garden Archives - The Halfway Homestead

Farmers Market Bound Dailyish Thoughts 0006

Today we are headed to the Farmers Market! We want to check out some local farms and see some friends that are doing amazing things!

So it was Saturday and we needed to add some items to our pantry that we either didn’t grow enough of of that we didn’t grow at all. So we did our morning chores, Released the Quackin’s, got them fresh water and sprouted sunflower and then hopped in the car to go to town. Side note, everytime I catch myself saying “going to town” I realize just how country we gotten! Then we hopped in the car and headed for the Farmers Market!

So we decided to fire up the camera and talk about some of the things we have been excited about this week when it comes to food, trying new things and seeing others succeed! One of the things we are super passionate about is supporting other small, local businesses. We might have some small bias but honestly it just feels like the right thing to do. When you see how much work goes into growing or raising food and animals, its makes you want to keep those folks encouraged. Another thing that we find so appealing about folks like that is the passion they have for delivering a great product to the customer that they know by name.

We also talk about some new things for us in the kitchen! Applesauce, Pumpkin Butter and various summer and winter squashes for starters. If you are interested in trying an amazing little squash next summer, these are the ones we grew this year Desi Summer Squash. Also, I made a comment about Honeycrisp apples not making a decent cider. I dont know much about making ciders so maybe it would or maybe it wouldn’t. Not sure!

Burn Barrel Barbeque, food so good you want to lick yer hands to get it all!

We mentioned our friends over at Burn Barrel Barbeque & Condiment Co. if you are in or near the Winchester Virginia area you are really doing yourself a disservice by not shoving their food in yer facehole. This is the first time in my life I ate a pulled pork sammich and I didn’t need to add any sauce to it. It was incredibly juicy and smokey just the way it was. I got home an hour later and could still smell the pork on my hands. This made me think “Is an hour to long to go and still lick my fingers?” I haven’t even begun to go on about their flavorful sauces….go check them out. Then come back here and thank us! Head out to your local Farmers market this weekend and support some local goodness!

2017 Year in review. Dailyish Thoughts 0005

Its October so it is time for the year in review!

We bought the farm two years ago on October first and every year we will be doing a year in review of what we have accomplished in the last year. So here we will be covering a variety of topics from animals to plants to techniques all tried this year. Some successful, some not so much. We talk about our experiences with:

American Guinea Hogs (hint: they got out)

The garden expansion

Mexican Sour Gherkins (these need to be in your garden next year!)

Black Vernissage Tomatoes

Ground Cherries

Strawberries and Raspberry WINS!

Greenhouse failure and Micro Greens

Why we didn’t add rabbit and quail like we wanted to and why quail is going to happen.

Have you had any great successes or failures this year? Share them below and lets chat about it! We would love to here from you and see what we can learn together! Below you can find a link to our 1 year on the Homestead review. Keep your eyes peeled for the year 2 coming soon!

We got a new video series and would like your input! Dailyish Thoughts 0001

Wow it has been awhile! This summer has flown by so quickly! Time to get back to dailyish updates!

We have been missing out on content creation and we are aiming to fix that! This is the start of a new video series were we are hoping to try to capture some small piece of what is going on in our life on a “dailyish” basis. The ups and the downs. The blog posts will be relatively short as we don’t want to bore you with reading when you can watch. That said do keep an eye out as we have another surprise coming soon regarding this series. If you like what you see, or dont, or have suggestions or questions, leave a comment below! We would love to hear from you!

This comfrey wont quit! From a stub to massive leaves in weeks!

We thought all this comfrey was dead but it had no quit in it!

We have had mixed success with comfrey this past year due to poor planning of when we ordered, where we put it and the ducks who decided they loved it! Here is a quick video of where we are at this point with more detail of the mistakes we made below.

When we first ordered our comfrey from Marsh Creek Farmstead last spring we had massive expectations. We ordered the Bocking 14 cultivar of comfrey as it does not spread via seed. The only way to propagate it is to take cuttings from the root and plant them. This allows us to control exactly where it grows and get the most out if it. Planting root cuttings as small as one inch long will shoot off into another plant quickly and vigorously. So we took our root cuttings and dropped them pots and man did they take off! We quickly moved these into our mini orchard, putting 4 plants around each fruit tree.

The leaves got huge, some more than twelve inches in length extremely quickly. Then the first duck tried to eat one and decided it was delicious. Within a few days the ducks had eaten all of the comfrey down to the ground and they were tearing up the ground trying to get to the roots. We lost all of those plants sadly. So we went and ordered more cuttings and dropped them into pots again. This time we had over sixty cuttings to plant and learned a good use for coffee filters while we where at it.

These two photos show just how much growth can happen in a very short period of time. This massive burst happened over a mere fourteen days! We will probably chop this off near the base and give the leaves to the ducks this weekend. Then let these plants take off again until we can get them transplanted outside in the now fenced off mini orchard. You can find a playlist of videos about our comfrey exploits here.

Here is a couple of reasons you might want to add comfrey to your homestead. We know there is a lot more reasons but these are some of the most important to us.

Dynamic accumulator- Comfrey grabs many nutrients from the deep down in the soil and pulls them up to the surface. Among these are nitrogen, potassium and magnesium.
Chop and drop mulch/fertilizer- You can harvest the leaves of Bocking 14 many times a year by chopping them down near the base of the plant. Take those leaves and drop them anywhere you want to increase fertility in your soil. All those nutrients listed above are quickly made available at the top of the roots systems where you dropped it.
Fodder for your animals- All kinds of animals will eat comfrey, either fresh cut or dried slightly. Comfrey is very high in protein not to mention the other nutrients and minerals.
Medicinal uses- Comfrey can be made into a salve for healing cuts and abrasions.

UPDATE: We are now an affiliate with MarshCreek Farmstead. You can find all of their sales options at this link as well as the one above.

We hope you found this article helpful! If you like what we do here and would like to help support us please consider doing all of your Amazon shopping thru our affiliate link. It doesn’t cost you anything and makes a huge difference to us! Thanks!

Deep Mulch and preparing next years garden

Turning old compacted clay and grass into future food using the deep mulch method.

This is what we started with. Basically clay soil with grass on it.

Last year we prepped an area 25×25 feet for our garden space. We were in a rush so we took some shortcuts and didn’t get the best results. This year we are taking a little more time and attempting to turn an area that is 130×90 feet into our fully enclosed garden and mini orchard area. The goal is to produce all the calories we can from this area for our family and those families that already purchase our delicious Duck eggs and broiler Chickens.

All we had here this past year was the two raised beds with the goat panel trellis.

So this year we have started with laying down cardboard directly over the grass, a step we skipped last year. Doing this smothers the grass, kills it off and leaves all the biomass and nutrients in the grass in the soil. This will then feed worms and the fungal layer helping to speed the process of turning clay into soil.

Another view showing the overlap of cardboard to completely block out the grass from getting any sunlight.

By skipping the cardboard last year we ended up with some grass growing up into our beds and we had to weed quite a bit. This year we should have very little of that to worry about. Some of you might have heard of this method of prepping an area, it is commonly known as the Deep Mulch Method. The basic idea is you never til the soil because doing so kills the fungal layer and compacts the soil over time. Instead you cover the soil with deep mulch and just add new wood mulch each year, you want to maintain 4-8 inches of mulch depending on your area. The layers should look something like this cardboard/compost/mulch. We do not have any compost ready this year as we were not here last year to get it going. So we will add compost when we plant in the spring. We do have plenty of leaf compost going from this fall. We will be adding some aged horse manure as well.

So this is how much we got done in one day. This was 5 truckloads of wood mulch and tons of cardboard. We got a long ways to go still.

We will be planting lots of perennials like asparagus and strawberries along with our annual gardens veggies. This area will also have about 20 fruit trees ranging from apples and peaches to paw paw and pears. So have you ever done anything like this before? Got any experience you want to share? Leave a comment below!