If you would like to support our farm by purchasing some amazing personal care products that you probably need anyway, www.songcroftnaturals.com is our retail website. We will have all 35 products there shortly! Check our Facebook page for sales and special offers. Thanks.

Now back to the regularly scheduled program…

It’s been a busy harvest season here on SongCroft. I have been canning tomatoes, peaches, pickles, sauces, plums, and salmon. Crocks of cucumbers and sauerkraut have been fermenting and sausages were made. Whether you are homesteading or not, this the time to put up the harvest!

There is lots to do as we transition from the summer into autumn. Alfalfa must be stacked for winter feeding of goats, stalls must be cleaned, hooves trimmed and herbal worming must become a ritual. I must also watch for signs of the does going into ester as we have one two-year old doe on our homestead who will be bred for the first time this year.

Chickens have their needs too. I do an extra deep cleaning of their yard and house, scrub out the nest boxes and give them a little extra diatomaceous earth to ward off mites. Pests become more active in the wet months so these are preventative steps.

The duck flock had to be reduced as we had to many drakes. Drakes can be relentless in their desire to breed and if the ratio of drakes to hens is out of balance, the hens lose. My youngest child and I worked together in harvesting our ducks and making them in to the best sausage we have ever had!

I’ll have to begin harvesting turkeys soon too. Our flock of 11 are huge and beautiful. I will keep my favorite tom and two-three hens with the hope of breeding them next year. The rest will come Thanksgiving dinner and many other meals throughout fall and winter.

Now is also the time to amend the soil. I plan to get several pick-up truck loads of horse manure from a neighbor who feeds only organic hay. We are making compost on our homestead but want to get a jump start by bringing a bunch on to our homestead instead of waiting until we make enough o our own. In time, we plan to only use what we make ourselves. This as well as all of the Big Leaf Maple leaves I rake from the neighbors 4 acres will be piles on our garden beds before they are seeded with fava beans and winter rye. (That means  I better get a move on things because I’m running out of weather!)

There is also garlic to be planted so we can enjoy it’s harvest all next year. Deciding where I want it to go this fall is a challenge since I want to add the manure and leaf mulch too. I will have to work that one out soon.

This is also a great time to plant or relocate plants. I moved a plum so it can grow on the edge of the campground and placed a medlar in it’s former place. I hope that I will be able to  pitch a tent under the plum tree in future years. It will bring back fond memories of my summer with my kids on the Bullock Brothers Permaculture Farm on Orcas Island.

In between the chores, I hope to get in some reading, board games and knitting. What are you doing prepare for fall? are you on a homestead or ? We would love to hear more about our readers.

If you are interested in reading more about  moving towards self-sufficiency as a family, check out our quarterly newsletter. The Winter 2012 issue is going to have our duck sausage recipe!

High 62  Low 34  Clear and slightly warm.

Visit www.songcroftnaturals.com to support our family farm and to get great all natural skin and body products!

Visit the Farmers Market Thursdays 3-7pm

I’m not even going to put the date on this entry since I am embarrassed how long it took me to get around to writing. You see, it’s spring and although it has been the wettest April in Washington’s history, there are still a lot of spring shores to be done!

• Have planted a thicket hedge of prinsepia to help keep the neighbor dogs from coming over.

• Planted a variety of willows in blue, red, green and yellow along the creek.

• Trimmed back the rugosa, raspberries, woody herbs and several other plants

• Mucked the goat shed, cleaned the stall mats in them and sanitized all of the feeders and water buckets.

• Made a new perch for the chickens.

• Bred the rabbits.

• Got help re-doing parts of the goats sacrifice area as well as their browsing areas.

• Brian added on to the chickens poly-carb covered roof on their summer home (okay, they are a bit spoiled).

• Deconstructed some keyhole beds so I can reconfigure parts of the garden and add vertical growing space as well as an outdoor room.

• Fed the bees (It’s been so cold that they rarely go out and things are blooming late)

• Harvested lots of greens.

• The kids and I planted lots of carrots, radishes, lettuce, bok choy, peas, leeks, cilantro, potatoes, onions, and flowers in the garden beds.

• Planted a ton of seeds in trays that are now overcrowding the greenhouse (snow and hail in April!)

• Made compost tea and applied it to a test garden. (Amazing difference!)

• Taught two soils science class and composting class.

• Planted a berm with edible berries and trees with my apprentices.

• Planted a perry pear, cider apple and medlar tree.

• Planted forage plants including Nanking cherries around the summer chicken house.

• Did all the mom things like helping both kids enter project in a science fair and droving kids to and from swim classes.

• Did the homestead stuff like baking bread and making cheese.

• Got our www.SongCroftNaturals.com business ready for the Snohomish Farmers Market.

• And so the list goes on…

Soon I will be at the Snohomish Farmers Market every Thursday.

You might be asking yourself how I find time and energy to do all of these things. It is really more simple than one might think. I don’t have to go to the grocery very often and I don’t watch TV. I eat a healthy diet that includes very little processed foods and I have a positive attitude, even in this rainy season.

Attitude is everything!

See you at the Snohomish Farmers Market!

High 61 Low 45  Drizzly but warm. ( Our seedlings are loving this!)

Farm Camp

http://songcroft.com/index.php/farm-camp/

This month has been busy with all of the usually Spring chores of getting the cover crops turned in, garden planted, pullets out to forage, hens in their Spring/Summer home, goat kids birthed and settled in, does milked, cheese made, rabbits bred and the post-construction landscaping started, all the while enjoying the flush of green that has taken over our land.

Although these things have me excited, it’s Farm Camp that has been on my mind. In August we will be opening SongCroft up to those who would like to live and learn about how to run a family farm. This is so exciting that I am finding it hard to concentrate on other projects. We’re going to have a lot of fun!

You’ll experience instruction on dairy goats, chickens, ducks and rabbits as well as growing your produce year-round and preserving the harvest. Mushroom logs, the basics of permaculture, food forests, alternative energy and home arts are all part of the program. It’s great to read books and dream about living a more self-reliant lifestyle but it’s a rare opportunity to be welcomed on to a farm where you are able to learn and try things out for yourself!

Checked out the Farm Camp page. Tell us what you think, what you would most like to learn and if you intend to enroll don’t wait because space is limited.

High 56             Low 45                 Warm afternoon breeze

Spring ahead? Not us, we’re taking giant leaps! There’s been a ton of stuff happening at SongCroft this week. Where can I begin…?

Over the course of the week we brought in a bit more hay to get us through until it is haying time here in the area. With a couple extra goats this past Winter, we went through more hay than usual so our estimate in August was a bit off. But no worries, I hauled the bails across our land. It is rugged terrain as we haven’t filled that side of the property yet and it is very uneven. It is hard to keep a bale on a hand-truck since they all want to fall downhill. Then I had to stack them under cover. At eighty pounds a bale, this job takes that take all by 5’4” frame has to offer. To keep the goats from leaning from their stall over in to the hay storage area, I installed a wooden barrier. Now they can only look at it longingly instead of gorging themselves until they look like someone ought to tie a line to a hoof so they don’t float away as giant goat balloons.

We also got almost all of the fencing around the vegetable and forest garden done. We just need to install a few gates. This means even if the goats do get out, they wont be eating my cabbages and strawberries!

The Winter rabbitry was converted in to a brooding house for the 17 pullets and 6 ducklings we are raising. We also have a hen on a nest in there. It is a good use of a small space. I will post photos and a video later.

All but the vegetable garden beds got compost on them. I will make another go at it over the coming week. The goats ate part of the garden in front of the house, that’s what happens when the kids leave the gate unlocked, so I put the compost down there first hoping it would help the poor plants survive. Even our big horse trough full of bamboo looks like Giant Panda’s attacked it!

Rhubarb and asparagus were planted. Only a few more years until we get our first harvest. (That was sarcasm incase you didn’t notice)

We cleared out an area so that we can bring in soil to level the land on the side of our house. This will make getting to the hay a lot easier. This is going to be major work.

We taught both our first year and second year courses from Saturday through Monday. We covered soils science, composting, fertilization and pruning. It was really busy and a lot of fun. Folks learned to do soil samples, test for ph and how to make compost. We mixed bedding and goat poo with a beautiful combination of scrap vegetables and juice bar compost. The colors were amazing and the results will be powerful. We also made a worm bin and were able to send it one with one of the student’s family. I truly love being with all of the course participants and am blessed to live such an amazing life.

Sometimes the songs here are the chirpings of birds and others times they are the grunts made while heaving bales of hay but it all makes for a beautiful rhythm that we love to live in.