ReMARKable Farms: Fall Farm Updates...

Random Farm Updates

We have been on the farm for several months now and are doing lots! Here are some random updates...

We have probably a couple dozen apple trees on the farm but they are pretty over grown (like 30 feet tall!) and have not been taken care of. The codling moth has gotten about 99% of the apples but I did find a few clean gems!

Henry has started chipping away at a huge wood pile in the back for firewood...

We have a wood stove in the basement of the house. It is the original wood stove that was put into the house when it was build in 1964. I have been told by the wood stove guy that it will be very inefficient (I didn't really expect him to tell me anything else...he is trying to sell us a wood stove). So, my preliminary estimates is that buying a new wood stove is expensive! We are going to take this winter to do some research and may be installing a new one next fall...
Not the best pic, but here is a different angle showing some of the wood.

I started some mead from the honey I had collected in the spring. If you don't know, Mead is an alcoholic beverage that you can make from honey! I made Huckleberry mead...I just love to watch it bubbling away...

When my mom and dad were here this past summer, we went huckleberry picking and I also found an elderberry bush up on the mountain. I picked all the elderberries and brought them home. I did not realize that there are 2 types of elderberries (well, actually there are dozens of different elderberries) but it appears to be 2 types of berries...black (these are the ones I found on the mountain) and blue. We have blue elderberry bushes in our yard as shown in this pic.

We found a plum tree on the farm. We picked some plums and I made some plum butter. I don't know if I should call it a tree or a bush. It has lots of suckers coming out from the main tree so it is like one big clump of plums. I started cleaning out under it but then got distracted with taking out a big rose bush. I will come back to this plum at a later time...

Cleaned out an old rose bush that was leaning the fence over...in addition, there is a dead tree in the middle of the huge rose bush that needs to come down. I took the first picture at the beginning of September. I worked on it little by little and it took me a month to get it all cleaned out.

Pic of rose bush pushing fence over

After rose bush removed. Now, you can see the dead tree!

Now, I have another big rose bush by the garden that I am going to remove...ugh...then, maybe back to the plum...depending on how the fall weather comes in...(I actually just finished this project yesterday...it was much easier because there were not as many suckers...)

In the middle of August, I decided to try and transplant some raspberry bushes. There is a patch of raspberries on the property but they are located on a steep incline which makes it difficult to pick.

Raspberries that were transplanted from another site on the property.

Some of the canes turned brown and I was not sure they would make it. I had already made up my mind that I would be happy if half of the raspberries survived the transplanting. The end of September, I saw new growth on those "dead" looking canes! Yeah!