April 8, 2020
It wasn’t enough for the 3 of us to live in a 540 square foot studio apartment, we had to add baby chicks! 15 of the 19 eggs we incubated hatched over the course of 2 days. They stayed in the incubator for a few days and then we transferred them into a make-shift brooder – a huge cardboard box. We found a few extra inches of space, so two days later, Katie picked up 7 more chicks from a hatchery. The chicks we incubated will lay super dark brown eggs and the ones she picked up will lay huge white eggs. If you didn’t know, Katie uses the egg shells to make Ukrainian Eggs, or Pysanky.
After lots of research and YouTube videos, John grafted the apple trees on to root stocks. Now we play the waiting game to see if we did a good job. If we are successful, we will probably graft a lot more trees for our orchard.
One day, while walking through the forest, I mean our front yard, we noticed that one of the trees was DEAD and leaning towards our Stone Building. It was a big oak tree, about 25’ high with a 30” diameter. The tree wobbled when we pushed on it. Uh oh, we knew this was not good. $200 dollars later, the tree was felled by a local tree guy. When it hit the ground, it disintegrated, it was so rotten. The good news is that the middle of the trunk was full of punk wood, which is perfect wood for our bee smoker.
We spent a couple days working on our mower. It took 6 hours for John to mow the field and around the house! We have added a bigger mower to our shopping list, but it will probably be a while!
We found the leach field for the apartment septic system! Another oops. We had to finish digging a trench to our pond so the rainwater would drain off better. After a day doing it by hand, we hired a guy with a backhoe. It wasn’t the best idea. First of all, the ground was still so wet from all the rain we got this spring and he made huge ruts in the field. Then, on his last dig, he brought up more than dirt – he had the drain pipe from our septic system in his bucket. Oh well, we will add that to our list!
We used some of the dirt from the trench to create a 25’x25’ garden bed in the back yard. We’ve not had a garden in over 2 years, so we’re eager to get one started. We have starter plants on the deck of the loft apartment. We are growing tomatoes, peppers, kale, spinach, and lots of herbs. Before we can transplant to the garden bed, we have to add some compost and get it tilled in. Nothing is ever easy, but we’re undaunted.
Undaunted Farming 