January 15, 2023

It’s hard to believe we are already two weeks into 2023!

We have had a very busy new year and we don’t expect to slow down any time soon. We both love being busy, especially when it includes building our dreams!

We spent the New Year holiday in Alabama with Katie’s parents and sister & her family. Her brother came up from Louisiana with 3 of his kids (we missed his wife and one daughter who was home sick). Being part of a big family (we each are from a family with 5 kids) is one of the best blessings of our lives. We are very fortunate that we all get along so well! God certainly blessed both of us in this regard. We had such a great time, we just did not take any pictures!

While we were in Alabama, we got a chance to visit our niece’s new farm. It is a beautiful piece of property near her mom’s home. As we walked through the property and listened to her and her husband tell us of their dreams, we couldn’t help thinking of where we started when we purchased this farm three years ago. We are very excited to watch them grow their farm!

For Christmas, Fr. Nicholas bought us a Sous Vide cooker – look it up, it’s a great little gadget that lets you cook your food long and low to make it as tender as possible. It was delivered to us at Katie’s sister’s house. We cooked a chuck roast for 24 hours. It came out medium rare and was amazingly tender and flavorful. We are excited to try other meats. I hear it’s good for bacon, too.

While we were in Alabama, we met with our business advisor. It is always beneficial to bounce ideas off someone and get their input. We came away with a game-plan for our orchard and are already making decisions to implement our plan. We listened to a few farm-business podcasts on the drive home to further cement our ideas. We are pleased to announce that Newtown Orchard, LLC is now an official entity!

We’ve ordered over 300 trees that will be planted in our orchard in a few months. Plus, we have another 200 trees on order for planting in spring of 2024. We still want to order 200 more trees for 2024, and at least 300 trees for 2025 but some of the suppliers don’t have their inventory listed. By spring of 2025, we expect to have at least 1,000 trees planted in our orchard, with a nice selection of apples for fresh eating, cooking, and cider. We are going to grow the following varieties: Arkansas Black, Enterprise, Fugi, Gold Rush, Harrison, Liberty, Newtown Pippin, Pristine, Puget Spice, Splendour, William’s Pride, Winecrisp. If all goes as planned, we will open for U-Pick this fall (like in 9 or 10 months) and our production will continue to increase each year! We plan to build the orchard to be a family event location where you can come out to pick apples, have a family picnic, explore nature and create memories!

Here’s our planting strategy for the next few years. Each little square represents a tree. We will decide how to fill rows 19-24 in the next few years, especially after we see how our current plan is going.

When we got home from Alabama, we spent a day re-configuring the chicken run so we will have three different pastures for the chickens. We plan to rotate the chickens between the three pastures. The idea is that they will get fresh grass and bugs every time they move. They will also deposit their “fertilizer” which will enable the grass to grow even better. Because our primary focus has to be on the apple orchard, we did not want to give too much real estate to the chickens, but we still wanted them to have fresh grass. We will let you know how this goes.

Another goal for 2023 is to finally finish our farmhouse. We moved in the house last Easter, but there were still several projects to finish. We still need to build cabinet doors and drawer fronts for the kitchen, mudroom and bathroom, install molding around some of the door openings, install baseboards, and get new siding installed. We ordered the siding back in August and just heard that it should be installed the first week of February. We can’t wait to get rid of the dull baby blue-grey siding we have now, especially since we have several spots with no siding at all. The new siding will be a rich grey with white trim. Our curb appeal is about to skyrocket, and that will give us the motivation to finish the inside projects!

AND, it is almost time to start seeds for spring planting! Katie spent time this weekend setting up her seed starting system. Since so many people have asked about in from previous years, she’s going to post a “how to” blog in the next few days. Watch for it.