June 19th-25th – Our busiest week of 2022 yet!
Garden
We finished another raised garden bed. It’s a ‘L’ shape bed that measures 4’x12′ both ways so total space of 4’x24′. I was able to transplant all of our squash – we have 2 varieties of zucchini ‘noche’ and ‘golden’, spaghetti squash, butternut squash, buttercup squash, and 2 pie pumpkins. I also transplanted out 3 cucumber plants, 4 cucuamelon plants. I put our broccoli and cauliflower transplants in the ground (it’s super late and I don’t know if they’ll be productive, but worth a try). I also sowed all the bean seeds.
The outdoor tomatoes ‘Scotia’ and ‘Roma’ are just starting to bloom.
We’re getting our first strawberries from the plants we moved into the asparagus bed this past Spring.
The Greenhouse is out of control. So many cherry tomatoes, the eggplant all have buds, the peppers have buds. I’m really excited how this has extended our growing season!
Orchard
The baby peaches are growing incredibly well – I’m super hopeful that we’ll get our first harvest this year!
The new apple trees are growing well, the honeycrisp trees especially have taken off.
The cherry tree blooms and produced fruit this year for the first time. The fruit is already turning red, and isn’t very big… I’m not sure if it will just continue to grow or any fruit is just a bust this year. Time will tell…
Broiler Chickens
Slaughter day was on Tuesday. Our normal processing plant is closed this time of year so we had to make the drive to Crapaud to Waddel’s. We were happy with their work, but they did inform us that they wouldn’t be accepting any pasture raised birds due to the avian flu outbreak. Moving forward we’ll have to order later chicks or process them ourselves. To be expected, costs are WAY up this year and as a result we’re looking at only raising for ourselves in the future, as there’s no way break even let alone make profit anymore. Fun times!
MacAusland’s Woolen Mill
Since we had to head West for the meat chickens we decided we would bring our wool to the woolen mill. This was our first visit and it was absolutely the cutest place! We ended up having 38lbs of wool – enough to make a lot of blankets. In the future we’re going to store the wool and do a trip every other year to save on travel. It will be about $500 to have the wool cleaned, processed and spun into blankets – but well worth it – we’ll keep some, give some for Christmas presents and sell the rest 🙂
Barn Build
Earlier in the week we had Island Bobcat Services up to drill holes and drop off some gravel to get our barn build moving. Matt’s parents came over for the weekend and were a huge help in getting everything up. The posts went in, rafters up and a lot of the strapping went on the sides. Still a tonne of work to go, but it’s nice to finally see some progress. The next month will be spent framing everything and getting the strapping on until the roof trusses are delivered [hopefully] early August.
Family Fun
While Matt and his parents were tied with with the barn the kids and I (and their cousin) had a busy weekend of fun. The kids had their first soccer gymboree, Henry almost got a goal!. and then we headed to the Belfast days parade and subsequent activities. The kids are going to need a few days to catch up on sleep and energy, but it was worth it!