Videos

Moving a the bee hive to a stand, checking on the progress of the second box and catching my first sting on camera…priceless.

 

Here is a review of the 2013 Food Forest

This is a review of the food forest that was planted last spring. I forgot about one maple tree that I transplanted from our back yard. I figured if I can buy bare root trees I could dig them up as well. It is doing great even though it is not on drip and not behind a swale.
The grape like fruit I show is a Gooseberry Pixwell.

Here is a list of the trees and shrubs:
3 Bur Oak
3 Black Walnut
3 Black Cherry
2 Mulberry Northrop Morus alba
5 Apple Trees
2 Smoky June Berries
2 Prince William June Berries
8 Gooseberries Pixwell (I planted two of these in Denver and neither one survived).
3 Sumac
8 Elder

This is a review of the back side of the 2014 swale which is above the second food forest. The sunflowers have really taken off. I bought a bag of bird seed black oil sunflower seeds to seed the swale. I didn’t highlight any of the vegetables but I included some lettuce and other seeds in hopes they would produce and reseed themselves. I will continue to add straw to the swale and should have included a lot of it to begin with. To note the back side of the first swales that were added last year with clover mixes are looking great this year and they were not irrigated.

Here is a short video showing the wind break trees and the supplements I used when planting them. To note as of July of 2014 most all of the Ponderosa Pines there were planted have died. Four of them were in tree guards but they didn’t fare any better than most. They were over a foot tall with six or seven inches of roots. The pinion pines were much smaller (maybe 6 inches tall) with the same size root containers. The pinion pines looked to be dying right away but many of them have survived as of July 2014 of their first year. Most all of the bur oaks look great. We’ve had great rainfall this year! None of these trees were placed on drip as originally planed.

Here is a tour of the homestead trees and shrubs there were planted in 2014.

Chickens really do have a pecking order. After having the white chicken in a chicken tractor for a week or so I thought it was time to introduce her to the flock. I thought putting her in at night might have been a better solution but I believe chickens will figure out their pecking order no matter when you integrate them. Snow Flake the white chicken ended up on the lower side of the pecking order to this black chicken. Snow Flake had an uphill battle since several of the chickens wanted to challenge her. This was the second chicken to challenge her. After the first chicken and her pecked a bit they definitely came to an agreement to get along.

Leave a Reply