Farm tour
Everett and Missy (from Living a Simple Life) were kind enough to invite
us over to
their new homestead for lunch on Saturday and I leapt at the
offer. There are few things I like better than a farm tour --- a
great chance to walk around someone else's operation and get ideas.
The farm was beautifully
manicured (way out of my weed-overgrown league), and I'm sure lots
of you would love to see pastoral photos. However, being who I
am, I took a few pictures of the chickens and then a whole bunch of
pictures of the garden.
Everett and Missy made
the wise choice to spend their first year on the farm focusing on
infrastructure, but they didn't ignore the garden entirely.
Instead, they planted a few cucurbits down by the creek, hired a nearby
farmer to plow up a field to plant a clover cover crop in a second
area, and then spread thick straw mulch over a third area.
This third area, of
course, was the one that caught my eye --- a patch of lawn being
transformed into a budding Ruth
Stout garden.
Mushrooms were already hard at work improving the soil, and worms had
clearly been attracted to the moist, bare soil beneath the 
mulch.
The couple's free range Buckeye chickens loved scratching up
the mulch to find critters...and depositing their own organic
fertilizer in exchange. I wouldn't be surprised if this plot
turns into a bountiful and trouble-free garden next year.
Of course, we didn't
escape the farm tour entirely unscathed. Like they say, August is
the only time you have to lock your car in Appalachia --- otherwise,
you'll come back to discover it full of zucchinis. Thanks for the
produce, the delicious lunch, and the tour!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Anna,
Thank you both for coming out. I can't wait to get together again. This time I'll bring Mark's DVDs.
I think that mystery veggie might be a very early, unripe heirloom pumkin. I see one under there today that is almost totally orange. We'll see! They'll either ripen into something or rot on the vine, but I'm not picking any more until I know what they are.
Thanks again for the visit. I keep meaning to get a video up of me making a chicken waterer bucket, but we've been over that whole "Not enough time for Everett and his projects" thing already.
We really had a great time --- thanks for having us!
An heirloom pumpkin makes so much sense --- I should have guessed that. Whatever it is, it's in the winter squash group, which means that it won't hurt it to leave it alone until the vines die back.
Don't worry too much about the video --- we'd love to have it, but are in no hurry. I hope I wasn't too single-minded about telling you to take time off. You know what they say --- there's noone so evangelical as a convert.