Kids are adorable! How's everything else going for you guys? Seems your still breeding a few goats. Have some chickens. Any gardening this year? Still making jewelry?
We miss you -- stop in more often
Awww! Thanks Mini! Yes, we are still breeding our Myotonic goats! We have sold some, and put some in the freezer. This year we have a freeze dryer, so I am going to try freeze drying a couple loads of goat burger, both for us to eat and to cut back on the increasing cost of dog food. We also have about 20 chickens, five Muskovy ducks - four hens and one drake, and four guinea hens.
A couple years ago we lost the two cats that we brought with us from Pennsylvania in 2014.
In 2021, we were given two feral cats, which ran out the back door and refused to come back.
So last year we decided it was time to get a couple more cats. DH went out to the workshop to get a dog crate to pick up some cats at the animal shelter. He walked in the workshop and heard a noise, which turned out to be a tiny little kitten. I wasn’t far behind him, and I walked in and found him holding this kitten, while at the same time hearing other kittens meowing. So I looked around and found three more one week old kittens, that barely had their eyes open. I found a clean 5 gallon bucket, and as we found kittens, I put them in the bucket.
Long story short. . . . I started milking Crystal, who had two kids still nursing on her, and were ready to be weaned. Sadly, we lost two of them at about three weeks. I did everything I knew to do, but I couldn’t save them. So we were left with Precious Boy and Sweet Pea. They are now 10 1/2 months old, and they are both special kitties! Sweet Pea is a short, haired tabby, and precious boy is a long-haired tabby with a black bushy tail. He looks a lot like a Siberian Forest Cat.
Precious Boy on the left and Sweet Pea on the right.
Sweet Pea on the left and Precious Boy on the right.
This is Sweet Pea
And this is Precious Boy
Yes, we have a garden. However, it still isn’t as big as I want it to be. The last couple of years, we have been slowing down. I am now 72 and DH is 76. We have a lot more aches and pains, which slows us down even more. Neither one of us ever got Covid, (or the shots, for that matter), but in March we both got really bad colds. We doubled down on the Elderberry syrup that I make, and other antiviral herbs and supplements for immune building, and it lasted less than a week for me and closer to two weeks for DH.
Back in 2013, I had foot surgery that didn’t go well. Okay, the foot doctor totally screwed up my foot!!!
That caused my foot to be out of alignment, causing me constant pain, and causes my knee to be out of alignment. So, now I have arthritis and am having a lot of pain in my right knee. I do not want to have knee surgery, because when I had my left knee replaced, it took me three years to get over the surgery. That well could have been because I had active Lyme disease at the time, but I just don’t want to go through knee replacement surgery again. So, I am hobbling around, and having to be careful where I step to keep from torquing my knee wrong and causing even more pain. I also have to limit my time working outside, so I can come in the house and rest my knee.
Last year I was ready to give up the garden all together, because the weeds were overwhelming me. Then I remembered that several years ago we had talked about doing a Ruth Stout style deep mulch garden. As much as I wanted to, we didn’t get it started last fall, or over the winter.
One of our stumbling blocks, was fire ants! I’m so worried I will reach down to pick some veggies and come up with my arm covered with fire ants!!! I’m working on an ant bait, that uses Spinosad, a newer natural pesticide. It needs some tweeking, but I’m hoping it will at least keep them somewhat controlled.
We also had two big oak trees, that were dying that needed to come down. From sun up to 1pm, they were shading part of the garden that I want to plant. There was a time I would have gotten the chainsaw out and dropped them myself. however, one of them was leaning over the road towards our neighbor’s pasture fence, and I didn’t trust it to not mess up his fence. so, I ended up hiring a tree service to take both trees down. This guy was really good, and I negotiated a good price. He also brought his stump grinder, and for $400 he ground 25 tree stumps!
I thought that was a great price for all he did! He also brought his log splitter and split the big trunks, which were each about 30 inches in diameter and 30 feet long. We don’t have a wood burning stove, so I let him have the wood, since he gave me such a good price on cutting the trees down. We had some big branches and a tree break in half during the ice storm in January, and he cut those for us as well. No extra charge!
Now we have a big burn pile (17 feet in diameter) with all the smaller branches from the tree canopies, that needs to be burned before we can do anything else in that area of the garden. We have a cedar tree about 8 feet away from the burn pile, so that has to come down before we can do anything else. Of course that wood will go on the burn pile as well. Although, we will most likely save the trunk to use as a post somewhere on the property. Most likely, we will use it on the three sided shed, that I want to build on the back of the barn, to store round bales and our yard tractors.
Hopefully, this coming week, we will start putting down feed sacks, in the garden, to keep the weeds down, and then put 8” of hay on top of that. The paths will have feed sacks and wood chips on top of that. Eventually, we plan to go out in the woods and dig up leaf mold to use as part of the deep mulch layers.
The little wagon that we bought when we moved here (4 cubic feet) just wasn’t big enough to do that. So we went to tractor supply and bought a 12 cubic foot Gorilla Cart. We are both just amazed at how big it is! And we are loving it! The cool thing is, it has a tow connector and when we go back in the woods to get leaves, we can tow it behind our Husqvarna lawn tractor.
Several years ago we bought Five 4’x12’x12” sheet metal raised beds at Northern Tool. We never got them put together, but now we are planning to get that done. One of the things that held us up, was that 12” was not high enough for these old bodies to bend over to maintain them. I recently came up with the idea of putting down our hardware cloth. (to keep the pocket gophers out of the garden), put a row of 8x8x16” cinderblocks on top of hardware cloth, and then build the raised beds on top of that. That will make the raised beds, 20 inches high, which will make it a lot easier to work with. Once we get the burn pile burned, we will start putting the raised beds together. We are saving some of those branches, to fill the bottoms of the raised beds, layering, branches, hay, wood chips and leaf mold ala’ Huglekulture. Then the top 10 inches will be a mixture of compost and garden soil, with hay mulch on top of all that.
Okay, I think that sort of brings y’all up to date on what has been going on here at Devonviolet Acres.
Well, one more cool thing .. .. .. A while back, I found a blog post online about a homesteader collecting huge bowl of wild violet flowers for making home remedies. I have a few wild violets around the house, but my dream has always been to have lots and lots of wild violets on the property, and even back in the woods. So, I took a chance and wrote to her, asking if she had any extra wild violet plants that she could send me. I told her I would pay for them and the postage. It turns out her woods are absolutely full of wild violets. So this kind lady sent me about 200 Violet corms. The only money she asked for was the cost of shipping! I sent her a check with the cost of shipping and a little extra for her time. I have planted them in plastic boxes, and they are starting to come up. my plan is to get them growing with nice root systems and then plant them in the ground around the property. I am so excited, that Devonviolet Acres will now have lots of violets on the property!!!
. I'm certain that garden will get working. Slower is ok....I'm a little slower, too. 
.
. Love it! 
