Working the Soil

Yesterday we spent most of the day working the soil in the plot in front of the barn in preparation for planting.

You have to keep in mind that this area was all pine tree forest when we bought the land... and we only knocked down trees and rough graded it into large plots a little over two years ago. Both of the plots in front of and diagonal to the barn were planted with a deer plot food mix ground cover the first year... in which turned into the beautiful deep green clover that it was the past two years. We like to refer to it as a "salad buffet" for the deer!

Anyhoo, even though the clover has infiltrated the ground for two years with lots of good nutrients and nitrates, the soil today is still hard and red clay material-like. Thus, a basic rotary tiller cannot even begin to grab the hard earth... So we brought out the harrower again.



Yes, Hubby finally let me run the Deere... And I have to say it is very liberating to ride the tractor working the soil. (Of course, it could have to do with the super smooth operation of a fine new John Deere product)

After many runs back and forth harrowing deep into the earth turning it over and over (and after giving up on our piece of crap tiller), we then pulled the box blade around and then the "drag" around to smooth out the earth as evenly as possible for planting.





And then when it's really time to get down to business and get it as smooth as possible, Hubby gets creative in weighing down the drag! Can you see the homemade weights (CMU blocks)??



All of the above took place over the course of roughly six hours.... so you can see the work that goes into preparing for planting. We did make the executive decision to only plant this one plot this year. We will keep the other larger plot next to this one full of clover for now... the honey bees will thank us!

Planting post up next!

Farm Help

Did I mention we have a couple of sidekicks that help us on the farm? Meet our girls, Rowdy-Girl and Teton Tilly (a.k.a. "TT")... They love the farm as much as we do! TT spends most of her time sprinting around the woods and through the clover plots chasing anything with wings or four legs. Rowdy-Girl spends a lot of her time on the look out next to wherever we are keeping watch of what's in the distance... she too runs the property chasing the wildlife and butterflies when the notion strikes. Here are a few recent photos:





This dog has no fear of bees...at all.




Expensive dog bowl.

Breaking Up the Soil

Now that we have the new tractor, we finally started prepping one of the plots for planting. Hubby hooked up the harrower to the tractor and then "broke up" the very hard earth on the west side plot. We were unsuccessful in our attempt to till this area up last week... so the virgin soil needed to be harrowed by the large discs on the harrower. (I cannot begin to tell how hard the ground was in this clover plot... Hubby fought our large tiller trying to dig into the red clay last week - to no avail.) So what was a beautiful matured red clover deer plot before...



Is now a nice turned over, broken planting area for us to till up this week and then start our fruit trees and bushes planting this weekend!



I am hopeful we are able to get this area ready to auger holes for our new apple trees, plum trees and blueberry bushes!

Third Hive Done!

We picked up our third nuc of bees this past Thursday night from the Oxbow Meadows Environmental Center down in Columbus... we had ordered it from the Chattahoochee Bee Keepers club a few weeks ago. We met them around 10:00pm and then drove them back to Pine Mountain in the bed of the pickup all 40+ miles... and then had to take them over to the farm to be set on top of their permanent box location. It was a super long day!!

Today Hubby transferred that third hive of bees from their "RV" travel box into their permanent box. He also removed the top feeders off of the other two hives since the nectar flow is decent right now in the world. All of these seem like such pain-staking, time-consuming tasks when watching Hubby do the work. Just glad he did not get stung today!

A Dream Come True

Hubby has had a dream for a really, really long time. He has always wanted a John Deere. A for real John Deere tractor. And we have been saving for five years for it. And this week he brought home his dream. Complete with a loader bucket, box blade, and bush hog attachments.



He is a happy boy. Nothing gets between a man and his Deere.

First Sting

Guess who got their first bee sting yesterday? Hubby! And the funny part is that he was not even doing any bee "chores".... he merely swatted at one random bee flying around his head and it stung his hand. TOO funny!



Scoreboard:
Bees: 1
Hubby: 0

Moving The Bees

So on Monday evening (approximately 48 hours after we picked our newest family members) it was time to transfer the honey bees from their travel boxes into their permanent hives. Some fellow bee-keeping friends of ours came over to assist Hubby in his first transferring of bees. The three of them suited up in their veils and gloves, set up the smoker and started the process of slowly disassembling the travel boxes and moving each of the five frames of bees/honey combs into their new hive boxes.



As you can see, there were WAY more bees on the outside of those hives than I am comfortable with, so I stayed a fair distance away from all the action.



Of course, sometime down the road Hubby will need my help... you know when the friends are not around and when he needs more than two hands. Hopefully, he will remember to order me a set of gloves and a veil. I told him I really wanted the whole white suit... to be covered from my head to my toes. Until then, he's on his own!

P.S.
Scoreboard:
Bees 0
Hubby 0

And The Planting Season Begins...

One of the many things I have wanted to do for the past couple of years is plant fruit trees on our land. I can remember as a child while growing up in this area, we would go over to certain folks' house and pick apples or plums or numerous types of berries. At one time in my childhood, my own Grandparents had a grape vine in the backyard along with figs, blackberries, blueberries, mulberries, plums, muscadines, pears and even strawberries when Papaw would plant them! I also remember the family that owned the local hotel in town had the BEST plum tree known to man! I would pick and eat until I was sick to my stomach. I long for those days and want to have those growing in my own yard or back 40. So this weekend started my quest for homegrown fruit...

Before we went to Griffin this past Saturday, we drove over to Macon to pick up twelve blueberry bushes from an older couple that own a large "u-pick 'em" blueberry farm. Some friends of ours told us about this place last week, so we called and made our order for pickup on Saturday. Here is Hubby loading up the small pots with three different types of blueberry bushes.



After we picked up our bees in Griffin, we passed a nice brand new nursery along the roadside on our way to Zebulon. We picked up two 3-gallon sized Fuji apple trees and two 3-gallon sized Santa Rosa plum trees. Looks like someone is going to busy planting this week! Now I just have to figure out and/or decide WHERE exactly to plant them all.

Show Me The Honey

My Husband has been talking about us doing the honey bee thing for quite a while now... probably 2 or more years to be honest. And I have always been... well, not too excited about it. Of course, the thought of our own honey supply can get me excited... but, the thought of thousands of bees and the thousands of chances in getting stung just does not appeal to me at all. Now that we are here full time I could no longer hold out on his bee keeping dreams... And for the past several weeks, Hubby has been building his boxes and frames for his bees to reside in. There are specific tasks that must completed in order to make the hives more like "home" to our new farm occupants. (i.e. Painting the hive boxes white)
Here is Hubby painting them a few weeks ago... Note the fact we have interior lighting in the barn to work by!



We joined the area bee-keeping club a couple of weeks ago and met some other friendly bee-keepers that gave us all kinds of advice. And this past Saturday, we picked up our first two "nucs" (two separate hives of bees in travel boxes) near Griffin, GA



We drove them the hour and half home and set their travel boxes on top of their new permanent homes in our lower deer plot. They sat there for 48 hours to "acclimate" to their new homeland.



I steered clear of all bee unloading, travel box setting, etc. That's Hubby hobby, not mine. All I can say is "Show me the honey!"

P.S.
Scoreboard:
Bees 0
Hubby 0

How It All Started

So some folks will ask us how in the world did we wound up here in “stickville”… Other folks will just flat out say that we got the bright idea to leave the City…as crazy as that sounds. And some more folks will say that we have “retired” to the country. And our answer? Yes, to all of the above. After 23 years in the City for me, over 30 for my Husband, and over 7 years together, we made our exit from Atlanta, GA: the hellacious traffic capital of the South.

It all started after we married in the fall of 2006… We would take drives in the country “looking” for land while visiting my family in the country. After a year or so, we found our spot. Almost 30 acres of wooded bliss nestled between two large horse farms just a few miles outside of town. This was our “retirement plan” and we made a pact to be residing here in this town in five years from the purchase of the land in October 2007. Fast forward five years (all five years spent off/on cleaning up/maintaining the land and constructing our barn) and here we are… residing full-time in my Grandparents’ tiny house a few miles down the road, both of us still working full-time, and daily planning our dream of turning this into Wilsons Farms.