Hey Everybody!
Welcome to the Weekly Wrap-up, a short weekly newsletter where we wrap up our week and share some of the things that we have been doing and what’s on our mind. Feel free to share this or add to the discussion in the comment section.
New Garden Crop We’re Trying Out
We love fall over here and Robbyn loves pumpkins! We have been raising a some beautiful blue pumpkins every year that we really like decorating with. This year, we are going to attempt to grow some huge pumpkin varieties – we are going to test out Big Max and Cinderella’s Ride. Both of these varieties are traditionally used in Largest Pumpkin competitions. Now, we aren’t looking to get into that, but we think it would be really fun to have some huge pumpkins this fall! Our pumpkin patch inspiration is Hagrid’s hut in Prisoner of Azkaban!
Homestead Projects That We Are Currently Working On
We have recently been working on mulching the rows between our permanent raised beds and mulching our potato bed. For the mulch, we are using wood chips that we have scattered around the property from when we had somebody come out with a forestry mulcher and clear out the back side and perimeter of our property. Mulching the rows with wood chips will help to preserve water, add nutrients to the soil as it decomposes, keeps down weed pressure, and it gives us a softer and less slippery surface to walk on.
Another project that we are slowly taking on is building high tensile electric fence on a new piece of family property. The new property is about 16 acres, and it is located about 1/2 a mile from our house. The plan is to get a few cows out there as soon as we can finish up building the fence. I have never personally taken on a big fencing project like this, so it has been a fun learning experience so far. We are doing wood posts every 100′ to 175′ foot depending on the slope of the land and then putting t-posts in between at 20-25′. We don’t have access to a tractor and 3-point auger, so we started out digging all of the holes by hand. That got tiring pretty quick so we have now moved over to a 2 person auger and it has been a huge help!
Large Purchase That We Are Researching
This kind of builds off of the last bullet. One thing that we are looking at buying is a tractor. Several of our family members now live really close by and we now have about 30 acres of land to maintain all together. A tractor was never really on our list, but man, it would really help us increase our efficiency around here. My dad and I have been looking into it and researching tractors recently and we have been to dealerships to look at a few different brands. We have also tested out a few used tractors as well to see if that’s something that were interested in. If y’all have tractors, let us know what you like about the brand/model that you have, or what you would recommend!
As always, thanks for spending some time with us today and feel free to give us feedback in the comments or on social media. What do you want to see more of in these newsletters? Other suggestions or comments on this weeks bullets? Please let us know in the comments or on Instagram @the_hollyhomestead.
Have a great weekend everybody and happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms, soon to be moms, and care takers out there!
Much love to your family, from ours!
-Zach & Robbyn
[…] are steadily moving along on the fence project. We have about 10 more wood posts to set and then we will be finished on that part. This week, we […]