Now (spring of 2017) we have our name!!! Anchored Farms! I have a few posts from last year sitting in my google drive that I will add and back date, and I'll try to fill in a little more from memory. (For example the rest of this one.) So for now our blog will grow in both directions and hopefully it won't be too confusing.
hopefully one day we grow enough that readers care to know where we started and how it lead to family success later on down the road. Or if worse comes to worse you can see how we started and skip our mistakes so YOU can be successful later on down the road... either way you get to see exactly how we started. One of my favorite blogs to visit is a blog from a pastor in Iowa all about beekeeping. http://basicbeekeeping.blogspot.com/ He details the whole process from when he started and you can see the learning curve as you read through his posts over the years. I read it all the time when we were first married dreaming about someday having our own property. Much to the dismay of my dear Husband who used to be allergic to bees.. He went through an allergy treatment at Mayo Clinic and supposedly is no longer allergic. He has been stung one time while we were camping with no side effects beyond the usual annoying sting, so 😜 hopefully he’ll survive having our own hives!!
Speaking of Chris, his programming job has been hugely helpful in starting out. Soon after we moved here our Bishop told us every successful farmer has a wife who works in town. We laughed, but I’m learning quickly he wasn’t kidding! We were blessed to find a property with a great house and the family before us had horses goats and chickens, so it is already cross-fenced with a barn and electric fencing. We were so lucky! Our dream is to get to the point where we are growing most of our own food and the animal’s feed as possible and the farm is producing a livable income so we can all work together as a family. I keep reading how doable farming is, how you don’t need much to get started, and it’s true, there are so many things you can do without much space or infrastructure at all. So I don’t want to discourage anyone from jumping in if they feel ready! For us it has been so helpful to have a starting point with the barn and fencing in place and it's helped us to start on a slightly bigger scale. It would be so amazing to have productive family business together and for each of us to have a little time each evening or even in the winter to pursue our own hobbies/crafts to help the farm progress. Luckily one of my hobbies is learning and that never stops.
Some of the things I’ve learned recently:
- “Green” beans are not named after their color.. basically any bean plant can be a green bean because the word green here means “young”. I’m thinking this is probably why our “green” peppers from our lone little pepper plant in Hawaii always turned red. Maybe we were supposed to pick them when they were still green. Now I’m wondering how many “green” plants aren’t a specific species after all they are just the young ones! Maybe everyone else already knew this. A whole lot of things on this blog are likely to be things that everyone else already knows. I’m learning, and I’m recording my journey while also creating a record of my families adventures, so I’m probably putting more detail into this than what is needed for a public blog. Consider this your fair warning. Although when I bought seeds (from mypatriotsupply.com mostly because they were the first heirloom seed company that popped up on google and their prices are great!) There are specific species you buy in order to grow green beans. So who knows what they grow into later, and maybe species is still important I don’t know. We are also getting black beans, so we’ll try some of those when they are green and let some of the “green” ones dry out and see what happens.
This lovely lady is called a red velvet ant. Sounds romantic doesn’t it? She’s also called the “Cow Killer” because of how miserably awful her sting is. I took this picture when she caught my eye on the front porch, and then researched her later. Apparently she’s not an ant but some type of parasitic wasp. Despite how awful her sting sounds, she is still a friend because she crawls into ground wasps nests and lays her eggs on top of their eggs so her young can eat their young when they hatch. Plus she’s “mostly” nocturnal. I’m all for living with a wasp that crawls and only comes out at night who will eat the ones who fly. Plus she’s beautiful!
- YOU CAN GROW LOUFAS! (Also spelled luffa, loofah, luffah, loofa, or luff sponge) This blew my mind! My mom, Charlene and I were watching videos about how to harvest dry beans and the youtube videos just kept loading themselves, the second video was from a company called reneesgarden.com that showed a much simpler way to shell the beans using a pillowcase and a hair dryer. Then the third video was another one from them about harvesting shower loufas. Who knew they were the inside a gourd! We kept looking at each other like, is this really talking about what I think it’s talking about?! Someday, I am going to take a shower with my own homegrown loufa and homemade goat milk/honey soap! (My Dad, Ross, rolls his eyes every time I say something like this and tells me I’ll never have time to learn and do everything I want to do. I have no doubt he’s right because there are already about a million things I want to do and everytime I look them up I learn about something else and add to the list, but I’m super excited to do as much as I can!) 4. I need to be a lot better at picking a topic and writing a more concise and focused post. This one is kind of all over the place... Sorry about that. 😊 You get to see my learning curve with writing too.
