40 Fruit Trees

We worked until 10pm planting 40 replacement fruit trees. In 2021 with an 11 day old Elden tied to my chest we planted 130 trees. I was more of the director, and we are forever thankful for my family who came in to help.

We lost about 30% of those trees to ignorance, drought, voles, and fire blight.

This year Elden aka tiny foreman helped by being master of the hose. He also loved searching for “weens” aka worms. In 2021 there were no worms. This year we found worms and healing soil in every hole. It’s so exciting to be here witnessing this place come back to life. The diversity of animals and bugs increase every year and tells us we are doing good.

Eloise helped me plant, spread amendments, and treat each tree with homeopathy.

Everett weed whacked, and helped Ryan come behind us and mulch each tree. He worked until 10pm with us, never complaining because he was so happy to stay up.

Ryan with help from our friend Brian dug every hole, then he came behind us covering the base in wood chips to hold moisture in the summer months.

I found the trees, made the plan, and put most of them into the ground. My worm farm turned farm waste into a plant super food.

When we say family farm we mean it.

Exhausted doesn’t even begin to describe how we felt at the end of the day. We ate take out in the orchard and worked into the night.

We took everything we learned over the last two years to give these trees the best start.

-We amended our clay soil (which was more soil and less clay than when we dug these holes 2 years ago.) with worm castings and gelsemium. Many orchardists say to not fertilize new trees. Worm castings are a fertilizer but not like chemical or isolated fertilizers. The good bacteria helps prevent disease and will help the trees get established.

-We pruned the trees upon planting to account for root loss.

-We treated every tree (both new and old) with homeopathy. Arnica for the trauma of being pruned and planted. Aconite to prevent shock. Silica to push out disease and pests. The studies on silica and plant growth are pretty incredible. This is called agrohomeopathy.

-We deep multched each tree with 4-6 inches of wood chips.

Our “small” orchard is 101 trees, 11 types of fruit and nuts, and 51 different varieties.  Diversity like this helps confuse pest and disease, and will space out We planted rows by their ripening dates and we will get fruit from the end of June until October.

We had 0 orchard experience 2 years ago. My plan was always to have the money to pay experts to help us. Plans change and we adapted.

In 2-3 years we will open our you pick orchard for a few.

In 3-5 years we will have an abundance of better than organic fruit to share with our community.

We are working on a mission statement, and clearing our vision. We are still in the learning phase. Finding what things bring us joy, what we are good at, and our community needs. We still don’t have all the details but we know one thing for sure. We want to create the healthiest food we can, with an abundance to share. We want to share our healing stories so others can be inspired to use food to find deep and lasting healing.

~Learning as we grow. Healing as we go.~

I think I’ve found our motto.

The Day a Salamander Made Me Cry

I’m laying in bed working on this website, feeling frustrated with the fresh snow, it’s April and I have inches of fresh snow outside!! I hear the kids in the kitchen, “Mom would want to see!” Elden is asleep in my arms and Ryan is trying to protect his sleep. Finally they convince him that they have to show me, and in they bring a salamander!

I could cry, I did cry, I am crying. It’s a salamander and it’s making me cry happy tears of joy. I have always loved amphibians, even as an “adult” with no children I would collect tadpoles to watch them grow. These tears are more than happy memories salamander hunting as a kid. We bought this property with zero experience and really no idea what we were doing. I truly believed we would plant some seeds, get some animals, keep everything organic, and bam clean delicious food.

Yes I really am that naive, and if I’ve lived my 37 years this way so I highly doubt it’s going to change.

Turns out the soil is dense thick clay, uninhabitable after years of compaction from tractor work. The water just flows over it, never absorbing deep. We moved here at the end of 2020, that winter we didn’t see a single bird. That spring there were a couple crows but that was about it.

Like many new farmers I am having to heal years of abuse and neglect. The soil needs so much love, and we have been working hard for 2 years. Last year the birds came back. Seeing the barn swallows build their nest was so joyous. Eloise leaves seeds out for “friend” birds and my heart bursts.  Last year we found a few frogs and I knew we were on the right track.

The amphibians are coming back!!! This is our 3rd spring here, and our first year ever seeing a salamander.  Amphibians are a sign that life is returning to this patch of land, a sign that what we are doing is a step in the right direction. It is so exciting to get confirmation from nature that we are on the right track.

Amphibians are called an indicator species.  They are very sensitive to changes in the environment and very sensitive to toxic chemicals.  Their return means that our efforts have already made a positive impact. We made the world, our world a little tiny bit better, and the amphibians are back to say thank you.

As we heal the soil, the wildlife will come back. As the wildlife comes back we will have new challenges, and so it goes on the farm.

Have a happy healthy hippie day.

Our First Jersey Cow Birth and Homeopathy for Cows and Calf

The brain is a funny thing!  We got our dear Fern girl last in spring of 2022. She had a young bull calf by her side and we were told that she had been with a bull but was not confirmed bred. This is farmer talk saying she had been in a field with a man but no one saw any action and they had not pregnancy checked her. Pregnancy checks can go a few different ways....

Option 1: Put on one of those gloves that goes to your shoulder reach in the cows butt, yes it’s butt and feel for the uterus. I attempted this recently with a friend guiding me on another cow, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Maybe it’s all those years checking cervixes on pregnant women in the hospital.

Option 2: You can get at home pregnancy test for cows!! Problem is they are blood only. I have started IV’s and drawn labs on hundreds of women, but coming at a cow with a needle feels very very different. I haven’t gotten the courage to try yet. Here are the tests I purchased but never used.

Cow Home Pregnancy Test

Option 3: Have your vet out and either blood or palpate pregnancy.

Option 4: Calf bump. The left side of the animal is LUNCH, Left is Lunch.  So you’ll want to go to the right side. You’ll pushes on the cows side and see if anything pushes back.

Option 5: ...

Option 5 was the option we chose as complete novices.

So Fern is here and she is lovely, except once a month she would get stompy and rude, sometime she would have mucous discharge from her vulva, her bull calf would try to mount her.  I chatted with some more experienced friends and we all decided she was not pregnant because she was having obvious heat cycles, and all those signs were fertility signs. So we borrowed a friends bull and had a shot gun wedding. Lloyd and Fern they were so sweet together. A few months later he goes back to his farm and I am unsure if she is pregnant or cycling again.

We bring Lloyd back over in December. In November we had a very experienced rancher over and he looked at Fern and said. “Wow!! That’s a very pregnant cow.” I said you think? I didn't think she was pregnant. He goes over and feels her belly, calf bumps the side, and does something else I’ve never seen. “Wow!! That is a very very fat cow.” From that moment on the idea of pregnancy was out of my brain. The expert had spoken, case closed.

---This is a lesson I had to learn in motherhood and it applies here too. Sometimes the experts are wrong, sometimes the experts are not up to date. Take the time and research everything that is suggested to you. Sit with your options (one of them to do nothing even though that isn’t always offered) and pick the thing that will create the most peace.---

So now I’m a little worried, why is my cow fat, she has normal bones showing, but her belly is so big!!  There must be something wrong, I start researching hay belly and infection. Nothing matches, we feed our girls very well. I’m stumped but still slightly worried.

On 1/21 Ryan calls me from the barn. He has been milking more this winter so I can rest.  Him calling usually means there is an emergency so my heart beat picks up a bit. “You aren’t going to believe it!! Fern is pregnant, her calf just kicked me in the head!!” Sure enough I go out and you can see a large strong calf kicking through Fern’s belly. How did we miss it for so long.

I can not stress it enough to have friends with skills and knowledge. Friends who are willing to come over and look at your pregnant cow with you.  It was so helpful to call our friend over to look at Fern and calculate dates. “You sure she couldn’t be due in June I ask?” “No way.” He says. So she’s been pregnant the whole time?!?!?! And she’s due in a couple weeks!!! My mind was blow. Let me tell you... my experience as a labor and delivery nurse has given me confidence in animal birthing when it should not. I have been wrong so many times. (We still don’t know for sure if Petunia the mini donkey is pregnant or not.) Good thing I can laugh at myself. We chose to dry her off right away and in hindsight I would not do that again. She only got 2 weeks and it wasn’t enough and I think it delayed lactation. Gouda her bull calf was born 12 days later on 2/2.

Because we hadn’t taken proper care of Fern during her pregnancy ie not giving her ample dry off time (aka not milking her for 90 days before birth), and because she was on a higher protein diet she was at risk for birth complications.  I became obsessed with what to do if she got sick. Milk fever was the main concern. Basically calcium levels drop as the colostrum/milk pull it from the body.

This is a random website that does a good job of explaining milk fever.

Milk Fever

I gave her the prophylaxis homeopathy shared in the images I made. After the birth she seemed off. Her eyes looked wild and she seemed over excited. I gave her a dose of Belladonna, Aconite, and the conventional oral calcium supplement. Can someone please create affordable organic food based minerals for animals?!?! This stuff has food coloring in it. It’s for cows and they dye it! You will be hearing a lot about minerals over here because they really matter, and because of current farming practices most the soil, plants, animals and humans are deficient.

These remedies can be used for other animals or even humans that match the descriptions. That’s why I love homeopathy so much. Once you learn the personality of a remedy you use all over.

Fern had never had mastitis but here’s what I found.

Here are some more remedies that might be useful as you adventure into the wonderful life with dairy cows.

We got Fern figured out, the remedies and one tube of calcium had her acting mostly normal. Fern was still being a little strange with Gouda so we had we kept an extra eye on him to be sure he was thriving. I hate hats on newborn babies so of course I hate coats on newborn animals. —-Smelling our young is one way we as mammals bond!!—- Gouda was shivering and Fern wasn’t staying that close so we reluctantly put a coat on him. That afternoon he went from up and thriving to down! We scrambled to support him. We brought him in the house because he was so listless. In the house he seemed ok so I thought I had overreacted. Ryan carried him back out, back out I decided I had made a horrible mistake and he needed to be in the house. My poor husband dragging this huge animal all over the farm.

We had made it 2 years as farmers/homesteaders/ whatever the heck we are doing, and I had not bought a thermometer. I do not know why I felt so resistant to it. With a calf down in the living room I ran to the store to get a thermometer and a calf bottle. We live in near a tiny town. The little ACE usually lets me down, but today luck is on my side.

I gather the supplies I need and come home to a calf who looks even worse. He had not energy, temp shows hypothermia, and he has no suck reflex. I give aconite for cold wind exposure because it was freezing out. Gelsenium because he seems dizzy, dopey and droopy, and carbo veg because he is not well. They help but it’s not enough. He is covered in blankets next to the fire trying to warm up, and we gave him a shot of BOSE. Not how I want to be supporting my animals, but it was an emergency. Nothing really seems to stick. He would perk up and then flop back over.

BOSE shot information

Finally we try the Madigan Squeeze. He has had multiple doses of remedies and I could tell he wanted to pull out of it, but he couldn’t. The squeeze changed everything. As soon as I released the pressure he was bright eyed and trying to stand. It was so incredible. Gouda had some low energy days while working to increase Fern’s milk supply, but now he is a happy thriving calf running all over.

Learning as we grow…

These are our adventures, successes and failures as we build a life as first generation famers. We have a million goals, but they are all centered around ONE thing. The best, healthiest, most nutrient dense food we can create.

Food is what started our healing journey, how we found our fertility. Turns out that isn’t as easy as just planting some seeds, and feeding our animals organic feed.

The soil, the animals, and the humans are all probiotic and mineral deficient. We have our work cut out for us, but it is worth it. We will leave this little slice of heaven better for future generations.