The winter months are a good time to make plans for our more active spring and summer seasons. The biggest planning event is our vegetable garden relocation and expansion.
With the end of our farm field lease last fall, we made the decision to tackle large scale farm expansions. The first expansion is for our vegetable garden, which will be expanded to the scary size of one acre and relocated to get less slope and more sun. I am actively planning the layout and varieties for this new larger garden and am really excited about the potential of the new space.
In addition to the vegetables, we may also be growing the flock. We have enjoyed our first year and a half with our birds. The responsibility of caring for livestock has stretched all of us but seeing the joy of our kids feeding the birds snacks in the sunshine definitely outweighs the negatives. The bird expansion requires some new buildings once the snow is gone, but we are hopeful that we can successfully bring in some new members to our flock.
Barred Rock Hen
Our expansions don’t quite cover the breadth of our new vacated field, so we will also be working on additional projects in the fields to prepare them for future livestock expansions. The research is currently focusing on growing pasture lands and creating deer sanctuaries. Fencing and fast growing hardwoods are also on the research topic list. As some of the other expansion projects get crossed off the list, we’ll intensify our research to get the lesser priorities handled.
We’re excited to be tackling some bigger projects this year. I’m very excited about the new garden and will be sharing more about that soon.
Here at Sunrise Farm Project, our conversations center around what we learned and how we can grow from the things we learned. This spring and summer, we took on a few projects that were new to us. Not all of them were as successful as we had hoped, and others we will improve next year and as we continue to grow.
Sprouts
Building indoor grow shelves and sprouting plants early produced mixed results. I have never grown tomatoes and peppers from seed, but in order to have heirloom plants, it was something I needed to try. Seeds grew, but the moving outside process (hardening off) and planting in the grow proved challenging. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the plants that survived and the plants that didn’t. As I continue to do more research, I will be trying a few different things next year, and hopefully build a better system.
Peppers and Tomatoes
My peppers almost seemed like a bust, and my tomatoes did almost too well. Somewhere in the middle summer weeks, with the heat and the rain, nearly all of my tomato plants took off, and I was never able to get them back under control. This led to an uneven tomato harvest, with huge plants, but less fruit than expected. Some of my plants were getting to be bigger and taller than some of my children, and required lots of extra staking. My one surprise tomato plant was the Chernobyl tomato. Producing a yellow tomato the size of a Roma, these tomatoes are prolific, still bearing into September.
The peppers were slow to take root outside, and for a brief time, I thought they weren’t going to survive. The Hungarian wax pepper was the first to recover, with a nice yellow-green fruit, and strong tall plants. My middle child was very excited to eat peppers fresh from the garden, and had quite a few for snack. My miniature bell peppers did finally start producing, and I watched them like a hawk, waiting for the first tiny fruit to come along. They are such a cute little pepper, great for little kid snacking or adding sliced into salads. Our orange ones did the best, though I think there’s a rogue purple one in the bunch. At the encouragement of some friends, I will be attempting to transplant and winter my miniature peppers indoors—stay tuned for that experiment.
Beans
Planted four different varieties this year—one was a dry bean variety that was poorly labeled in the seed catalog. I was attempting to create some color and variety in the earlier vegetables, and my varieties delivered. A classic green bean, a sunny soft yellow, and a funny purple striped variety called Dragon Tongue filled the garden from mid July into September. Once the school year started, it was a challenge to keep up, and had I planned better, we may have had better late harvests. I’m saving seed, and will try these varieties and a few more next year as well. Having fresh green beans to eat has always been a summer expectation of mine, and I want the little ones to grow up with that experience too.
Pumpkins and Squash
Two words: squash bugs. Destroyed all of my seedlings and made for a disappointing pumpkin patch this year. However, I did spend some time researching and planning, and with the vegetable garden move that we plan for next spring, I’m hoping I can keep the pests at bay.
We learned a variety from this year’s garden projects, and I’m looking forward to trying again next year. Next year’s vegetable garden will be relocated and enlarged to accommodate a greater variety of vegetables. I’m hoping to intentionally succession plant some of the faster producing vegetables to prolong the harvest. And we have a few surprises up our sleeves as well.
Early on in the summer, we had many plants in the green stage. Seedlings were popping up all over with some fruit and flower, but June was definitely about maintenance. Farming and gardening and growing things seems to be a lot about waiting.
flowers and herbs
tomatoes, lettuce, herbs
herbs
Just a few of our potted plants around the back patio
Last year, we had a few potted herbs and vegetables, but we’ve doubled our back patio space with a few large raised beds.
amaranth
salvia
a mostly mulched flower bed, with rows of flowers peaking through
After what was shaping up to be an unseasonably warm and early planting season, we had a few frosty mornings that kept delaying our planting. I was totally convinced that I was never going to get my garden in, and all my seedlings were going to die before I could transplant. Obviously that was a bleak outlook, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. But now the warmth has returned, and this past weekend, I was able to get most of my garden planted.
My early seedlings
This year’s garden has been nearly 5 months in the making. Back in January, I started planning the vegetable garden, perusing catalogs while also trying to keep from going overboard. I settled on 5 heirloom varieties of tomatoes, 2 varieties of pepper, 3 varieties of pumpkin, 3 varieties of beans, plus cucumbers, carrots, and summer squash. Compared to last year’s garden, I am being way more adventurous. I have never grown peppers or tomatoes before, and had to do a bit of research before I started them indoors. Our indoor grow setup was put to the test, and proved sufficient.
Testing out the new sprinkler for easier watering
As the weather got warmer, I hoped for early planting, but wanted to avoid last year’s seedling failure. Most of our vining plants were stunted, and it wasn’t until this spring that I realized a lack of hardening off was more detrimental to my plants than I realized. But we also didn’t have a great set-up for bringing plants in and out until the weather improved. This year, I just used spare boxes, and as seedlings became acclimated to the weather, they took up residence on the back porch. Per my research, hardening off seedlings that were sprouted under grow lights should take at least a week, as one gradually exposes the seedlings to more natural sunlight and the elements. I’ll be the first to admit that I was not super scientific about the whole process, but I’m hoping it makes the difference.
Many of my plants are direct sow, meaning that they are not planted until the soil is consistently warm and out of danger of frost. Of my vegetables, I didn’t sprout the beans indoors, and of my flowers, only amaranth was an indoor sprout. This past Friday, the weather was beautiful and I started to move my seedlings to the garden. Six amaranth plants and a variety of peppers and tomatoes went into the ground, intermingled with marigold seeds to help keep off some of the pests. The following morning, I planted carrots, all of my beans, and some of the vine plants. I sprouted a few of my vines inside, and they are still in the midst of the hardening off stage, but I hope to get them into the garden this week.
My green beans already starting to sprout
Over the course of the last few months, I consulted multiple websites and books for inspiration and help. My favorite resource has been the Family Garden Plan, a book that I found through one of my social media accounts. The experiences of other people have been really useful to me, and I appreciate social media for those connections. One of the biggest learning curves for me has been figuring out how to grow and maintain seedlings. I had to repot several sets of seedlings as they outgrew the original pot I had put them in.
I would love to answer questions about our set-up, or hear your story about starting seedlings indoors!
We had quite the date night this past fall: a trip to the hardware store for ground contact 2x6s and lots and lots of dirt.
the layers of soil, peat moss, compost, and mulch in our blueberry boxes
After my huge disappointment over the initial testing of our ‘orchard’ soil, Evan and I decided on building raised beds for our blueberry bushes. Twelve holes are now twelve little raised beds, filled with peat moss and a compost/manure soil mixture. It was really fun to reveal the very defined layers of the raised box dirt when we planted the bushes the other week.
Between the blueberry patch and the vegetable garden, our dirt has been astonishingly disappointing, and we are hoping our amendments in the fall will produce a better crop this season. The vegetable garden did not need as aggressive of amending for the upcoming season, but still received a layer of compost and mulch back in the fall.
Improving the soil is a slow process, and obviously only time will tell how much more work we will need to put into it. In order to keep the improvements coming, we are also more aggressively composting and mulching. Anything that doesn’t get fed to the chickens goes into the compost heap, and every few weeks the chicken bedding gets added in as well.
As we continue to test the soil and grow our plants, the literal fruits of our labor will be apparent. I am optimistic about the adjustments we have made since last summer, and am excited to see what sort of harvest we will have this year. Want to know more about our processes or just want to chat dirt and gardening? Leave us a comment or check us out on one of our social platforms!
With the building of basement grow shelves this winter, I was able to start some of my newly planned vegetables in the house. I was bitten with the winter gardening bug, and may have gone overboard in my seed ordering. New additions to our garden this year include multiple varieties of both tomatoes and peppers, and new varieties of beans, pumpkins, gourds, and flowers. I attempted to only buy heirloom varieties, because I enjoy the challenge of harvesting seeds for next season, and used MIGardener, Territorial Seed Company, and Baker Creek seeds.
Starting seedlings indoors was not a new idea for me. Last March in the early weeks of our pandemic lockdown, we started our plants indoors as a science and math lesson for our oldest. However, leggy plants and limited window space led us to pursue a different method this year. We visited family last summer, and they had an extensive growth light set up that inspire ours. Multiple shelves with lighting to encourage early growth in two hard-to-start from seed vegetables: peppers and tomatoes.
If you’ve been following along on our social media at all, you’ve caught a bit of the saga of my seed ordering and subsequent planting. Based on my research, and the seed instructions themselves, the peppers were the first plants I started. We are trying two different varieties this year: Hungarian Sweet Wax Peppers and Mini Bell Peppers. I anxiously awaited the first sprouts, which took much longer than I had anticipated. (Had I done all of my reading properly, I would’ve realized that the germination just does take that long.)
In addition to the peppers, I am trying a new variety of flower for the farm stand after research into cut flowers: Amaranth. Eagerly, I ordered three different varieties from Michigan Gardener, and so far they have not disappointed. Their germination rates are excellent, and it’s fun to see the different colors of the seedlings. I ordered two red varieties, so seeing those seedlings next to the green pepper plants is fun.
The second and third rounds of seeds were planted in mid-March. Tomatoes are a totally new plant to me, and we’re still figuring them out. Seeds have sprouted, but the seedlings quickly wilted. I’m still troubleshooting those issues. The flowers that I planted in the third round of seeds seem to be doing well however, and right before Easter we finished up the new flower bed.
The remaining plants are all direct sow, though in my eagerness to get plants started, I may still try to sprout a few inside before May. We prepped the garden plot last fall, and are excited to see the literal fruit of our labor as we move from spring into summer.
If you have any suggestions for my wilting tomatoes, I’d love to get some feedback! Also, I’m super interested in learning more about heirloom seeds and seed harvesting, so any research/books/sites you can pass along would be appreciated.
This past year has been quite an adventure, to put it mildly. One of the side effects of this crazy busy-ness was that I have fallen FAR behind in writing updates on all the projects going on around SFP. I will try to correct this now.
The first is the garden. The rototiller arrived in late November 2020 just in time to be used briefly in the garden. Unfortunately for us, the temperatures dropped and the ground was frozen the very next day. We’ll definitely update more on that later once we have had a better chance to put it to work. Suffice to say, the rototiller is going to be helpful in adding compost to the gardens and adding a flower garden in the spring.
Next project is that the Mrs SFP has decided to start plants inside so we can get the garden going a bit earlier. So I was “asked” to build so shelves for grow trays that can have lights suspended above them. The build took about a week to plan, gather materials, and then build it. Again, there will be a detailed post to follow.
The woodshop is filled up with projects in various states of not-yet-finished. There has been some small project success with cutting boards and trivets. I really do like the small stuff that I can finish in a late evening or just few hours. The larger projects are taking up a lot of the space in the shop are the 8 x 5 ft table and the half log bench. The cold has made it terribly hard to avoid wood warping as the humidity changes and all the projects have really slowed down.
Wood shavings all over the barn
And finally I have two deer skins salted and hanging to tan as soon as the temp rises. Most of the tanning work has to be done above 40F and the actually tanning paste can only work above 50F.
As we adjust to a new rhythm going into the spring months, I’ll be sharing more about all that we’ve been working on.
It’s hard to believe we are deep into autumn already! The back-to-school time found us busy juggling new schedules and trying to find a new routine.
Zinnias
I was pleasantly surprised at the responses we got over our roadside flower stand, and disappointed that our fall vegetables were mostly a bust. The flowers were almost a fluke; we grew them because I wanted something pretty. Once the zinnias started blooming, they hardly stopped. However, given the revelation of our dirt issues, I was not surprised that our vegetables didn’t do so well. The only real vegetable success we had was the bottle necked gourds. Those were fun to watch grow, and a fun harvest as well.
one of the cute bottleneck gourds
Our big summer building project was the chicken coop, and Evan is already planning a “next time”– what to do to make it better and maybe bigger.
As we head into fall and winter, our focus moves inside. In addition to a few home improvement projects, we also have to start planning for next spring. Hopefully, we’ll make some soil adjustments and have a more productive vegetable garden. We also have to look at getting our apple trees trimmed sometime in January, and order new bushes and trees to continue our orchard expansion.
Chickens are simple, straightforward, and (dare I say it) cheap. My own research found the uses for chickens is meat or eggs. Mary and I decided we wanted to have eggs since as long as you can shop and wait for sales meat can be had at the store very effectively and we already had a good “store and use slowly” system.
Looking into needed supplies and infrastructure, the main part was always the chicken coop itself. Premade coops and kits are available online, but for the size coop we wanted, seemed to cost $4000 or more. However I am very inexperienced in building structures of any quality so I had managed to find a online design that included a supplies list.
The actual build became quite an event. I have a rule that I don’t want to work with powered saws/drills etc., without other people around. This allows me to at least believe if I get into trouble, there would be someone to extract me from underneath or call for emergency services. I only had the help for a day and a half, so the construction was limited to a day and a half.
Stage one was collecting the materials. I do not have a trailer or truck so gathering anything over 8ft long had to be done with a borrowed trailer. You can see the collection here.
The only mistake I really made at this point was I did not pick up roofing cement and I should have been more careful about warping 2x4s (more on that later). Not shown here are the nails (exterior and interior), rolled asphalt roofing, metal drip edge, and tools.
I was able to assemble and frame the floor and the walls on the ground so I could stand them up and attach them to the floor deck without having to balance and maintain 90 degree angles and straight lines.
The floor was weather resistant cedar (shown above) and the walls were made out of interior 2x4s (shown below)
OSB decking was simple enough to add to the floor but Some of the seams did not line up with supports without some modifications. I have not decided if that issue is normal or a result of my inexperience.
The walls were filled in with plywood paneling and then the roof rafters could run from front to back. This was when the warped lumber became an issue but the structure stiffened up when the roof OSB was added. Below is show more issues with framing not lining up to the paneling.
And finally it was paint, cut windows, install door and latches, frame in the wire to keep enough ventilation and keep predators out, place the rolled roofing (once I went and got roofing cement), and the whole thing was finally done.
I’ve always loved the idea of having a blueberry bush. I have fond memories of going picking with my family when we were younger, and I love to eat blueberries. Unfortunately, that is not something they cover in marriage prep, and I learned the hard way that Evan did not like blueberries at all. Something quite the opposite of me—he had bad memories of picking blueberries.
When we bought the farm with the apple trees almost ready to pick, i hadn’t yet thought about other plantings we would make. I knew we would need to replace our trees eventually, but I didn’t really think about other fruit plans. Evan was talking about our hopes and dreams for the property to a friend, and they actually convinced him to add blueberries to our list. And so our blueberry planning began.
Before the garden
My research started with soil, space, and a place to purchase young bushes. MSU Extension is a wealth of resources for most of our agricultural needs, and I started there. Blueberries require lots of sun, and we thought we had a perfect spot. They also require what is considered a relatively high acidity for garden plants.
Evan and I measured out the distance between each bush, and we cut sod out for mini-raised beds. I researched and bought this soil test kit from the local hardware store. It is very easy to use with clear directions, and includes additives to test for not only pH but nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. I collected dirt samples from three different holes. All three tests came back as VERY alkaline. I was disappointed to be sure. We were hopeful that our soil would be at least slightly neutral so we wouldn’t need a lot of amending.
After the sod removal
Now, you may ask, why amend the soil if you are making raised beds? We weren’t planning on very tall beds, and full expect that once the bushes reach maturity, their root systems would be creeping into our dirt. So now we are on the hunt for fool-proof methods to create a more acidic environment for our bushes so that when they arrive in the spring, they will be able to adjust well and flourish.
If you have any recommendations for us, we welcome tips and tricks! I’d love to hear about others’ experience growing blueberries or amending soil for more acid-loving plants.
