Our farm turns one year old !

     Hello from Sweet Summer Farm, this month we turn one year old. A year ago this August  we closed on our farm. We had looked for several years at farm after farm never finding just the right one. If we liked the land then there was no water if there was a great creek or pond the land was too steep to farm. We spent almost every weekend driving around over three different states most of the time a drive by was all that  was needed to eliminate each farm. A farm would sound wonderful on paper, but the seller had forgotten  to say there was a convenience store next door that was open twenty-four hours. Let's not forget the farm with a" beautiful creek"  that was really only about the size of your arm.   And of course, the one that was on a five lane highway was just not what we had in mind.  The creek was often the property line, so you are sharing the creek with your neighbor, and we once looked at a farm with a barbed wire fence down the middle of the creek so the neighbor's cows could drink out of it.  Maybe a plan for them, but not so good for us.

      Then we got the call about this farm! Our agent Dale Holmes said we had to come look at it. It was beautiful. We loved it! Could this be the one? The creek ran right through the middle of the farm, there was pasture and woods. The house was in fair shape and there was a barn and an old corn crib. So after much taking and  worrying we decided this was the one, our Sweet Summer Farm.
   
     We have had a lot of changes over this first year. The first thing we needed to do was put in a driveway. We cut down lots of over grown boxwoods and tons of weed trees, the property had not been well cared for over the years. We plowed and planted a large garden after stopping every few minutes to  dig out rocks. We have put in a small orchard, the deer have really enjoyed it, they think it is a salad bar. We have planted blueberries and raspberries, some fig trees and three pecan trees.

    In addition to all of our plants and trees, we have poultry. First, we have our beautiful Silver Lace Wyandottes. The first update on them is that sadly one of our hens has passed away. The second update is sad our rooster had to go.  Buster was a beautiful rooster, but his behavior was unacceptable.  But when he went after Grand and left her bleeding he had to go. So he was given away. Next, we have our littles, aka our bantam chickens. The biggest and most wonderful update of all, is our bantams have STARTED LAYING!!! Our bantams now have layed roughly two dozen eggs. Grand is going to make mini deviled eggs. All of us are very excited to start using tiny eggs. The last type of animal we have is our wild and crazy ducks. The next wonderful update is our ducks have even started laying beautiful blue eggs It's really cool to have brown eggs, blue eggs, and tiny eggs.

     We are really enjoying our beautiful little farm. There have been a lot of changes in the past year. It has been a lot of work , but mostly it has been great fun and a wonderful experience. We are looking forward to many years in this very special place.  We feel very blessed.

  

We love this old farmhouse and hope to get it painted this fall.

Our chickens are next door neighbors

The littles are loving the farm.

Our crazy ducks.



 We need a fence around our small orchard.

Our sign is finally up and looking good.

Just a few of the many rocks we have dug up!

It's something all the time !!   Oh well, more firewood.

One of our three pecan trees.

                                                     


Some garden pictures

Some of our produce



Our old barn Love it !!!

Our favorite spot!!! Down at the creek after a hard day!!! We are so lucky!!!

Our Indian Runner ducks

We wanted to do an update on our Indian Runner ducks.  Well about all We can say is " bless their        

hearts." We just feel so sorry for them. They are absolutely terrified of everything.
We purchased them. to forage for bugs on the farm. We were hoping they would help keep the slugs and the Japanese beetles under control, but so far they are yet to leave their pen. When they see that we have left the door open they run away from the door, loudly quacking bloody murder. They run as far away from the opened door as possible.  Making a small tight duck wad, they step all over each other, each trying to get closer and closer to the center of the cluster of seven ducks. If we circle around them and try to herd them out the open door, the poor things run from us and toward the open door. Then in an instant, they all at the same time seem to realize " OMG the door is open!!! The horror of it!!! RUN AWAY RUN AWAY!!!" The duck nervous breakdown is now complete. The poor things now make a mad dash to the door of their duck room in the barn,
 where they remain until they think all danger has passed. Just hiding out in the dark until had evil door is once again closed and latched. Once we decided to catch the ducks and place them out in the orchard, right next to their pen, BAD idea, the poor little soul we caught first, ran into the duck pen from the outside over and over trying to get INTO the pen. His misery was so sad. We don't know what we have done to mess up these poor little ducks so badly. It really is a shame, we so wish they could enjoy free ranging on the farm. But right now we are just hoping for some duck eggs. If you have  Indian runner ducks and have any ideas that might help please let us know.

Strawberry Biscuits

Strawberry Biscuits

3 cups of self rising flour
1 cup of sour cream
1/2 cup of butter melted
1 cup chopped fresh strawberries  You can use frozen if you want  just defrost and drain slightly
3 tablespoons of sugar

     Preheat oven to 450

     Mix chopped berries with sugar and set aside.
Combine flour, sour cream and butter.  Then stir the chopped berries with the sugar into the flour mixture.   At this point you can add a teaspoon of cinnamon, if you like,   Cover your baking sheet with parchment paper, these tend to stick because of the fruit and the sugar. Or you could grease heavily. This dough is to soft to roll out so we scoop up a heaping spoonful and drop the dough onto a cookie sheet. Then, bake the biscuits for about 20 minutes or till golden brown. They are wonderful with butter and strawberry jam.

The Bantams get cuter

We thought we would write a quick update on our Bantams. They are sweet little birds and we think have turned out to be very cute. We still need to get a pen built for them, we have them a small coop. We are going to add them a small pen next door to our laying hens  Remember, we bought assorted bantams, so we were really lucky to end up with four hens and only one rooster.  We also had no idea what kind of bantams we were going to end up with, but are very happy with our little ones. We have a polish, (Grands calls it a chicken in a hat) a frizzle, a barred rock, a sebright and  we are not sure about our rooster. If you have any idea what he could be please let us know. We will have to wait a while to see if we are going to get any eggs from our little ones. They are so cute we don't really care about eggs. We know they will add a lot to the farm and we are really enjoying them.  We will let you know when they get moved into the new pen and how they like it. Please enjoy the pictures below showing how much they have grown and changed. 

Puff with tiny hat

Puff with big hat

Baby Blair beginning to frizz

Blair fully frizzed

Our tiny, sickly, mystery chick...

...turned into a beautiful bird

Dottie with one dot on her head

Dottie with lots of dots

Our cute little Brownie...

...turned into a Rowdy Rooster!

One chicken is more spoiled than the others. Guess why.

Spring Harvest

     Here is an update on what is going on at Sweet Summer Farm. We are really enjoying our  first Spring harvest. We just planted a few rows of potatoes to see how they would do in the hard soil. We didn't buy any potatoes, we just planted some leftover potatoes we got from the farmers market. We are excited to have harvested over 50lbs of potatoes. We've also started harvesting a few onions and that's  good because we use lots of onions. Grand puts them in almost everything she cooks.We have also harvested our garlic and came home with a "table full" as you can see from the pictures below. The tomatoes are doing very well and we hope to get a large harvest. There are many little tomatoes, so we are very hopeful. We are looking forward to some great tomato sandwiches. But it is going to be hard not to pick them green and fry up some green tomatoes. Wouldn't they be good with some homemade pimento cheese? Just thinking about it makes my mouth water!!! Guess we will have to wait and see which one wins out in the end.  The truth is I am sure there will be plenty of both. Hopefully, lots of canned tomatoes to enjoy this winter, maybe some homemade ketchup.  The cabbage, however, isn't doing very well. It has some worms and isn't looking very good. Still, we think we will have a few small heads to cook up with the potatoes. We hope to harvest it very soon. Our peaches are also getting bigger and are looking good. Well, they looked a lot better before the deer came by, but we are thinking we might get a peach or two. It would be nice to at least get a bite of fresh  peach. Well, if the deer don't mind!  The peas are growing fast, plus we have more of them to plant. The peppers look great and lots of baby peppers are enjoying the hot weather here. We have some squash seedlings we will be planting this week, as well as some okra and butter beans.  We're so looking forward to the next couple of months at the farm. We will keep you posted on how everything is going. See pictures of our harvest down below.

A "Table Full" of Garlic

Love that Garlic!

Love Digging Potatoes

Potatoes & Onions

Tomatoes are looking good.

Baby Tomatoes

Swiss Chard

Purple Hull Peas

Green Peppers

Blueberries

Raspberries

Our Biggest Crop, Japanese Beetles!

Farm Update

A lot has happened on the farm lately. We've planted tomatoes, peppers, Marigolds, Celosia Flowers, Sunflowers, and Onions. We also now have ducks. We have seven Indian Runner Ducks, that have now been moved to the farm. They are living in a room in the barn with a run on the side that is 10'x20' If you want to see "The Quakers" Come by and say "Hi." We like visitors. We did, however, have some unwelcome visitors. There used to be 8 ducks, but one day a coyote came by and had a duck dinner.

Bear claws in feed sack

We also had a bear tip over a 100lb food bin and drag out a 50lb bag of chicken food and a 50lb bag of duck food. We are currently repairing a room in the barn to keep the food bin in. Then, we have some smaller visitors, Cabbage Worms. The Cabbage Worms have almost decimated the cabbage crop for this year. We tried sprinkling Diatomaceous Earth on the cabbages and sprayed them with an oil mixture, but nothing has worked. We have ordered some Dipel Dust, an organic pesticide, to try to get rid of the worms. They have also ruined the Broccoli crop and we had to throw it to the chickens. On a good note, we now have a harvest of Farm Fresh Potatoes! Some of the potato plants died so we decided to dig them up to see if  they had made any potatoes.

We only dug up about 25% of the potato patch and ended up with 10lbs of potatoes. Grand made supper out of some of the potatoes. She boiled them and mashed them and put butter, salt, and pepper on them. They were absolutely delicious! Then, she cooked cabbage and Kielbasa Sausage and dinner was served. We also have had our first Garlic crop. Some of the garlic heads had become uncovered so we pulled them up and they were fabulous. Nice and large. Then we cut some

Garlic Scapes. They were a bit greasy, but next time mama will remember the top to the oil. We still have a lot more garlic to harvest and it is green and doing well. We hope it will be finished by the end of this month. We have a start on our tomato crop. Some of our "Compost Tomatoes" have finished blooming and are covered in small green tomatoes.
All of our other tomatoes are still in bloom. Compost Tomatoes are tomatoes that come up in a composer voluntarily. We planted some of these at the farm and they took off. We also had two meals off the Swiss Chard we grew We have had some disappointments but we're still doing well and look  forward to the next few weeks with more harvesting.

We'll keep you posted. If you have any gardening or farming experiences please tell us by commenting below.

The Corn Crib, Do we save it or not

      On our farm is what we've been told is an old corn crib. It's leaning badly and some of the wood has decayed. It has two lean-tos and a small room in the middle with a door. There is no floor. There are  lots of old scrap wood, tools, and some old wooden boxes filled with nails in the building. We even found an old ax head. We don't know when this building was built or if it is original to the farm, we don't believe that it is. We don't know what it was used for in the past, but we had thought about making it a turkey house. This building is very close to our driveway, so we thought we could turn it into a farm stand. There is an odd box nailed to the outer wall that is about six inches deep, eighteen to two feet wide and about six feet off the ground. We have no idea what this is. Grand thinks it could have been a nest box for Guineas. But then we were thinking don't guineas nest on the ground? The building is leaning so severely we think a strong breeze might blow it over. One man that we talked to about repairing it thinks we should use a tractor to pull the building up straight and then put in new supports  Other people think it could be jacked up with house jacks.  We have asked quite a few of people how we should fix it and many of them just shrug their shoulders and say tear it down. We hate to just tear it down, once it is gone it is gone forever. We hate to see so many old farm building being lost, there are so many just in our neck of the woods that are falling apart. We go back and fore about what to do with this building it is not going to be an easy fix, many of the supports have rotted away There is no telling what it will cost to repair. We do feel that it adds some charm to the farm, mostly because we love these old buildings. A number of people have stopped by the farm to tell us that they would love to buy the old wood if we tear it down. One day on our way to the farmers market we saw some old barn boards for sale. We would hate for this to happen to this old building. Please if you have ever repaired a building like this let us know. Does anyone else think it is worth saving?  Or has its time come and we should tear it down and make way for new and better things at Sweet Summer Farm. If you know any way we could save the corn crib comment below with your suggestions.

Blueberry Muffins

Ingredients

Topping

1. 4 tablespoons of melted butter.
2. 1/3  cup of packed brown sugar
3. 1/4  cup of uncooked oats.
4. 4 tablespoons of flour.
5. 1/4  cup of chopped nuts 

Muffin Mixture

1. 2 cups of all-purpose flour plus 1 tablespoon [ use 1 T of flour to mix with the blueberries]
2. 1/2 cup of granulated sugar
3. 2 teaspoons baking powder
4. 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
5. 1/2 teaspoon salt
6.  1/2 teaspoon of lemon flavoring or the zest of one lemon  
7. 3/4 cup of   buttermilk
8. 1/3 cup of melted butter. 
9. 1 egg
10. 1  cup of fresh or frozen blueberries.

Directions

1. Mix the brown sugar, 2 tablespoons of flour, oats, and butter until well blended. Stir in the chopped nuts and then set aside. This is your topping. 
2.  Combine "Muffin Mixture" ingredients 1-5 in a large bowl and mix well.
3. Wisk the buttermilk, the oil, and the egg in a separate bowl . Then add them to the flour mix. Stir just until mixed, do not over mix.
4. Toss the blueberries in the remaining 1 tablespoon of flour and the fold them into the batter.
5. Spoon the batter into a greased muffin tin and sprinkle some topping onto each muffin. Pat lightly into each muffin. 
6. Bake at 400 for 20 to 25 minutes and then transfer the muffins to a wire rack for cooling.