Schoonover Farm Blog

The pigs seem to be enjoying their new home.  They already have a giant mud hole.

I did the animal and garden chores while Tom worked on building a roof for the trailer that had a tree fall a while ago, and its roof is slowly deteriorating.

This afternoon I picked our golden egg plums and our peaches.  We had pruned them quite a lot on pruning day so I wasn’t expecting much.  But both trees made more than I expected and bigger fruit than usual.

Interestingly we heard the song Peaches “Movin’ to the country, Gonna eat a lot of peaches” just yesterday.  And now we are going to be eating a lot of peaches.

Then I picked the last of the blueberries.  We had a banner year for blueberries.

For dinner we had carnitas, and I made a fruit salad on the side.  It was all really great.

I am realizing that I haven’t been writing much about the farm recently, just our trips.  But today was a farm day.  We moved the pigs to the larger pen.  They will have more room to roam.

The chickens are growing up, and I am enjoying watching the young roosters develop.  They are so beautiful.

Plus I enjoy watching the white peacock (hopefully).  The bird behind him I think is a peacock.

This afternoon I decided to take on dismantling the bee hive.  It failed last winter with all of the bees dying.  I thought it was due to starvation even though they had food I had made for them.  I had thought that I made it wrong so they couldn’t use it. But I figured I could at least harvest some bees wax from the hive.  I started taking it apart in the back yard.

Here is some of the food I made for them, still not eaten.

But surprisingly there was some honey in the hive.  I opened up the combs and laid them on some pans to let the honey drain.

But then some local honey bees started showing up, attracted to this honey.  Then more bees came, and currently we cannot walk out our back door onto the porch.

I am happy to donate this honey to the local honey bees,  But probably should have handled this better.  Still hoping to get some wax to make candles with.

I am making a pot roast for dinner.  I harvested some of our carrots for this.  These are the biggest carrots I have ever grown.  Usually the underground rodents eat them and what is left are stunted.  We have moved the carrots to our old manure spreader with sandy soil in it, and it seems to be working well.  No success with the potatoes in there though, but I am still happy.

That is my farm day.  I hope you had a good day too.