Today was our first success at foraging! Meet the Trout Lily! Also known as the Fawn or Glacier Lily. If you dig down about 8 inches you will find a bulb. It will look like the white part of a green onion. I wasn’t able to get a picture of the bulbs I gathered because we sampled them before I thought to take a picture. But the white stems you see below are the chunk right above the bulb. The flowers are gorgeous and the bulb taste like sweet corn! Foraging for us will be a slow progression, we are gardeners and hunters and for now grocery shoppers..😆 so foraging doesn’t fall high on our priority list at this time. It’s also so dangerous to miss identify and we have our health to protect. So as of right now we’re definitely taking it slow. However this identification was a breeze and so much fun!
Clayton planted his own plant yesterday. He was very excited. Out of all the packets to choose from he chose Fennel! He likes the way the picture looked, I love his choice! Fennel has so many medicinal uses!
We have taken a pretty good break from homeschooling. We didn’t take a spring break for just this reason. We are working our way back into a routine and have started our mornings reading by the green house while we wait for the sun to come up over the trees and warm everything up. Bailee has been working on reading the Little House on the Prairie series. She reads silently for a while then out loud. I have been enjoying my word finds a lot these days. It’s nice just sitting together early in the morning while everything is still quiet. Well kind of quiet… the roosters have a lot to say in the mornings. If all three of my boys weren’t so handsome and polite they would be in the soup pot.. because goodnesssss they are chatty! And one of them is very special… but I’ll mention more about that later when I’m not talking about homeschooling. My chicken brain gets out of control sometimes! 🤷🏻♀️
Clay will be starting some sit down time in the evenings for learning. He seems to have this really nice peak in the early evening where he gobbles up anything you teach him and is relatively focused. He helped me plant in the greenhouse the other day and remember a lot of the info I gave him about soil. He remembered that we plant in loose soil not packed soil, he remembered seeds only germinate in moist soil not dry. Little tiny tid bits of info such as that make him feel so smart and he tells everyone!
So more about roosters! 🤣 I have three. Some people swear you can only have one! I know this to be one hundred percent false!! I have had 20 roosters at a time in one very large pen with my hens. I was hearing crowing in my dreams and I’m pretty sure any nearby neighbors wanted to burn my house down..😬 But hey! When you incubate eggs you just never know what you’ll get. So one of my roosters is a brahama! His name is Richard and he used to be very disrespectful. However watching a raccoon rip the throat out of his brother Rodney really cleaned up his act. ( This was before Sig was old enough/ trained enough for night patrol) I will be starting a breeding program oh Brahamas in the future once we are settled more and have the appropriate facility to accommodate this endeavor. The next guy is Oliver! He is special because I incubated him for a friend, we were working on creating a chicken that laid Dino eggs! These are dark green eggs with speckles! They are not common and we swapped chickens and we’re trying to incubate one that would end up a hen and lay these eggs! But the only one we got was a rooster! So now once I begin incubating again I will pair him with a dark shelled layer and hopefully have success! Now of course after incubation I would have to wait at least 7 month to find out if our plan has worked… 😱 I usually incubate like a mad woman in the early spring. So it’s been tough to not start chicks. But I have no brooder space at this point, so I’m just grateful my chickens and ducks are giving us tasty eggs!
We just purchased Guinea Keets. We should have them the first week of June. We decided to add them to the farm due to the outrageous amount of ticks out here. We want nothing to do with ticks and have decided to expand into guineas! They are hideous and noisy so this should be fun! 😂
Another new member on the farm is Hillbilly! Billy for short. He will be the Bergstrom family’s new mouser. He has quite the mouth on him and has been keeping Amber and Garret awake at night. So they are eager for him to learn his mousing skills so they can turn him loose!
We started work on our driveway. There are spots that require us to chain up when it rains. Sometimes we get stuck and can not get out until the mud dries. We are very fortunate that there is a gravel pit up here and the owner gave us a key to load up gravel!
The kids are still doing amazing. They eat like hogs, take epic naps are covered in mud 85% of the day! They can’t wait for it to be warm enough to swim in the pond. The sun made a rare appearance a few days ago and the kids ran inside to change to shorts. By the time they came back out it was cloudy and breezy again. 😂 Idaho is even more of a “hold my beer” climate than Central Oregon! Amber has begun lessons with Gwen in the mornings. It’s so cute hearing her in their trailer working on letters and numbers. I cannot believe she is going to be 3 next month!
So far our little hobo camp is thriving! We are trying to keep things tidy and organized so that we don’t look like actual hillbillies! 😂 It’s harder than you would think. We need more storage sheds. We need another outhouse. Annnnd a bunch of other things. But we will get there. Some of our current accomplishments are:
-Getting water from the spring to our current living area.
-Building fencing for a small animal paddock, we are about to expand the paddock for more grazing.
- Made a small laundry room and hooked up a washer.
- Set up solar panels
-Got the lumber mill going and started producing lumber.
-Began work on our driveway so we don’t get stuck in the mud all the time.
- Started clearing the road up to the spring- which will also become the road to the upper part of the property.
- Constructed one of many greenhouses and planted some veggies.
All that in less than a month, on top of daily chores!
The next update will finally include my mom! Alex and my dad are on their way back with my mom today! By tonight our little Schmatberg farm with have its Matriarch!
😘
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