Northland Alumni Site

Sometimes he likes to smell the flowers…..

Somtimes he likes to hang out in the shade of his tree….

And sometimes he just misses Becky….

One of the projects this Spring was planting an asparagus bed. We cleared an area and dug it out. Then laid out the asparagus “crowns” which are just a bunch of roots. We had about 50 of these. Then those got covered with some silty-soil from the creek, compost and cow manure. After a few days some very little and very thin asparagus heads started to come up. They look just like the asparagus that we eat, but they can’t be cut this year.         

After some of the crowns sprouted and came up a bit, the bed needs to be filled in more. We also set some posts and then put boards around the bed so it’s a more defined area and we could make it pretty deep. Here’s John digging one of the post-holes.   

Eventually when the bed is filled in, the asparagus has to be left alone. It turns into wispy fern-like stuff. We’ll leave it alone besides some weeding throughout the summer. In the fall the ferns will get cleared out, and the bed should be covered with leaves as we wait patiently for the spring. Next spring we’ll cut just a little bit, because the plants are still getting established and can’t handle a heavy harvest. But, by the third year we can take as much as we want. I know it will be worth the wait for fresh asparagus every day. Yum-Yum!

We are preparing the farm for the cow’s arrival this summer. The biggest part of this project is building a fence, since most of the remaining fence from when John’s grandpa had cows is no longer usable. All of the posts for the fence will come from our land. So the first step in this process is to cut down the trees.

Locust is the best tree for this because it doesn’t rot, ever. (Well, it does, but it takes decades, and our farm has lots of locust trees, and the guys enjoy searching all over for them) The next step is to cut the tree into 6ft lengths for the posts. I can cut up the tops of the trees to use as firewood this winter.

Some lenghts are small enough that they can be used as posts on thier own. Others are thicker and need to be split, by hand, which is a job for John. I’ve tried to swing the maul and axe, but it’s pretty worthless. So the first step is to use the maul to start to split one end.

After the initial split in the log, wedges are used to continue to split the log. Each one is pounded into the log using a sledge hammer. And the wedges are “leap-frogged” to the end of the long or until it splits in half. In these pictures John was using two plastic wedges, they aren’t as good as metal ones, but tend to be safer.

These two halves can also be split, but don’t need the wedges. They split pretty easily with the maul, and some help with an axe. I didn’t get pictures of this step. Here’s Farmer John with a finished post.

Did I mention he was splitting these in the rain and mud? Which, in my opinion, makes him a bad-ass farmer.

The Northland Brewhaha’s Official Website is up and running and we are proud to announce that we are starting a blog on gardening and anything else Northland related we can freaking think of!