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Homestead Update #2

Alright! Here we go, another Friday episode of the Homegrown Liberty Podcast, I’ve been working hard on some really cool things to reveal maybe in a month or two, but I wanted to tease you with a little hint that some cool things will be happening later this year! And if you’re a fan of the show, you definitely get the first shot at some really cool opportunities.

I originally had a different plan for today’s episode but something exciting happened just a couple days ago soI figured that I’d give you guys another glimpse into our lives with the next edition of our homestead update!

And I wanted you to know that since I’m making so much money doing this show, I’ve been able to afford some top notch voice acting to create some intros for each segment! Since I got so much positive feedback from the last episode on the great job I did introducing the segments that I decided, this time I’ll shell out the big bucks!

News

We got a little rain, I’m letting my garden get a little out of hand. I need to get some more plants stuck in the ground, the tomato supports put up ASAP, seed planted, and more mulch spread out there. The rain was real nice and one of those perfect soft slow rains that just soak in. We’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for the milk cow to drop her calf. It’s literally looked like her udder was going to explode if she bumped up against something for over a week now. We’ve been thinking “when is she going to drop her calf?” We’ve been anxiously awaiting that, hoping for a heifer, but we’ll just be happy with a healthy calf.

Well I guess most of this news is gonna get covered in the topic of the day, so let’s just go on to…   

Plant of the Week

On to the Plant of the Week! This week I want to talk about Mulberry! Specifically black mulberry Morus nigra, red mulberry Morus rubra, and white mulberry Morus alba. These are great fodder, edible for humans, both the fruit, the shoots and young leaves. You can eat the leaves as a cooked green and also use them to wrap things like rice and meat just like you use grape leaves. I’m super into mulberry this year if you haven’t noticed. I think they are going to be a HUGE component of what we are planting and growing here on our land. Here are a couple of the big uses you might be interested in.

Fuel wood – They are fast growing but also a hot burning dense wood, comparable to black locust grown in a coppice system. I know in some parts of the country you guys think of mulberry as a trash tree that’s a nuisance, especially the Paper Mulberry Broussonetia papyrifera. But you would be wrong! I think they are all great species, helpful in their own way. Let’s break down some of the individual species and talk about each just a little bit.

Black Mulberry – Morus nigra: Is known for it’s large, more rounded fruit that don’t readily release from the tree when ripe. The fruit is sweet and very dark and will stain everything purple. Bird droppings during mulberry season will all be purple from the fruit. The berries of all the Morus species are around 1% to 2% in protein which is pretty high for a berry. Shoots and young leaves are edible and it makes a great fodder tree.

Red Mulberry – Morus rubra: This is going to be the most common wild mulberry you are likely to come across in the forest. Red berries that ripen purple, generally oblong to sometimes quite long fruit. Similar in other regards to black mulberry. So if you don’t have any mulberry on your property, you may want to consider adding it for lots of great reasons!

White Mulberry – Morus alba: This species is similar to red mulberry with it’s berries. Contrary to popular thinking, the berries aren’t always white. They can range from purple, to red, to white. White mulberry is often confused with red mulberry and the two of them can cross pollinate to create hybrids like “Illinois Everbearing”. Again, much of the same characteristics apply to white mulberry as red, except it’s reported to produce better tasting leaves, and is more developed from a horticultural standpoint due to the silk trade.

All in all, one of the tree species I am most excited to be working with this year and in the years to come.

Interesting Things

That’s interesting things by the way. And I wanted to share something we’ve started doing in our household, and that is disconnecting our router. For real, I found myself becoming glued to my iphone doing work, checking emails, responding to people on social media and researching topics and educating myself. None of those things are bad in and of themselves, but both Catie and I were looking at our phones more than each other. So I made an unpopular decision. I unplugged the router first thing in the morning. We had no internet during breakfast, nobody could send us messages, we couldn’t look something up online, so the phones weren’t touched. Those digital walls dropped and it was so refreshing! So you may want to think about how much you use the internet and your personal digital device usage. You might want to try getting radical like we did and just unplugging the darn thing. Maybe that’s not a problem in your household, but you might be surprised how often you catch yourself looking at that device only to realize the internet is off. Think about when the power is out and you walk into a room knowing full well that the power is not working, you will sometimes automatically reach for the light switch to get some light and catch yourself wondering why the lights didn’t come on for just a fraction of a second. I found it to be the same way with the internet. Just a thought I figured I’d share with you guys.

Topic of the Day

Let’s get on to the topic of the day! I figured you guys might be a little interested in what’s been going on here on the homestead for the past month or so.

Momma Cow Had Her Calf!

I was beginning to think she’d never have that calf! Her udders got so big I was afraid she’d bump something and they’d pop! This is our first go at a milk cow so I’m sure I’ll be messing up a lot in the learning process, but the cool thing is you guys can come along with me and learn though my mistakes. Speaking of getting injured, I noticed she has a couple scratches on her udder so as soon as I’m done here at the computer I’ll be going out there to take care of her, clean those wounds and apply some comfrey salve to help heal that as soon as possible. Her calf is doing great, sadly she gave us a bull calf. Not what I was hoping for, but it’ll mean more beef in a year and a half. So maybe it’s for the best. We’ll see how she does this year with milking. She’s super sweet and very patient, so hopefully she does well and produces a lot of milk for us. We’re hoping for 2 or 3 gallons of milk a day. If we can get that kind of production, then we should be doing great at meeting all our dairy needs. We would be able to have all the fresh milk we needed, cultured buttermilk for cornbread and biscuits, yogurt, cream for our coffee (this is the most important thing), sour cream to go on tons of things Catie cooks… The list goes on and on! We can even make some cheese and we plan on making a lot of mozarella and a little bit of cheddar to age in the fridge. Really looking forward to that for sure! Man! Exciting stuff when your animals have babies and that new life is happening all over the farm!

Thousands of New Plants

I planted literally thousands of new plants. My brother Logan helped me out tremendously by filling tons of pots with some potting mix, Titus my (now) 5 year old even helped him. Logan said that Titus was filling the pots as quickly as he could get them separated, set up, and taken away. Called him a pot filling machine! It’s great when your kids get old enough to be a big help! I love it!

As for what I got started. We planted lots of apples from seed for selection trials. Antonovka, Borowinka, Red Fugi, and Common apple were mostly what I planted this go round. So if you have apple seeds you want to send me or any other kind of cool seed you want to share that I can to add to my trials, you can sign up to send seed for our plant breeding efforts on the webpage I love getting seed from listeners and other plant geeks out there. I hope to set up some kind of seed swap or traveling seed bank this winter. I think that would be a really cool thing to be able to ship the box full of seed all around, with each person taking a little, and adding as much as they took so everyone can share what they have. Talk about a fun thing to get in the mai! Anyways, back to what all I got planted. We also started some Echinacea purpurea, which is my preferred medicinal echinacea. Lots and lots of hops. Those are not supposed to do well down here in the heat and humidity, so I’ll be planting them out all over the place to see which ones survive. Those will be allowed to set seed, I’ll harvest that seed, kill off the old plants, sow all the new ones, and repeat the process till I have a handful of hop cultivars that do well down here in the south. Talk about something that hasn’t been done before. Nobody really grows hops well down in the deep south. I intend to make that a thing of the past!

Oh yeah! I also planted a lot of the nemaguard rootstock for peaches. So I’ll have tons of rootstock to graft peaches onto hopefully next year, depending on how fast these little guys grow this year. It might take an extra year before I have the right sized rootstock, but that will be perfect timing for planting my tree areas either way. I love peaches so that’s definitely something I’m happy about having growing on the property.

And the elderberry, Sambucus nigra is growing well, that is going to get planted in the ground soon also. My common elderberry is doing well, lots of new growth that I’ll be trimming off for rooting soon.

Catie is going to be helping me get my mist bed set back up. I gave away my last setup to someone in need so I have to re-do my whole mist system almost from scratch but it’s not a big deal. I need to get that done this weekend because tons of things need to get cut and stuck under mist in the next couple weeks. Man, this spring is super busy lemme tell ya.

Disappearing Ducks

One or two of the Muscovy hens have disappeared. I hope it’s not due to the huge owl I’ve seen skulking around the pine trees, I’m hoping it’s because they have a secret nest somewhere and are setting on eggs. Regardless, we are going to be penning the ducks up for a week or so to gather Muscovy eggs for the incubator, as well as gathering eggs from my current hens for hatching. I’ve been working on these hens for several years now, grabbing good breeds, integrating them in the flock, hatching a batch, keeping the best roosters, letting those new roosters take over the flock, then doing it all over again. I figure it will take a few more years before I can start selecting for specific traits, but so far I’ve been getting really good layers that are very mindful of predators, that love to range out and forage. So right now I have a great flock of layers that seem to be perfectly suited to the homestead kind of management style. So what Catie and I’ve decided we’re going to do this year is hatch about 60 eggs at a time. Counting on about 50 hatching, that gets us around 25 hens and 25 roosters. We will brood them outdoors, and tractor them all in the same large pen inside the garden fenced area that’s protected from coons and possums and anything larger of course. After about 12 to 18 weeks we will be able to harvest all but the best looking couple roosters for meat. The hens will go into laying rotation, and we’ll do it again. We should end up with 3 batches this summer and that means hopefully around 75 birds in the freezer and 75 pullets. Since we don’t need that many pullets we’ll put them up for sale and those birds go quick around here at $20 apiece! So 50 pullets at $20 apiece is a thousand bucks. That’ll pay for all our birds for a whole year. I think that’s a good plan!

Mulch Galore!

The other day Titus and I were on our way to the feed store to get food for animals and to the grocery store for our food when I see some guys pulling up to a pile of freshly cut limbs in a chipper truck towing a wood chipper. So naturally I hit the emergency brake and pulled a smoking 180 degree turn. No I’m kidding, but I did turn around immediately to go ask those guys if they would bring me wood chips, and they did! They brought me two truck loads! And it’s awsome! The boys have been playing on it almost every day, sliding and jumping off it. They think it’s the best toy ever. I’m just letting it cool off a little before we use it to cover areas we need mulched. So don’t forget to let your power company know that you want any wood chips their contractors cut up in your area. They’re normally happy to dump their wood chips on your property because it often means a shorter drive than heading to the closest dump, so it saves them money and time, and you get wood chips! Talk about win/win!

So yeah, things are moving right along, lots happening, we’ve got new ducklings on the way hopefully, new chickens to start soon, thousands and thousands of new trees and other plants started and growing, and the biggest news of all, our milk cow finally had her calf. I think we might name him Ribeye. Let me know what you think we should name him 🙂

Thank you so much for listening!

You can reach me at nick@homegrownliberty.com, and you can sign up for my mailing list on the webpage if you want the inside track on when I’m going on the next consulting tour as well as event and appearance news.

Until next week

I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”