The Tales of our Blueberry Farm

I started this blog with the intention of being a helpful resource for those who are just beginning farming. Just a warning when spring kicks in, the farm work revs up like crazy.

A couple of major updates on our farm:

1. We finally installed 8 foot deer busters fence and I am glad to say that my contractor husband and his crew did an excellent job. We also purchased a 10 foot and a 3 foot fence gate from Deerbusters.  

2. We planted all our flower & veggie plugs and fruit trees including peaches, apples, cherries, apricots & walnuts. Some of the fruit trees did not make it because I waited too long to plant them after I received them. I did contact Stark Bros and I let them know that the trees died because it took me so long to plant them and they were very gracious to provide me with a credit.  Most of our flowers have done well but we are having a bit of trouble with dahlias.  They are still very short and not really flowering for us. 

3. Weeds have also been a very big issue in our garden.  The second I turn around, all the pathways are full of untamable weeds. I decided to add landscape fabric to the all of the garden pathways. Adding landscape fabric to rows that are 300 feet long is a very time-consuming task. We are almost complete with this project with one row left. 

4. We've also worked quite a bit on our irrigation system. We added drip tapes to all of our garden beds and that as well was a very time-consuming task. Next month we are going to update our irrigation system to an automatic Wi-Fi unit as currently it is only functioning when we manually turn it on. One cool feature on our irrigation system is that it has a fertilizer injector pump.  I plan to utilize that to feed our flowers next summer with tea compost and fish emulsion. 

5. I’d like to believe the bees are doing well. I did have a an experienced beekeeper take a look at my hives.  I asked him to mark my queen bees so that I can easily spot them when I inspect the hives. Yesterday for the 1st time I was able to collect a couple jars of honey from one frame! I was very excited to do so.  I did not use the manual extractor I purchased from Amazon but proceeded to old fashionably scrape the frame and strain it myself (given that it was just only one frame).  My goal for these bees?  Try to keep them alive! Usually new bee keepers have a hard time keeping their beehives alive within the first three years of receiving the bees. 

6. The chickens have started to lay eggs and our friends have also gifted us with 5 smaller chickens and a rooster.  Unfortunately we can no longer let our chickens free range as an animal attacked one of our chickens during broad daylight.  Our plan is to eventually move the chicken coop closer to the barn so that we can monitor them better when they are free ranging. We do feed them organic cracked corn and dried meal worms.

7. At the end of May we started to harvest blueberry foliage. In our first harvest with cut over 2,000 stems of blueberry foliage. It took over 12 hours to harvest. Now looking back at the end of the season, I learned that there will always be a process when first starting anything. Throughout the season, as I was harvesting blueberries, Erin from Floret Flowers kept on coming to mind.  She once mentioned how they streamline processes and are "always breaking records".  So I've tried to streamline our process and cut down on the labor.  Now, we don't clean branches too deeply (there is no need, really) and if we are shipping same day we process the bunches directly into the boxes we are shipping out.  

8. Earlier this week I did not have enough flowers.  There were too many daily deliveries coming in.  I had Ravinia Farmer's Market on Wednesday and a private one on one with a student scheduled.  While making a trip out to the farm I googled "U-pick flower farmers in Michigan" and found a great flower farmer, "Blue Star Bloom Flowers" who also led me to another flower farmer near my farm, "Fox Glove Cottage Flowers".   Both of these flower farmers are near Lake Michigan and I cannot explain to you how excited I was that I stumbled across their businesses.  Not only did they provide me with beautiful flowers but they were both very friendly and community oriented.  

9. Last but not least, the blueberries started to ripen earlier this year. Since they are coming in fast, we decided to invite our friends and family to pick free blueberries. But even with lots of berries being picked, there were still plenty left.  Our lovely neighbor, Billy, offered to harvest our berries with his harvester and he did do so but unfortunately the berries were so mushy that we couldn't do anything with them.  Eventually we came across hand harvesters.  The process is this: Let the harvesters know how many pounds of blueberries we would like and they begin to hand pick the berries into buckets. Once their bucket is full they place their berries in lugs and at the end of the day I weigh the amount of berries they've harvested.  The handpickers are paid per pound picked.  Once everything is weighed I place the berries in 5 pound boxes to take back home and sell the berries.  We also had another farmer interested in our blueberries.  I am sharing this story with you because I don't want it to seem that "everything is perfect".  Let's just say this farmer was not an honest person.  I can share that I saw God's hand of divine protection on us when God caused for rain to come in on the farm and stop this farmer from continued dishonesty. I was also forewarned in a dream God provided two weeks prior that someone is trying to steal from us.  We live and we learn and we trust in our almighty God. 

I'm often asked, "How do you do it all?"  The answer is very quite simple. I am not doing it all. For instance, although we are homeschooling two of our children, I have hired a teacher to come in and teach three days out of five.  I have two sitters that come in from time to time to watch our children.  My mom usually comes in on Wednesdays to watch the children as well. My sister-in-law is also the sweetest anyone could ever ask for and occasionally watches our children.  I have a wonderful friend who helps me clean my home from time to time. My aunt also cooks very delicious soups on occasion for our family. Most recently, we hired a lovely family to help us harvest the blueberries on the farm as well as clean the flower beds. The most important of all is my supportive husband. We are truly a team and he is a great dad and very involved.  From time to time he even provides me with one of his workers to get the heavier jobs done on the farm. 

I know this post is extremely long, but if you personally know me, or if you love reading you've reached the end, which is here.  We love you and thanks for reading!