Housman Farms: Farmwife's Journal-October 7th

Hi! I'm Mindy Housman, your long lost blogger. :) Blogging has had to get pushed to the bottom of the list lately, but the seasons are changing, which means there is less to do on the farm. Yippee! :)

The last Friday in September was our last "Friday on the Farm" for the season. We will still be open two Saturdays in October and two Saturdays in November for our chicken and turkey butchering days, so we are not quite done yet. But the garden is mostly bare, and the freezer and pantry are stocked.

Last week we finally picked the apples - enough for a whole 9x13 pan! Yep, one pan of apple crisp is all we got! Quite a difference from our harvest of over 1000 lbs. last year! Late spring the temperature dropped to 20 degrees. All the fruit bearing plants and trees suffered, and there was little to no fruit to harvest this year. But that's farming! Every year there is usually a crop or two that does exceptionally well, and then some that do really poor.

The good news is that a family just south of us a few miles (and obviously higher in elevation) had a great crop of apples...more than they needed, and they were giving them away. Now our lonely root cellar is stocked with apples, and we need to work on getting the humidity up and the temperature down in the cellar. It's a babysitting job. The cellar gets opened up at night, when the temperature drops below 50 and then gets closed again late morning. Apples like 80-90% humidity, so often times we will run a humidifier. The temperature is hovering around 50 degrees in there right now, but that is not cold enough. The ideal temperature is 35- 40. If we don't get it cooled down (like last year when we had a very mild winter), the produce won't last very long.

Now that our market season is over, we are going to be down-sizing the farm. If you are interested in a milk goat, give us a call. We will have three for sale.

Now that fall has officially arrived, we are looking forward to our puppy season. New to the farm last year, were two beautiful Great Pyrenees puppies. They are both over a year old now and will be having their own puppies some time late fall. :) There will be some changes coming to the blog, as we get ready to add more information and pictures about our dogs. Stay tuned! :)

The big news around here is that my wonderful husband is running for county commissioner! It has been a huge factor in making our busy season even busier! :) But we are all so very glad that he is running because he will make a fantastic commissioner. People have been asking my husband for years to run for different political offices, but he just didn't want to make that big of a commitment at that time - family comes first for him. Now our children are old enough to take part in it all, so when he was asked this time, he agreed to do it. Our family has been involved in politics for years, and our children have walked in tons of parades and participated in many lit drops, but this time they get to do it all for dad! They are so excited to help him out. They love wearing their "Vote for Housman" shirts around town, and they practically fight over who gets to go door knocking with him. :) Here are some pictures of them campaigning: