Do your chickens love you? Do they show it? Well even though its not valentines day look at this egg. It was layed by one of our hens. It is so AWESOME!!! Sure is nice to know they think we are doing a good job.
Heart shape on egg.
Couldnt see paying for one of those high dollar tractor canopy when we can just build one ourselves. O yea and the wife wanted something to hold her cell phone while she was on the tractor.We also installed brackets for future lights on each corner of the canopy. We figure it cost us less than a $150 to build this canopy. Thats better than a $450 and ours even has brackets in it for when we add lights later. We also put a piece of fiber board / asphalt sheathing that makes it bout 10 degrees cooler under it.
Before. We was always baking in the sun.
Some of it tacked and welded together. It is C-clamped here to the ROPS.
Got it welded together and slinging some paint on it.
We bought a pretty red piece of aluminium to match the Mahindra red.
She wanted some where to hang her cell phone while she was on the tractor. You can also see one of the brackets on the front for a future light to be mounted there.
Here it is complete with the cell phone hanger in use. Here you can see where we cut the half inch fiber / asphalt sheathing to go under the aluminium to keep us cool. Also notice the brackets in each corner for hanging lights later.
Here comes most of the herd. Some slow pokes didnt make the video. We enjoy watching the cows as much as the rest of the animals we have here on the farm. Our herd is grass fed and gets left over produce just like the rest of the animals. We try to make sure all of our animals live a peaceful life. Our herd is a mix of hereford, brahman, brindle or tiger stripe, pinch of longhorn (we are in TEXAS you gotta have at least a pinch of longhorn), jersey, holstein, but most of all black brangus and black angus.
First you must decide Bush or Pole beans.
Bush beans are easy, but you must be down low bent over or seated to pick your beans. Bush beans require more land as they only grow a foot or two tall. Not such a good thing for a small homesteader where space is an issue.
Pole beans are great, but do require more work in the beginning because you must build some sort of trellis for them to climb. Pole beans require less area to grow. This is perfect for the small homesteader. They will vine five to eight feet tall. Your garden will be more vertical this way and require less space for such wonderful vegetables. Also pole beans will make a nice screened fence look if needed. You can plant different color beans together for an interesting look.
This is probably the easiest trellis that can be built and you will never have to rebuild it. The only trellis better than this and by far probably the cheapest is a corn stalk, but that is a story for another day.
The cattle panel trellis is our favorite. You can plant 4 rows and have them trellis up the inside and outside. You can reach over, under, between, etc. when harvesting pole beans this way. Also gives your garden a beautiful green arch.
I read somewhere that if you plant your seeds four inches apart and one twenty foot row you would have enough for a family of four during the growing season. Building the arch trellis this way while planting on the inside and outside only requires fifty inches in two rows. This now comes out to two hundred inches of planting area which is over sixteen feet. We now have almost the twenty feet required for a family of four by only using fifty inches in two rows in the garden.
We wanted to make sure we had enough for sharing and to store rather it be canning or freezing so we planted four rows forty feet long. This required more trellises. To cut down on cost we used some biodegradable garden twine between each arch.
Tips
Below is a link to the biodegradable string we used between the cattle panel arch trellises.
There is a quick video at the bottom of the pictures.
Here is a side shot. You can see some of the biodegradable twine between the arches.
We have or supposed to have the kids helping the green beans vine up the cattle panel arch trellises, but we have one working and one modeling.
Mom rings the dinner bell and yells foods ready and the help gone in a flash.
We went out to turn our compost pile, but checked it with the compost thermometer and its still hot enough we are gonna wait to turn it.
We will put a link below the video to the same compost thermometer we used in the video.
Garden is coming along pretty good. Needs some weeding done. The storm we had late last night and early this morning included heavy rain and hail. The hail beat the plants a bit, but we are hoping for a quick recovery.
The diy eBook on the Ultimate Cattle Panel Greenhouse and material list can be found here. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UF3EUTY
Mutz Farm .com
http://www.mutzfarm.com
Farm and Garden supplies
http://mutzfarm.com/farm-supplies-2
Ultimate Cattle Panel Greenhouse video playlist
We got tired of buying chickens and not knowing what we was getting. Then we started mail ordering to make sure we got full bred chickens and that got expensive (we still order some). Finally we decided to buy an incubator. This unit holds 41 eggs. We figure if we get lucky and have a 100% hatch rate it will take only one round of eggs hatched to pay for the unit. Not a bad investment.
This unit has a fan and an automatic egg turner. Well worth the investment.
You can find the Incubator we use by Clicking Here.
Our 2015 Spring Garden. This year we have corn, green beans, potatoes, butternut squash, tomatoes, peppers, watermelon, etc. Hoping all goes well.
Some of the seeds we are growing can e found here.
http://astore.amazon.com/mutzfarm-20?_encoding=UTF8&node=39
Just finished tilling the garden.
Got the rows in.
Watermelon Sprouting.
Cucumbers Sprouting.
Corn on the rise.
We added the cardboard from the produce we haul in for the animals and have decided to put some in the empty rows where we expect the watermelon to crawl. The cardboard will break down
Our compost pile consist of hay and produce we feed to the cows plus their manure, cardboard boxes the produce come in and the chicken dropping from when they stir it all up. This was pushed up into a pile 2 days before the video and with almost 4 inches of rain and about 62 degrees its a steaming active pile of wonderful goodness. This is gonna be great stuff. Below you can see some pictures of our compost pile and a video describing our compost pile.
Here is where we fed the cows all winter.
Boxes from the produce we haul for the animals.
Also got wood chips from the county to mix into the compost.
This is the wood chips, boxes, manure, and hay being pushed up.
These two pictures will give you a size comparison of our compost pile versus the tractor and cows.
This video has a bit of a description of our compost pile.
