Chris and Sherry Hardie

B&B homesteaders

Opening up a bed and breakfast was the realization of a dream for us. Our long-term goal is to be self-sufficient (we're well on our way) and to be able to share the earth's bounties with our guests.

Sunday, May 30, 2010


The weather has been perfect for making hay.
If you have animals to keep year-round, you need to feed them in the winter. Hence the need for hay.
Chris and his Dad put up more than 800 bales so far, which is about 3/4ths of what we estimate we will need to feed the sheep when the pastures are dormant.
Hot weather that drives most people inside to air conditioning is perfect weather for drying hay. There always seems to be a direct correlation between the hottest days of the summer and the amount of hay that needs to be baled.
Sometimes when people complain about the heat, I (Chris) ask them if they've ever worked in a hay mow when it's 95 degrees outside. I usually get a strange glance and people quickly shift the topic of conversation.
Mow, which rhymes with cow, is the place in the barn where the hay is stored. When you're getting close to the top of a metal roof with very little air movement, 95 degrees outside seems refreshing.
In the old days - for me, that's early 1970s - baling hay used to require one person driving the tractor and one or two people riding on the hay wagon to stack the bales as they came out of the baler. We used iron hooks to grab the bales and stack them. Sherry also grew up on a farm and had to stack bales or pick up them in the fields before putting them in the barn.
I still have a scar on the top of my head from the day when the load shifted and my brother's bale hook found my skull instead of a bale. There is speculation the injury went far deeper, which explains why I became a journalist.
We became a more modern farm in the mid-1970s when we got a kick-baler, which fired the bales into the wagon. Most farmers today use big round balers, requiring heavy equipment to move around the bales.
On a good day we'd put up about 1,200 to 1,500 bales of hay. My cousins sometimes helped out.
In the old days between loads my brother, cousins and I would head to the milk house and consume copious amounts of water, sticking our heads under the faucet to cool off. We'd sprawl out on our makeshift furniture - bags of feed - and contemplate how many more loads we'd have to do that day and argue about whose turn it was to wash up the milking equipment or who had to stick around to help milk the cows while others went swimming in the creek.
Baling also is a chance to cleanse my pores and stack hay bales rather than pushing around paperwork. It also gives me a sense of satisfaction that although summer has officially not yet started, we're already on track to feed our animals this winter.


Saturday, May 22, 2010

Mowing and groaning


One of the challenges of having a country property is keeping the grass mown. That’s sometimes much easier said than done when the areas we mow have been reclaimed from patches of weeds or former pastures.
We have several acres of lawn, pasture and hiking trails that we mow. At first we did it all with a walk-behind mower until Chris broke down three years ago and purchased a riding mower. That made the job go much faster and also expanded our mowing area. But there are still plenty of places that the riding mower can’t go and you still need the smaller mowers for trimming.
This spring the mowing season started early because of the warm and wet weather that was perfect for grass growing. Unfortunately the mowers weren’t ready for the season. Over the years we have accumulated quite a collection of walk-behind mowers – some ours, some belong to Chris’s parents – and they have gradually broken down. Last year we had 1.5 of them running. The 0.5 comes from one of them sometimes starting and sometimes not.
We were down to a shaky 1 when the 0.5 did not start at all several weeks ago. The 1 started and we got most of the lawn mowed before it quit. Unfortunately the grass that was starting to get a foot long was still growing.
What about the riding mower, you might ask? Good question. The answer is long, but here’s the condensed version. Last year Chris ran over a small steel fence post with the riding mower. The post wrapped around the blade. A trip to the shed and the use of a cutting disc freed the post and miraculously, the mower still worked. Sort of.
This spring when it came time to sharpen the blades, Chris realized that the only thing holding one of the blades on was a bolt. The mandrel that the blade fits over was completely rounded off – the result of the fence post accident.
Chris purchased an extended warranty when he bought the mower, but of course the part that broke “was not covered.” The labor to fix it would be covered, but it would take three weeks before an appointment could be scheduled.
Watching grass grow might be more interesting than listening to Chris’s parts tale of woe, but it took nearly four weeks and five orders of parts before the mower was fixed. Of course if he had listened to Sherry and had a “professional” repair the mower in the first place, the repair probably would have been done earlier but that’s not how do-it-yourself hobby farmers operate.
Meanwhile, the grass was so long Chris had to use a pasture mower pulled behind a tractor to mow some of it.
The other five mowers were taken to the repair shop to be fixed. Our plan is to have lots of back-up mowers to get us through the mowing season. We’ve stimulated the parts economy plenty. It’s time to cut grass. Even if we have to get out the scythe!

Saturday, May 1, 2010

The war against quackgrass


We recently received some much-needed spring rainfall, so we decided to hit our fruit garden for some weeding. The moist soil makes the dreaded task of pulling weeds a lot easier. Sherry tackled our strawberry patch and Chris headed to the raspberry patch.

Actually, we have two raspberry patches. One is the established patch and the other is a new patch we started last year from some transplants. The second patch was started below our vegetable garden in what used to be cow pasture.

The problem is it "got away" from us last year and there was a thick mat of quackgrass growing between the rows. It was already a foot high.

Unfortunately, Chris did not do his research before deciding that some mechanical help was the way to take out the quackgrass. The University of Minnesota Extension in a pamphlet called "Controlling Quackgrass in Gardens" says, in bold print: "Never use a rototiller where quackgrass is growing." Why? Because it amounts to propagating thousands of new plants from the chopped-up rhizomes."

Rhizomes are what makes quackgrass such a nasty and invasive weed. Once a quackgrass plant goes to seed, it produces about 25 seeds which remain viable for up to five years in the soil, according to the UM extension.

Each plant then develops rhizomes with a node every inch or so. Each node is capable of producing a plant. And a plant is capable of producing 300 feet of rhizomes.

That is really scary. The only thing that multiplies faster than quackgrass is the promises of politicians during an election year. The unfortunate thing is you can count on quackgrass.

Our only options now are to use a herbicide, which would also take out the raspberries (and we strive to be chemical-free in our gardens), pull each plant up by hand and make sure we get each rhizome, heavily mulch (although rhizomes will push up through asphalt pavement they are so tough) or give up.

We're not ready to give up just yet. Perhaps there's some marketing opportunity here and we can find some value in selling quackgrass rhizomes. Perhaps we can offer any guests from Northern Africa some free rhizomes to take home to plant. There's lots of room to green things up in the Sahara Dessert, don't you think?
(University of Minnesota Extension photo)