Little Sprouts Pear Day is Here!

We would like to extend an invitation to you that we just sent to all our customers for a fun day picking pears from a local wild growth orchard. 

here is the invitation we sent to our customers:

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Hi

You are invited to join us for another Little Sprouts Work Event! The project this time will be fruit harvesting!

We have made arrangements with one of the local fruit companies to strip the fruit from an unused pear orchard. These pears are organic and "wild growth" since the orchard has not been worked in several years. There are good pears on the trees yet ready to pick, preserve, eat, whatever... and fallen pears on the ground great for animal feed. We will be doing both.. collecting fallen fruit from the ground as well as picking what can be reached on the trees without a ladder. NO LADDERS will be used nor allowed for safety reasons. 

You are welcome to come and work as much as you like, and take home your own set of pears at the end. You are welcome to make it a family event, bring the children, plan for a picnic lunch or dinner, and enjoy yourself!

Date:  Wednesday 9-18

Time:  630am till dark (around 8pm) you are welcome to work any hours between this, just let us know your preference. 

Bring: buckets for collecting and taking your own pears home, plenty of water (no running water at the farm) and food for meals. 

Wear: dress for cool morning and evening, hot day, and prepare for tall grass and burrs in places.

FYI: there is no restroom facilities on or nearby the farm. 

This is a great family friendly way to work on the farm, help us feed these animals, keep pour prices down, and just have a good time!

Please RSVP by email or phone by Tuesday evening if you plan on attending! 

Thanks!

Dave, Brenda and the Little Sprouts

541-826-4345

Blueberry planting time!

Spring is here, and with it, the need to get our new blueberry plants in something to grow a crop this year. Since we are planing on moving the farm within a year or two, we don't want to place them in the ground permanently just yet. So, working with a local nursery we decided to place the plants into the new things called "grow bags".

Grow bags are 35 gallon bags make of something like felt. The rough surface inside the bag encourages roots to stop lengthening when they hit the side of the bag and start bushing out instead. In contrast, plastic pots let the roots grow round and round in circles until it becomes root bound. These bags should give us a couple years of growing room before planting in the ground itself is a necessity.

So we started transplanting the big blueberry plants into the grow bags. We used a mixture of organic potting soil, organic pete moss, and as much of the original root ball as possible. What a challenge! By the end of the day, with only 5 plants potted, myself ad my young farm hand were both beat! These mature blueberry plants weight a ton, are challenging to work with, and just generally tired us out! It will be worth it though, when we have buckets of fresh ripe blueberries to pick this very first summer!

We placed the finished blueberry plants into the orchard, to line the fences. My plan is to keep the plants all within the orchard to make a nice "hedge" along the fence where they are save from the sheep and llama, but the turkeys can find shelter under their shade. We will need some sort of protection from the birds eating all our berries. The berries along the bottom will be a nice food source for the young turkeys, but wild birds will steal all the upper berries if we let them. Netting seems appropriate for that.

The first 5 blueberry plants in their semi-permanent home

The toms had to come check out the new additions!

Closeup of the blueberry inside the grow pot. Perhaps we should have gone with one size larger.

Blueberries Arrive Finally!

Today the blueberry bushes were delivered! Apparently there was quite the demand for mature blueberry bushes in the southern Oregon area, because several other people showed up at Little Sprouts to pick up their plants too. The bushes arrived on a rather large flatbed, which barely fit in our circle drive.  Here it is waiting to be unloaded with about 40 blueberry plants on the trailer.

Blueberry bushes waiting to be unloaded

We ordered 20 plants ourselves, and the other farmers that showed up all had a few each, so it took a while to unload the plants into the various trucks and trailers. What a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon! It was really wet and muddy after the last few days of rain...  the ground is very soft. and an inch off the driveway and its like being in quicksand. Times like these I am thankful for 4 wheel drive tractors!

Loading some plants into a trailer

And of course, my usual supervisor was on site making sure everything was done right. Most of his time was spent inspecting the water puddles.

Is this puddle compliant with OSHA?

Sure does make a nice splash!

So now we have 20 mature blueberry plants in hibernation resting comfortably by the front fence. They can sit there through the winter since they are dormant. Come March we will start planting them along the fence line to provide a nice privacy hedge and buckets and buckets of blueberries! There should be enough blueberries to harvest this coming summer to provide all we need for our family, and have plenty left over to sell. We are considering offering them as dried, jellied, jam, or baked into something yummy.

blueberries are on their way!

We have made arrangements for another new crop on the farm starting next year. Blueberries! We are putting in mature blueberry bushes so that they will fruit the very first year. If all goes well we will have Little Sprouts blueberries for sale throughout the summer.

The plants are set to arrive this Saturday, weather permitting.  They will be dormant and can sit all winter if need be until I get time to dig holes for them. The decision coming is where to put the plants, which are quite large apparently.  The blueberry plants are like very large bushes or small bushy trees.  We are considering using them as productive hedges for privacy and shade.

Fresh  bush ripened blueberry pies! Yum!

Raised beds for the orchard

Well, another mistake on my part. It was necessary to plant the orchard trees higher than the surrounding soil so that it could drain year round in the location we chose. I had assumed that the grass would grow across the mounds of dirt and compost quickly. Unfortunately it wasn't quick enough! The turkeys started digging around the tree roots and before long three trees were fallen to the ground. They had scraped the entire mound off and left the roots exposed.

So we took the weekend to rebuild the orchard. I found some damaged 2x12 cedar and got a great price. This made excellent boxes, 3x3 feet. four screws in each corner and it is sturdy as can be!

Once finished, it does look better than before, and the trees are more protected. Hope this lasts!

Daddy's helper holding the box in place

Who is that hiding behind the tree?

The team hard at work

How's it going Daddy?

Sometimes you need extra help to hold the box still

Don't fall in!

That's putting your whole body into it!

Finished product, great job Fam!

First fruits

Look closely and you will find 2 tiny apples at the top of one of our apple trees! We are so excited to see fruit growing only a couple months after planting these trees!

Worm Fence?

Ever hear of a Worm Fence? I hadn't until recently but apparently at one time this was the most popular american fence in existance. During the early settler days there were thousands to millions of miles of this type of fencing snaking across the country. The pros of this fence are: easy to build, no postholes necessary, and reasonably strong yet see through. The cons are: a large supply of material needed. It is basically just logs of any type stacked on each other and laid in a zig zag pattern across the area.

We needed this fence becasue of two reasons.

1. On the east side of the orchard the ground is very shallow. Hardpan is often only a couple of inches under the surface. That makes for a very difficult time installing TPosts! This fence seemed a natural fit since it requires no posts!
2. With a traditional TPosts and wire fence, the turkeys housed in the orchard area would have a difficult time getting to the open pasture. I have leanred from experience that adult turkeys can fly, but prefer not to cross woven wire fences unless necessary. We want the turkeys to have free range of the pasture so we wanted an easier way to let turkeys pass but block sheep.  This seemed ideal since the top of the fence is natrually a "perch" in their eyes.

First step was acquiring material at a reasonable price. Unlike early settlers I was not prepared to go into the forest to find, cut, and split 12 trees.  Call me lazy but I much preferred the lumber store. But this much normal lumber is costly! Fortunately we discovered one lumber yard with "seconds" of 4x6 pine posts that were inteded to be treated but didnt pass inspection. We swung a deal on 100 of these that was too good to pass up. As the forklift dropped the two full pallets of these on our flatbed I began to wonder... never had I seen the tires quite so flat! The owner did some quick calcualtions and happily stated "It should'nt be over 4500 lbs." Well, the bad news was my trailer is rated for only 2080 lbs cargo weight! It was a VERY slow ride home at 20mph :)

Building the fence was actually quite easy. Here's some pics:

Unloading the trailer to set the pieces

Cutting some end pieces

The Job Inspector Arrives - How am I doing?

Almost Done!

Checking for Strength

And here is the finished product. In the foreground you can see the woven wire fence that makes up the south end of the orchard.

Lessons learned while planting the orchard

Today we learned the valuable lesson of keeping things in order and sticking to the schedule.

We decided to hurry and get the trees in the ground today due to a light rainstorm predicted for the next few days. We had the extra hands to help this week during spring break, and everything seemed perfect for the effort.

Unfortunately we forgot one detail.... we had not yet put in place the pasture fence that isolates the horses from the orchard. Samson, being the curious horse that he is, decided to check out the activities. Apparently the lightly flowering trees looked just too tasty to ignore, and he started munching on the top of a small pear tree.

Fortunately Kim arrived home from work just at that moment so she was able to walk Samson and Callie to the barn and saved the trees. There they will stay until we get the pasture fence in place.

In the future, we really need to stick to the schedule to avoid surprises!

The orchard is in!

Yesterday we finally planted the orchard. Hopefully we will have a small amount of fruit this year, but it's unlikely. The trees we planted were bareroot and smaller, not over 5 feet.

We are hoping they stay put. The ground chosen is less than ideal as it is very shallow in some places. We tried many methods to break through the hardpan but finally gave up. Instead we mounded each tree with a mixture of topsoil and compost (both purchased from Biomass1). Some of the mounds are sitting on as little as a foot of pasture dirt over the hardpan.




The orchard contains 22 trees. We went for a combination of fruits instead of many of any one. The list includes:

Persimmons

Apples

Peaches

Plums

Pears

Pomegranits

Figs

Apricots

Necterines

Cherries

And 1 mystery tree that wasn't labeled!

All of our trees came from the friendly and helpful folks at Shooting Star Nursery.

The little hummer that could

Ok, so sometimes things happen unexpectedly to those of us that don't really know what we are doing, but it ends up very fun!

We took delivery of the topsoil and compost for the new orchard. It arrived in a dump truck with an extra trailer, one full load of topsoil and one of compost. To save a lot of tractor time moving this stuff into position, I asked the driver to pull through the gate into the pasture and dump next to the new orchard site. The ground there is high and seemed firm enough. I stress "seemed".

First came the topsoil, he backed into the pasture with the full load and the ground shifted a bit under the weight, but not enough to be concerning. After dumping though... he tried to pull out to get the compost.  As he pulled through the gate, the front wheels dug down deep into the dirt and stuck tight. Both axles were spinning trying to push forward, but no budging.

We considered our options, which were limited since there was no tow hook on the front of the truck. We decided that maybe we could pull it back into the pasture and take a faster run through the gate. To do this I grabbed a chain and  attached between the tow hooks of the hummer and the truck. I managed to pull him back into the pasture about a foot but the truck stuck again, sinking even deeper. We decided to try to dig a "ramp" behind the front wheels to let them ease back up with an abrupt edge, and discovered a huge rock underground stuck behind the tire. That's what had prevented this first attempt from working. Unfortunately removing the rock didn't help, as the tires had sunk too deep by then and we were afraid any more attempts to go backwards would cause the front axle to dig into the ground.

At this point the driver called the office to ask for the front tow hooks to be sent out.  That way we could pull it forward.  While waiting for it to arrive, we dug ramps in the front of the front tires and filled in with gravel, making a sort of  gravel road leading back to ground level. We also shoveled gravel under the rear tires to gain traction.

When the hooks arrived, we brought the hummer around to the front, attached the chain, and off we go!  The first try was disappointing, but repositioning and setting the hummer in low 4wd, plus locked rear differential, and just flooring it.... worked. The big truck actually pulled up and out of the hole.  I wish we had a video of this!

After the truck was out my 7 year old son climbed into the ruts. It was so deep that the ground level was above his waist!

To test fate a little more, we filled in the ruts with large river rocks and gravel, and actually succeeded in backing the trailer load of compost over the ruts to dump the compost right past the gate. The ground was so soft by then that it was heaving up several inches all around the truck. But it didn't get stuck! He was able to dump his second load and drive out with only a little slipping.

After it was over.. I asked the driver what the weight of that truck was. He replied 17,000 pounds EMPTY. I can't believe we succeeded in pulling it out of a nearly 3 foot rut with a lonely H2! It is very unfortunate we don't have pics or video of this experience.. it was certainly a fun afternoon and a challenging experience!