INTRODUCTION
Barlow Roots Newsletter - 11/26/2025

Hello and Happy Thanksgiving! It has been a busy, busy fall! We have a lot of catching up to do, I likely won’t do it all in one email. 🙂 I will say the fall has been extremely productive and with the extended nice weather we got lots of projects done. With the projects on my list, the nice weather and a busy season at my desk job, every free moment was full, leaving this little newsletter to be idle. The transition has now begun, rain is falling now, it will change over to snow overnight tonight and I will suddenly have back a fair bit of time. I will add I am so thankful for this long fall of beautiful weather. Even last night as it stayed mild and warm I took extra time to enjoy it knowing that winter is coming! We will share a few updates in this post and try to use a couple of posts to catch up on some of the bigger happenings here!

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Enjoy this weeks newsletter!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Busy and Productive in September!

The homestead has remained quite busy during this busy season! I am going to go back to September to update you on a few happenings that we missed during my quiet period. September was pretty crazy, dare I say it is our busiest month of the year? We continued full throttle in the garden, added in homeschooling and our homeschool coop, added in piano, violin, guitar lessons, added in a high school cross country runner and two younger cross country runners, continued fall ball for lacrosse, continued a lot of food preservation and did some fall harvesting for things like apples and berries. It was pretty wild!

Touching on some of the homesteading highlights, we processed a lot of tomatoes! September is the time when our tomato sales dip just slightly but the plants are loving life and still producing a ton! We turn a bunch of them into soup that we sell while also producing a bunch for ourselves. Stuff like salsa, tomato sauce, pizza sauce, enchilada sauce, tomato soup, ketchup and more. Most of this gets canned up and then put up for the rest of the year.

The pigs had a healthy last month or so and we got them to the butcher in September. We did so in two batches a week apart. So 2 at a time. It went REALLY well this year. Our system just worked and it was a huge relief. We did a video on the process this year: https://youtu.be/EdeS05sPCOY. The pigs were big, just a little too big for my liking. We got caught a bit this year as the pigs were born early and our butcher is a local college, so we can’t butcher till they start school. So due to that we got pushed back a bit into September. Hopefully this next year we are able to time that a little better and save on some feed costs. The pork has been amazing and I am super happy with it!

Apple harvest was down a little bit this year. We had two of our largest trees not produce at all. The apples we did pick we did sauce, cider, and dried apples. For the cider we got together with another couple of families and pressed together. I think we ended up with 16 gallons or so. Ingrid then canned ours in the pressure canner which effectively turns it in to apple juice. We used to freeze it but our freeze space is at a premium so canning works pretty good. We love apple sauce as well and have a good supply stocked up. Generally our apples were pretty ugly again this year. I would like to get on a more successful system for organic pest management, but need to do some research on how exactly to make that happen.

We also squeezed in our meat chicken processing towards the end of the month. We rushed the birds a bit this year and I think still ended up with a nice final product. Our larger birds were 5-6 lbs while we had some 3 pounders mixed in. Most birds were around 4 lbs which is great for us. Processing was pretty painless. I did find through processing this year that I need to replace a ton of the fingers on my plucker before we do it again. They are breaking down and not working quite right. Chickens are rested for a day or two in our walk-in cooler and then added to the freezer.

So those are some good updates from September from the homestead. It was a full month! It is also one of my favorite months!

MARKET GARDENING
Shutting Down the Farm Stand and Garden

What a late season! The garden continued to produce in abundance throughout September and October. For the first time we kept the stand upon through October, with the first of November being our final day open for the season. It honestly was a bit of a push through October. Ingrid being the main force for harvesting was worn out, which is totally understandable. She was thankful to see the end of the harvest season. Business definitely slows in September and October. We still have a steady stream of customers but not like what we saw in August. The slowing of customers fits somewhat with our own physical slowing and a general transition of the garden as well.

From a business perspective we were able to surpass sales from last year during the last week of October. Financial growth every year is certainly a goal for us, so it was nice to reach that. The biggest difference in 2024 vs 2025 is that in 2024 due to warm weather in the spring we had veggies to sell in mid April, in 2025 it was several days in to May before we could start selling. Because of that we were playing catch up all year long and finally surpassed 2024 in late October. As of this moment as it looks like winter is finally going to set in, we have an abundance of food still growing in our new high tunnel. We’ve been picking and eating and sharing as much as we can.

It will be fun to plan for 2026 this winter. Our new high tunnel is a game changer, that truly extends our seasons. It gives us way more flexibility as well. My hopes would be to use that tunnel to have veggies by mid April. The goal certainly isn’t to grow year round but with our mission being to feed people good, local food it feels like we should use any opportunity we have to extend our season.

To close down the garden we started with our most important beds, what we call our salad beds but really it is just our most central, uncovered beds where we grow most of our staple crops. We covered each bed with a layer of compost an inch or two thick.

We use the skid steer to load wheel barrows and dump it on the beds before raking it out.

Once all the beds are composted we cover the whole thing with a black tarp.

Sandbags hold down the tarps for us. I then use the skid steer to add a healthy pile of compost on the end of each high tunnel. Over the winter or in the spring as time allows we are able to distribute that compost onto our beds. The goal is getting a lot of the heavy work done now in the fall while the ground is somewhat dry. The spring can be very wet and moving compost with the skid steer can be a huge mess. The high tunnels keep the piles dry and make things pretty easy for us in the spring. For the tarped beds, we are able to simply pull back the tarps and plant right away in the spring, which works awesome.

Fall was a great time for projects in the garden and I can’t wait to tell you all about them the next time I write. We’ve got 3 good projects to share, that were major game changers for us.

CLOSING
The BEST Trip!

Early October found us on an amazing trip to Riondel, BC. We stayed with some new friends at their camp, The Harbour (https://www.theharbour.net/). We traveled with a group from Ingrid’s parent’s and brother’s church. It was a great group! The Harbour does a number of wonderful things but most notably they do discipleship training for young people during a two month intensive session in the summer. The plan for us was to get a taste of that program over a week. As a bonus, the owners of the camp have 3 kids similar in ages to our kids. They had an amazing time!

We learned a lot, got to spend some quiet time with God and our families, ate amazing food, swam in hot springs, explored and hiked, and got to take in the scenery in one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. What a gift!

Thank you as always for reading and for following along on this journey. As always I would love to hear from you. If you have questions or suggestions just reply to this email and I will be in touch.