INTRODUCTION
Barlow Roots Newsletter - 3/18/2026

We have had a wonderful finish to the winter season and now with everyone else we are cheering on spring. We have had tastes of it for sure but a fresh foot of snow this past weekend has put a damper on things. It was minus 6 yesterday morning! The extended forecast looks good for melting snow and we will be thankful for the moisture in our soil. We are neck deep into early spring work on both the homestead and the farm. It is a fun time of year full of plans, expectations and excitement for what is next.

Check out this latest update from our homestead and garden! Thanks as always for reading.

To follow us elsewhere on the internet here are a few links!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BarlowRootsHomestead

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barlowrootshomestead

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/barlowroots/

Enjoy this weeks newsletter!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Spring Homestead Projects are Underway!

Spring is such a hopeful time on the homestead. Winter is (for the most part) behind us and we look forward to things greening up, temps warming up, snow melting and just generally being able to be outside without being bundled up. The first warm days of spring are some of my favorite. The mud I can do without, but it is all part of the process for spring to come.

We are still in a relatively quiet time period on the homestead. We are caring for our chickens, ducks and goats. Ingrid wrapped up milking our one doe, Opal, a couple of months ago as we let her body prepare for giving birth and feeding her new babies. We had Opal bred in the fall, we also have her daughter but choose not to have her bred as she is still pretty small and was a bit young. I am on the hunt for our batch of pigs that we will raise this year and have some good leads working.

Elsewhere on the homestead we started the arduous task of pruning our fruit trees. I can’t even tell you how many trees we have right now which is a good indication that I am in over my head. 🙂 I made a good dent on one of our pear trees and our largest apple before our latest round of snow and cold. As the snow melts I will get out there and finish up. Pruning is something where I always feel a little intimidated. We purchased a new book that we are really liking and learning from, it is called: Fruit Tree Pruning: The Science and Art of Cultivating Healthy Fruit Trees. There is a link there if you want to check it out. One of the things that I am interested in, is implementing some summer pruning. With the aggressive growth of our trees I do a lot of winter pruning which seems to create a cycle of wild growth and heavy pruning, summer pruning seems to have some hope of curbing that cycle.

We’ve also started our annual maple sap collection process! We had perfect sap weather while we were out of town earlier this month but I don’t think we missed much at all. We got our taps in March 8. I think we have about 20 taps in about 8 trees. I really should know those numbers for sure but there is a foot of snow outside and it is cold and I don’t want to go out and look. 🙂 We actually taped some new trees this year which was fun. We’ve collected 4 times and have 80-100 gallons of sap so far. We will see how collection goes this week, take a look at the forecast and decide if we are going to cook this weekend. I am thinking we will only cook one time this year. Though, honestly, I think I have said that before! The trick is timing it so that you get the most sap possible, while keeping the sap you have fresh, and picking a good day for cooking with nice weather and no rain. We actually shockingly have syrup left from last year, which has never happened! Homemade syrup, cooked over a wood fire is the absolutely best thing in the whole wide world. Thus the effort and time committed to this project!

My sauna project continues. As with most things of this nature it is going slower than I want. We have walls framed up in the shed, the walls and ceiling fully insulated, and electrical completed. The next two steps are pretty intimidating thus maybe (probably) the delay moving forward. I need to get my sauna stove pipe ran through the wall, also can I add, who knew stove pipe was so expensive! I think it must be lined with gold! After we get the stove pipe ran we have to do the vapor barrier. The vapor barrier is made of tin foil. Now imagine yourself in a small room attaching a giant piece of tin foil to the ceiling! This is going to be very interesting! I will keep you posted on progress!

MARKET GARDENING
Seeds are Started! And a New Tool

Ingrid broke ground this last week, not literal ground but she stirred up soil mix and got a bunch of seeds planted in trays. I believe she mentioned kale, bok choy and broccoli among other things. The seeds are cozy and warm in the germination chamber now. Once the seeds pop we get them under lights in my office. We were scheduled to get seeds in the ground in our high tunnel this past week but with the forecasted temperatures and snow we decided to wait. The clock is ticking now and we will work to get a few rows planted as soon as we can. In the meantime we’ve been spreading compost on our tunnel beds we will rake them out and then do a shallow till to help get the soil ready for planting.

Speaking of tilling! We took the leap and purchased a new machine for the garden. It is a BCS 2 wheel tractor. Officially for those of you in the know it is a BCS 850 with a 14 hp Briggs and Stratton engine, it is a new to us machine and is 25 to 30 years old. It came with a snow blower and a sweeper attachment and we just purchased a tiller for it as well. We have been able to test out both the blower and the sweeper and they work great! In fact this past weekend the blower out performed our current snowblower by a long shot! I was glad to get to test the attachments as we weren’t sure we would keep them. We purchased a roller attachment with the tiller that allows us to till very shallow! Like 1-2 inches. We work very hard to limit deep tillage. In fact we only really deep till when we are starting new beds. Prior to owning this machine we wouldn’t till at all on the surface and were just using hand tools. But as we’ve grown we’ve seen the need for a little mechanical help for prepping our beds. Bed prep is a huge part of what we do as most of our beds will have 2-3 crops in them each season. So the plan is for this machine to help us with that task, mix the top level of the soil, stir in compost and chop up some of the leftover plants from the previous planting. It should give us a nice solid base to get our next crop in.

The jury is still out a bit as we haven’t been able to put it to work yet! Currently the machine is in the garage with 1 foot of snow between it and the tunnel. We will get there soon enough. I have had to order some parts and make some fixes to the machine, that was expected when we purchased it. It feels like it is ready to go now!

Our garden plan is FULL and we are excited to start putting that plan to work. It should be a good year, fingers crossed for a quick and beautiful spring!

CLOSING
A Trip South for Some Rest and Sun

We escaped winter for a couple of weeks at the end of February into March. The stars aligned and Ingrid’s parents were vacationing in Florida with a little extra room in their rental for us, my parents are living in Florida these days and also opened their doors to us. So we spent a week with each set of grandparents and had a blast. We fished, went to the beach, went to Twins spring training, did warm walks and hikes, sat in the sun, relaxed, swam, played mini golf, ate really good, and generally felt so blessed to be with family.

Being gone 2 full weeks is more than we have vacationed in a long time! But it was so worth it and we had great farm help back home to make it possible for us. Life is busy for us year round so when we found a little window of time with not much going on we jumped at the chance to get away.

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.