INTRODUCTION
Barlow Roots Newsletter - 4/16/2026

We’ve been riding the weather roller coaster lately. Just taunting us to try and put in our summer crops early. 🙂 We are currently in a nice hot streak, it certainly feels like summer! But we look in the forecast and see lows in the 20s this weekend! This is a good time of year to practice patience, we’ve gone too early in the past, we’ve lost hundreds of tomato plants, we’ve lived and learned and we will certainly have teaching moments again in the future. Its a busy time with 3 kids in full time sports, baby goats and pigs on the way, our garden business cranking up and of course the little 3 year old demanding time as well. With all that said it is a beautiful season and we are loving it!

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

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Enjoy this weeks newsletter!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Spring Clean Up, Homestead Garden and Orchard Updates

We’ve been making really good progress around the homestead this spring. It has been a lot of fun. The warm days keep us going through the coldy, rainy days that are just a part of living in Wisconsin in the spring. Lots of updates here for you.

We’ve made some major changes in our homestead garden. What was once a plan for a garden/orchard is now just a garden. We had a heck of a time keeping our trees alive down there. We started with 20 trees, replaced a bunch last year, and then lost a bunch more. We had issues with deer and rodents. So we pulled the 4 good trees we had left and are finding new homes for them. This week we reworked the garden and used our new BCS tiller to till the whole space up. We then added 20-30 skidsteer buckets of compost and then tilled it one more time. This will be the home for onions, potatoes and squash. We need to figure out weed and pest control down there! But here’s hoping all goes well.

Our orcharding experience originally started with tart cherry trees. My parent planted close to 30 trees. We are now down to 1 cherry tree. We ripped out 6 more this week. The trees got a fungal disease and there was basically nothing we could do. It was sad. We got many years of beautiful cherry harvests. Hopefully our 1 tree continues to produce. 🙂 In the space of a few of the cherry trees this week we dropped in 3 of the apples we saved from our homestead garden. I ripped out the cherry trees with the skid steer, which always makes a huge mess! The family gathered this morning to try and level things back out. Mixed success!

In the next few weeks we will welcome baby goats from Opal who is very pregnant and 4 new baby pigs. Hopefully we will get consistent good weather for their arrival! The pigs will probably spend a few weeks in the barn before we transition them outside.

We finished up our syrup cooking. We had high hopes of finishing in a day but it took 3. 🙂 Really just 2.5. We ended up with 130-150 gallons of sap and finished with 4.5 gallons of syrup. All went really well! Its great to have the shelves stocked again.

We’ve made a little more progress on the sauna. I did a couple coats of waterproofing on the floor. We will then laydown a heavy duty rubber floor over the top. Next step is laying tile down where the stove will go, finishing our foil vapor barrier. The ceiling is done, just need to do the walls. Then we will be on to the wall paneling.

MARKET GARDENING
Beds are Filling Up Another New Tool!

The garden is looking really good! We are filling up the high tunnels with lots of greens, radishes, turnips, peas, and carrots. We’ve also started planting the outdoor beds and we are seeing a lot of germination there. If the weather cooperates we may actually have something to sell for our planned opening day of May 1. We will see how it goes. We can only do the best we can on this front so if we have to push it back a few days we will.

We have decided to swap a few of our beds for perennial crops. Meaning crops we don’t have to plant every year. We are planning a bed of blackberries, a bed of asparagus and a bed of rhubarb. Ingrid got to work this week splitting some of our current rhubarb and adding it to the bed. These beds weren’t super productive for us so I think this is a really good plan.

Our indoor seedling racks are starting to overflow as well. We’ve got a ton of tomatoes getting close to going in the ground, beets, cucumbers, kale, and more. We had terrible pepper germination that we need to figure out, could be old seeds? We are keeping these seedlings happy, as they get closer to going in the ground we will bring them outside for a few hours to get them used to natural light.

Last month I mentioned our excitement over getting a new tool for the garden. A new BCS 850. Well……….. a few weeks after getting that machine ready, another one came up online and I bought that one too. It is a BCS 853 and is 20 years newer than the other one. It also came with a nice brush mower. The machine was barely used and is in perfect condition. I listed the other machine and have someone picking it up this weekend. Can I just say that we spent a long time justifying not needing a BCS over the years. I can safely say that this is one tool that completely lives up to the hype. It is super powerful and does a beautiful job. I am very pleased with the new machine!

In the farmstand we are working on a few new ideas… we hope to have some new products including loose leaf tea, tallow skin care products, and granola. We’ve also been working hard to expand our offerings by offering amazing products from other local farms. The food hub model is an idea that is growing and if we can be the hub that helps other farmers and makers sell their goods that is great for us. We can only grow so much in our little space but don’t want that to stop us from getting great products into the hands of our customers. I also upgraded our self checkout system. That is a work in progress but it will hopefully make for a more seamless experience for our customers.

CLOSING
Living in the Moment!

As a young dad I remember doing my very best to stay positive about the stage of life my kids were in. Yes, there were difficult season, some more difficult than others. But there was also so much to love in every stage of life. While I tried to stay positive, people would frequently let me know that the worst was yet to come. 🙂 Yes, 2 isn’t so bad, just wait till they are 3. And so on… It was a bit annoying and now that I am an older parent I try really hard not to give new parents that impression.

Each season, each age, each difficulty also comes with beautiful changes that you never see coming. Raising children is a REALLY wonderful thing. Watching little people grow up, try new things, learn lessons and figure life out is amazing. Now with a 16, 14, 11 and 3 year old we are again in the most amazing season. I work hard to savor the past and enjoy those memories but not dwell on them, and I also work hard not to worry about the future, because as the bible says the future will have it’s own worries. So we are working hard to live in the moment. Life is moving fast but it is so fun, and such a blessing!

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.