INTRODUCTION
Barlow Roots Newsletter - 4/3/2025

Don’t look now but we are supposedly a month away from opening our farmstand. Looking out at the garden I am skeptical. 🙂 We are for the most part on schedule with our plantings but we’ve had some loss due to the weather and we will just have to see how things far for us in the early part of the year. It is all weather dependent of course! Otherwise we are honestly working hard to soak up the last month of a quieter season before things really ramp up in May. We’ve got some projects planned for the warmer months this year so we’ve been thinking and planning on those as well.

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Enjoy this weeks newsletter!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Pruning Finished, One More Sap Cook, Saying Goodbye

With a few nice days I was able to finish up our pruning for the year. It is a big project that only get’s bigger each year as the trees grow! I pruned a little heavier this year than in the past so we will see how the trees respond. A little trial and error! The challenge of course is am a pretty uneducated trialer! 🙂 

We did a final sap collection and cook of the year last week. Some of the trees were still really pumping out sap but most of them had shut down for the year, and frankly we were ready to be done. That brings a good lesson, so often we are drawn to milking things to the last drop or getting the most out of every little thing. It just doesn’t always have to be that way. Sometimes it is OK to just shut it down and say enough is enough. On to the next thing! We cooked for a full day plus a little bit the next morning and ended up with another 3 gallons of syrup. That gives us a total of 6 gallons for the year, which we are pretty happy with! We purchased in a few gallons from some local syrup producers that will supplement our supply. Most of that syrup we are actually planning to bottle and sell at our farmstand. That should be fun and interesting!

Other than those items things have been pretty quiet on the homestead. It is far to wet to be doing any equipment work. We’ve had a couple of shots of really wet snow and some heavy rain, good news as we needed the moisture! It is looking like pigs will be coming earlier than usual this year. We may even pick them up this weekend. We will need to closely monitor the temps as pigs don’t do great with large temperature changes. We may start them in the barn for a couple of weeks before transitioning them outside. We will just have to see!

Last week we traveled off the homestead back to my families homeland of South Dakota. My Grandma passed away at the age of 89. She has been with us in Hudson for the past couple of years, but her lifelong home was in South Dakota. It was such a blessing to see family as we celebrated a great woman and laid her body to rest next to my Grandpa’s who passed away a couple years ago. My grandma is likely the one who influenced my love of farming the most. As a farm girl herself she worked hard to get us up to the old family farm whenever we visited. Those visits planted the seed for me at a young age of what it means to grow food, work with your hands, and feed the people you love. We feel so blessed to live this life now and have grandma to thank for introducing us to farming and teaching us about good work ethic along the way!

MARKET GARDENING
Crop Loss, Planting Continues!

Well… the temperatures haven’t done us any favors and we’ve lost some of the early crops we planted. We lost a whole bed of spinach. And we have a few other beds that are looking rough. We are working fill in the gaps with fresh seeds and filling in new plants. We are thinking all will be OK, but we need the weather to level off a little bit! While we were traveling last week we had to call a friend to open up our tunnel as it was going to be in the 70s, then just a couple days later it was snowing again with lows in the 20s. All in all it should be OK!

All our plants started indoors are looking good. We’ve got a ton of tomatoes growing really well under lights. Many of them are ready to graduate to a taller shelf as they work to outgrow their space. That is good news! The germination chamber is now full again with tomatoes that we will plant outdoors later in the year.

If the weather cooperates we should be planting greens and other veggies outside soon. For now we are filling up the tunnels as best we can. We need to pretty quickly get the outdoor crops going as the tunnel space needs to transition to tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini at a certain point. It is all a fine balancing act!

We’ve continue to push forward on getting our new high tunnel ordered. We sent the check this week and should have a timeline for delivery soon. In the meantime we are working hard to make a plan to move the current tunnel to it’s new location. As soon as the weather dries out we should be able to get to work on that project. It should be pretty straightforward but will take a few days work to get it done.

CLOSING
Pacifiers.

Our youngest daughter turned 2 recently. In our house that means we say goodbye to the pacifier. Some of you understand what this means. 🙂 Overall, the process went amazingly well. She had a couple rough nights of sleep but has since acclimated and is actually sleeping better without the pacifier. The magic of the pacifier of course is that it is such an effective tool for quieting a baby. That pacifier goes in and suddenly all is quiet and baby is happy! But all things must come to an end and now it is time to learn to self soothe without the pacifier! She has done great.

This transition got me thinking about the “pacifiers” many of us adults use. Maybe a few things come to mind for you… for me what came to mind are things like fast food or eating out, alcohol, television, or of course the most obvious our phones. When you relate our phone usage in this country to a baby and a pacifier you start to see a lot of similarities. What are the things that you are dependent on or use to pacify yourself?

I’ve been on a journey with my phone over the past couple of months. I hit a breaking point and basically went cold turkey on social media. LET ME TELL YOU, it was a gift. I promise you that you can break the habit and life on the other side is better. Just like with the baby sometimes we have to learn to self soothe. A couple of tough days or weeks and then we are on the other side wondering what we were thinking! Give it a try. Let me know what you learn.