INTRODUCTION
Barlow Roots Newsletter - 5/28/2025

We are officially on goat baby watch on the homestead. We have 3 goats we know are pregnant and 1 that we are a little less confident in. 🙂 Always a fun season waiting for babies. The weather has been pretty typical for spring, as in super unpredictable and varied. The garden is looking good, though summer crops are ready for it to warm up a bit. All our fruit trees had a great season of blooming and we have lots of little apples and pears developing. It is a busy season for us with some trips and adventures as well as the homestead, summer sports and our farm business. We feel so blessed to be living this life!

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Enjoy this weeks newsletter!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Goat Baby Season, Orchard Bloom

Based on the timing of when our goats were bred we should be seeing babies on the ground any day. None of the does are showing immanent signs but we will keep an eye on them. Goats most commonly give birth to 2 kids. When the kids are born we will let the babies have the early milk and then start milking them. We are pretty comfortable with 2-3 goats so we will likely be selling goats this summer as well. Goat milk is AMAZING and one of my favorite things. It is best enjoyed fresh as it starts to have a more goaty flavor a few days in.

The orchard had a great bloom cycle. Interestingly my 2 heaviest producers last year are talking a year off this year. No flowers and no fruit! That tells me that I need to be thinning my fruit more aggressively. A tree that produces too much fruit has a habit of switching to every other year. We would prefer to have fruit every year so we need to thin the fruit so it isn’t such a drain on resources for the tree. My timing wasn’t great but I did a spraying of kaolin clay for the trees. Due to windy and wet weather I was a little late in my spraying, but I was happy to make it happen eventually. We mix the clay powder with water and spray the trees, visually this makes the trees white. The nasty bugs don’t like the way the clay feels on their body and it deters them. This is an organic method of pest management. I consider myself still in the trial phase of learning if it will work long term!

Elsewhere on the homestead the pigs are doing great! They are almost ready to be moved to a new paddock area as they have worked paddock 1 pretty aggressively. My frustration with them right now is that they insist on creating their toilet in the hub where we feed and water them. I would really prefer they do that out in their paddocks. But haven’t found a good way to make this happen yet! Our homestead garden has been on the back burner this year. The weeds down there are thick so we will have some work to do. Ingrid has some potatoes coming up and we did buy 9 replacement apple trees that we planted. These were to replace trees that were destroyed by a deer last fall and to fill in some other gaps. Ingrid and her mom made rhubarb jam this last weekend. It turned out great and is one of our favorite things. They made enough to share with Ingrid’s brothers family as well.

MARKET GARDENING
Tunnel Has Arrived, Germination Struggles

The farmstand has been doing really well early this year. We have an abundance of product and our customers have been keeping us busy. Such a blessing! We are now in the part of the season where we just need to keep it going. Where we need to keep constantly looking forward to make sure we are planting the next round of vegetables. Irrigation is key to our success and I have everything now set up on timers so that we don’t have to worry about it so much. This should make a big difference for us in continued success.

Our new high tunnel arrived in a million pieces on Saturday. We have little piles all over the farm with hoops and ground posts and everything else. I am now on a mission to find a crew to build it for me. I have been in contact with the Amish and they are my best hope at this point. As you can imagine communication with them is difficult. 🙂 There are other options out there but they are few and far between. We will keep you posted!

We have had our fair share of germination struggles this year. Mostly it seems in our seed starts. Some stuff is doing really good and other items not so much. Then of course you go looking for who is to blame. Is it us? Is it the soil? Is it the seed? Is it the conditions? We are currently tracking that down. It has been most frustrating so far with our microgreens. We will get it figured out, but in the moment it is a challenge. Germination is so important to what we do, and poor germination leads to wasted time and lost profits.

Otherwise in the garden we are plugging along. My high tunnel tomatoes are starting to take off while the outdoor tomatoes are struggling. Just too cool at night for them to be happy. Other summer crops have also had a slow start, cucumbers, zucchini and eggplant. We need our overnight lows to hang more in the 50s and less in the 30s and 40s for them to be happy. All the spring stuff is very happy and thriving!

CLOSING
Wedding Fun!

We were blessed to share a special day with friends recently as they were married. What a gift! It was fun for our kids to see the traditional ceremony and all of the fun that makes weddings a joyful occasion. We ate good food and cake and the kids got to take a turn at some swing dancing, we enjoyed time with friends and seeing our friends on one of the happiest days of their life. The partnership of marriage is such a special part of our time on earth and something I feel so blessed to be a part of with Ingrid.

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.