INTRODUCTION
Barlow Roots Newsletter - 6/13/2025

Baby goats have arrived! All 4 of our does kidded last week. Baby goats are about as cute as baby things get and we are enjoying this season with them! Weather on the homestead has been a bit of a challenge, very similar to last June we have had a ton of rain with another inch and a half falling last night. It is nice to have a break from watering but of course it means the weeds are awful and we need to watch some of our summer crops as the sunless wet weather is a challenge for them. Hoping for some sun soon! Enjoy this weeks update from the homestead!

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Enjoy this weeks newsletter!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Baby Goats, Muddy Pigs, Bees and Fishing

Goat babies always bring joy to us at the farm! They are bouncy and loveable in their early stages and just fun to watch. We ended up with 6 babies. Our two older mothers gave birth to twins and our two young mothers gave birth to singles. The bummer is that we ended up with 5 boys and only 1 girl! We intend to keep the lone baby girl, and two of the mothers. The rest we hope to sell to good homes. Ingrid started milking a couple of days ago. Man that milk is good! So creamy and delicious. All the mamas took well to their babies and all is going well. We had the vet come out and do the disbudding for us. That is the removal of their horns, he gives them a little sedative and it goes pretty quick. We also had one baby with a turned in eye lid. Eventually he would have gone blind in that eye, so the vet ran a couple of stitches in the eye lids and assured us that all would be good!

The pigs are growing nicely! All are looking very similar in size which is great. They are ready to be moved to their next pen, as they have properly torn up the first pen they were in. With all the rain they have lots of mud as well. Moving them should be a pretty easy process and I am sure they will enjoy exploring and finding new stuff to munch on.

As part of a restoration project on the property we had a large hillside cleared of brush this past weekend. The operator did a fantastic job! This hillside was grown in with large ash trees that died. I did the removal of the trees but that left the stumps behind. Over the past two summer brush and nasty weeds have taken over. We have a small grant to restore this section of land into pollinator habitat. Now that we have a blank slate we will seed oats as a cover crop. The oats will help hold the soil in place and hopefully out compete some of the weeds. We will then mow the oats and when they die back we will seed in some good seed in October. Hopefully next spring we get a good flush of grasses and pollinator habitat. It is quite a process!

Espen has been working with his bees over the past few weeks. The bees seem happy in their new hives. He added honey supers so they have some room to keep growing and start storing honey. We are already thinking and planning ahead to give our bees a good chance of surviving this winter.

We’ve had some good time to enjoy summer over the past couple of weeks. Lots of friend time and cousin time for the kids and some good adventures too. We camped for a couple of days with a bunch of families at our local campground. The kids biked, fished, hiked and slept in their tents. It was a ton of fun! We’ve fished a few other times as well with friends and family and have plans to get on the water more this summer. Elias did a 5 day hike on the Superior Hiking Trail last week and had lots of stories to tell. He joined a group of 11 other boys and 3 leaders from a local church on the trip. Bergen will soon head to camp for a week and then Espen will head off on a Boundary Waters Trip with a local bible camp. I love the adventurous spirit of my kids!

MARKET GARDENING
Lots of Rain! Found a Tunnel Builder

I am feeling very blessed to have found a builder for our high tunnel. This newsletter actually played a part in the process! A local grower and friend (thank you Dan!) read that we were looking for a builder and reached out with a contact. The builder had space to fit us in and we should have our tunnel completed sometime in July. WOW! It was nice to have that building process taken from my plate with all the other stuff we have going on. It is going to be an excellent added resource for us on the farm.

The rain keeps coming and so do the weeds. So far I THINK we are keeping up but each day we find patches that need weed whipped or pulled. We had something very similar last June and our tomatoes got a little sickly as a result. The moist, sunless weather is just not good for them. Hopefully some days of sunshine are ahead of us, and I am working hard to keep them well ventilated and pruned.

We ordered a new tote of seed starting mix and hope that will make a difference for us on some of the germination struggles we have been having. Time will tell! In the meantime we continue to work to flush out the issue and make some other adjustments, like just planting extra seed to account for the poor germination.

We have some projects to complete that I hope to get to soon. Mainly getting the end walls finished on the tunnel we moved. I have the doors in place and just need to get some plastic up to cover the rest of the end wall. Not having that plastic up likely has affected the growth of some of the plants in the tunnel. Our summer loving crops love the heat!

Otherwise, things seem to be growing well. We have an abundance of greens right now which is good. We are selling a lot, but likely have room to sell more. Just need to decide if that means getting more people to the stand or finding some outside accounts like restaurants. The challenge with committing to a restaurant is then you need to produce! And we need to prove that we can keep this momentum going through the rest of the summer!

CLOSING
Toddler Fun

With three big kids (15, 13, 11) and now a 2 year old it has been fun to see the differences and similarities 😁. There really are a lot of similarities between toddlers and adolescent teens. We are blessed to mostly see the best of our different aged kids. Anikka is a doll and really sweet but of course she does have her 2 year old moments. Mostly we are just enjoying her sweet disposition, sense of humor and cute mannerisms. She is at the phase now where even her naughty behaviors are sometimes cute, so it has been good for the kids to see how to handle that as an older sibling and someday, a parent.

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.