INTRODUCTION
Barlow Roots Newsletter - 7/24/2025

It is the time of year where the garden is SOOO busy that it is hard to even track what is happening day to day. We are harvesting everyday and putting food out in the farmstand as fast as it will grow. As we role through July we are coming up on our more difficult months to grow things like salad. So far so good this year, we’ve had rain at good times and the truth is it feels like we are just finally getting a handle on how to make it all work in the summer! Check out the rest of the post for a full update.

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Enjoy this weeks newsletter!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Busy Summer on the Homestead

Mid July is just a wild time of the year for us. It signals the halfway point of summer, which is a little sad, but is also just busy, busy with all that we have going on. On the homestead we’ve been keeping up feeding out the ducks, chickens, goats and pigs.

Pigs are getting bigger everyday. They will be leaving the homestead earlier this year than in past years because they were born earlier in the season. So we expect to keep them around into early September and then haul them to the butcher. They’ve been loving all the kitchen scraps we haul to them!

Goats are doing OK. We’ve had some issues with off tasting milk that Ingrid is trying to work through. It is either what they are eating or it could be a little case of mastitis. She treated them with a holistic option and we are hoping to get that cleared up soon. Soon we will do the castrating bands on all our little bucklings and we still have a couple of goats we hope to sell as well.

We had our yearly flock of meat chickens delivered last week. We are doing Freedom Rangers again this year and have about 30. The Freedom Rangers are red vs. white, they take a bit longer to grow out but also give more dark meat and a better final product in our opinion. They will hang in the brooder for about 3 weeks before we move them out to our chicken tractor. Right now the chicken tractor is full of our next batch of egg layers, so we will hopefully be able to move them into the big coop around the same time the meat birds are ready to move out. The meat chickens will be on the homestead for about 12 weeks. Of course this year our butcher date is right around a big fall trip we have planned, so we will have to either do it just before or just after. Ideally we’d like to do it before so our farm sitters don’t have to mess with them but we will see how big they get, I’ll be feeding them heavy hoping to hurry them along!

We celebrated Espen’s birthday last week! It was a fun and busy day which is just perfect for Espen. Lots of good friend time and activities. He likes to stay busy. 🙂 He got some fun lacrosse stuff for his birthday and has been enjoying his first season playing that sport.

MARKET GARDENING
Harvesting Everything! Garden Tour

I took a little time and did a quick walking tour of the garden the other day. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0YK6kHGUf0

It is the time of year where we are harvesting everything. When everyday is a harvest day it can be tough to squeeze in some of the other daily tasks like weeding, seeding, planting, trellising. So it just takes a lot of intentionality to get those extra tasks done. With the tomatoes as they ripen they do slow down in growth, so there is a little less trellising that needs to be done. Frankly, we also just let the tomatoes go a little wild as the summer wears on. It is a catch 22 because of course you want more tomatoes but if you let them go to wild too soon you end up with smaller fruit, and often fruit that isn’t quite as nice. It is also painful to harvest!

The schedule these days is that we do large harvests, with our hired help on Monday and Thursday. These are the days we really stock up and do big harvests of salad greens, turnips, kale, carrots, radishes, etc. These crops that need to be washed and bagged take a lot of work and set up, so it just makes sense to bundle it together. There are weeks where we get busy and then we may need to harvest a little more salad mix in between harvest days but the hope is to avoid that. Then everyday we are harvesting tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant. I would say everyday harvests are most important with zucchini and cherry tomatoes which just don’t wait. Everything else could probably be every other day but during peak season we are just going every day.

We are now just starting to get our fall crops started. This will be cabbages, broccoli, and eventually we will fill the tunnel with salad crops to try and stretch out our season. Ingrid is also starting onion seeds with hopes of planting some winter onions that we will harvest next spring.

CLOSING
Travel

We are looking forward to some good travel in the next couple of weeks. Travel is something that can be tough as a homesteader! Thankfully we have some great friends that can farm-sit for us. They are experienced at feeding all the animals and even milking the goats.

The farmstand is a bit of a more challenging story. It is tough to leave your business, especially during peak season! We could of course close up for a few days and there might be a time where do that, but this time of year we would not only lose money but lots of valuable food as well that wouldn’t be harvested or sold. We are going to be leaving the business in the hands of our friends who help us each week and I am certain everything will go great! We are of course a phone call away and ready to help them out. We will try to get away and breathe a little bit and get refreshed for the rest of the season!

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.