INTRODUCTION
Barlow Roots Newsletter - 8/14/2025

Hello from the homestead! A lot has happened since I last sent out an update. We’ve been blessed to sneak in some mid summer vacations and have continued to see the garden and the farmstand thrive. Lots of beautiful time with friends and our family as well. Being deep in the midst of harvest season the homestead just needs daily maintenance. No big projects, just day to day maintenance and handling issues as they arise. Check out the rest of the post for more details.

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Enjoy this weeks newsletter!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Busy Summer on the Homestead

What an awesome summer on the homestead! As I alluded to in the intro it hasn’t been an overly productive summer on the homestead. In the past we have had projects that just NEEDED to be done and so we made the time for them in the summer. This summer the projects on our list are a little less urgent. We of course think about those projects frequently but they just aren’t a top priority and we’ve had fun leaning into more activities with the kids as well. Hopefully this fall we will find some time to make a little progress. In that vein I will just throw out that finding someone local who builds sheds and small buildings onsite would be really helpful. 🙂 

The biggest and baddest piece of homestead news is that we had a pig die. He was one of our big ones and was just lying dead in the pasture this morning when I went out to feed. It is incredibly frustrating, financially taxing and heart wrenching all at the same time. I feel bad for the pig and of course we know very little about why or how he died but it is natural to believe we maybe could have done something. We are now short 1 pig to sell this fall and 2 of our customers won’t get pork. Thankfully, I haven’t sold anything yet as I always wait until late in the game just to be sure they will all make it to the butcher. After speaking with the vet he believes it was a heart attack, as pigs get big the heat and humidity can be hard on them physically. They have good water and mud but we will work to keep them cool over the next few weeks. The diagnosis was reassuring as I was nervous about some spreadable illness that my other pigs might get. Of course logistically we then had to dispose of a 275 lb animal. There is a guy that will pick them up but there is a cost to that, so we went ahead and buried the pig. Here is hoping we can get the other 4 pigs to the finish line.

Meat chickens are doing really well. They are now in their chicken tractor and we are moving that every couple of days. We are working to keep them fed and watered and I am trying to “rush” them as we would like to butcher before we leave for a vacation in October. Of course our vacation landed right on the ideal butcher week. They are growing nicely and staying alive which is great!

Goats are doing great and Ingrid has starting separate the goats from their babies to increase the milk we are getting. We are only doing that periodically as it is a lot of milk! We are getting the goats out several times per week to graze and free range, which they love. We are close to being ready to castrate our little bucklings and we still do have some goats for sale as well. Ingrid is ready to sell but we haven’t had time to create the ad on craigslist. Soon!

Despite the bad news from the pig pen the other 4 pigs seem to be doing well. We have them in their final pasture and there is lots of forage for them to work through. We are eyeballing early September to take them into the butcher. They were looking quite large so we did cut back their feed just a little bit.

We’ve done a little burning of brush and have a few more piles to go. Burning a pile is always a good feeling as it seems to clean things up nicely and quickly. If I had my way I would love to chip brush but big chippers are expensive and then we would have another machine to maintain. I’ve considered renting one as well which would work but is costly.

MARKET GARDENING
Playing Catch Up, Lots of Harvesting!

We continue to keep our nose to the grindstone as we work through the brunt of the harvest season. Tomatoes are definitely in full swing now and we are selling a couple hundred pounds per week. With that said I was surprised to see that we are quite behind where we were last year as far as tomato sales. That doesn’t have anything to do with our customers but more to do with my tomato supply. We are selling out of everything I put out everyday. I know our supply is down and I blame the fact that in the past we’ve grown additional rows of determinate tomatoes. I have just one row of determinates this year in our tunnel and that row has a mix of plants because we lost some seedlings in the spring. The plants look great and there are tons of tomatoes but just not that massive volume we usually get. It could also be that we are just behind, I know that we are behind where we were last year because tomatoes ripened later this year than last year. The trick is if our customers will still have a taste for tomatoes in September!

We have also hit a bit of a snag with our greens. We were doing very well but must have missed a couple of plantings and had a couple of beds with poor germination. So our salad mix has been a bit low as well. We are working hard now to play catch up. And I don’t think the impact has been too great for our customers, which is good!

We are in full swing planting fall crops now too and planning for our high tunnels that will take us into October and November. In positive news we have had great carrot harvests this year, our germination chamber on the cool setting (it is an old double door fridge) is helping us get great lettuce germination (we have it set at like 68 degrees), Ingrid has grown great broccoli and has been selling it and freezing it for our own use.

The farmstand itself is still running just a little behind last year on earning. Because of the cool spring we opened up about 2 weeks later than last year and we just haven’t been able to catch up. My hope is that we can have a strong October to make up for the late start. We will see! Always learning!

CLOSING
Travel Success!

WHAT A BLESSING! Our trips went really well and our farm sitters and farmstand workers did amazing. We enjoyed a wonderful trip to Gull Lake with our family for my parents 50th Anniversary. Lots of swimming and playing for the cousins and a little good relaxing for the parents, though we did plenty of playing as well. We are already booked to do it again next year.

After Gull Lake we were home for 1.5 days and did a little catch up on the homestead and at the farm before leaving again for Bayfield with Ingrid’s parents and some friends. We camped on a friends land, swam in the Lake Superior, shopped, hiked and had a great time together.

There were of course challenges along the way! Anikka is 2, big challenge! HA. And the farm was almost recognizable after 5 days away. I don’t know how that happens! The weeds went bonkers while we were gone! There was also a huge windstorm that knocked some big branches down. It was worth the effort and worth the work playing catch up as well.

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.