This morning in Minnesota it was around -7°F with wind chill. I am so thankful we now live in North Carolina where we dip a few degrees below freezing at night, and the day temperatures will rise to the 40s. Winter is quiet on the farm but also the perfect time for us to do…
Autumnal Equinox (the real end of summer)
No pagan rituals around here but we do a lot of related activities like bonfires, taking nature walks, watching the sunset, and writing down blessings from the past year and lessons learned. I often feel that farming, gardening and raising koi are endless lessons. Last month I judged the Upper Midwest Koi Club’s annual koi…
5 years on the farm
We have been staying busy on 41 acres in the middle of nowhere since July 2020. Here are a few statistics related to living on the farm. I have high hopes for plenty of fresh fruit on the farm. To date, 46 fruit trees have been planted. 14 of these trees have been replanted since…
Five Weeks on the Farm
There’s always a lot of activity on the farm. Something that requires no effort on our part is the exterior painting of the house. We chose the traditional white color since that was the color farmers used back in the day. Whitewash was cheap, easy to make and had some antimicrobial properties. Colorful paint was…
Not enough weekends in a month
Since we both work, most of our farm projects are weekend activities. From Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, we try to squeeze in all sorts of necessary and unnecessary work. The beauty of living on a farm is that there are endless projects you can dream up. There are some necessary maintenance tasks we have…
Around the farm in 80 days
What have we done since our last blog entry on February 1? Lots of projects inside and outside…as well as the endless projects. So that’s around the farm in 80 days. We think that we should be getting ahead to have some loaf around time but that’s not happening. Good thing we like doing most…
Happy 2025 – we have been working, just not blogging
It does snow in North Carolina Early December 2024 we had a light dusting of snow. It’s kind of pretty and usually disappears in a few hours. My kind of snow event. January came in with the coolest winter weather temperatures we have experienced since moving to North Carolina. This snow lasted a few days….
Japanese Maples, Nishikigoi, and Chickens
Hobbies take up a lot of my time. I’m looking forward to retiring in about six years so I can devote all of my time to japanese maples, nishikigoi, vegetable gardening, and keeping the chickens away from the afore mentioned. This year we dove into japanese maples. We had about twenty assorted maple trees (large…
Hurricane Helene turns into an unexpected weekend on the farm
I should have been judging the South Carolina Koi & Goldfish Show this weekend in Greenville, South Carolina but Mother Nature had other plans. Hurricane Helene created quite a destructive path through Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The result has been widespread loss of power, flooding, and road closures. I’m sure it was so disappointing…
Autumn Fun
September has been a pretty good month for us. We’ve had a setback or two but overall we feel we are getting ahead. The biggest accomplishment was the completion of the koi pond. The pond builder was so happy to nail in the last piece of shou sugi ban siding. He has officially retired from…
A lot to do by September 13…
The pond builder and I are working hard to finish a number of projects around the farm before we host the Charlotte Koi Club meeting on the 14th. I hate to jinx the unfinished projects but I do believe the pond might be truly finished by then. Rodney the contractor has disappointed me a few…
Konishi Karashigoi
The pond builder has always liked the Konishi Karashigoi ever since he watched a Youtube video in 2015 or 2016 about this variety. The koi in the video were 40+ inches long. He would often comment “I just want to grow a little porpoise in the koi pond.” In the summer of 2016, we purchased…
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