Our Sixth Year

This week marks the beginning of our sixth year here on the farm. Our fifth year saw less online business and less foot traffic. We added another four acres of land in January of 2024, doubling our acreage. We bought our first meat chickens and our first goats. We laid off unnecessary workers while others quit so we are now doing more of the hands on work. This is good because we are doing it the way we want it to be done. The negative is that it leaves us less time to come up with new ideas to grow the company.

Our Sixth Year - 7/29-8/4/2024

This is what our farm land looked like when we first found it in July of 2019, 4 acres of waist high weeds and 1 mesquite tree.

Monday, July 29, 2024

This rainbow is from yesterday evening but shows a part of our farm so I thought it would be good to start the page about our sixth year on the farm.

Good morning and welcome to the final day of our fifth year on the farm. It will be hot as usual for summer. We are not supposed to get any rain but it is overcast. I have a lot of orders to fill today as we have a five year anniversary sale going on. It ends tonight.

You save 50% on all seeds for the rest of the day, no discount code required. This is for in store and online at David's Garden Seeds®.

We had one set of customers today. The rest of the day I pulled and mailed orders, watered plants, and took care of animals, a typical day on the farm when you have a business.

Our Sixth Year

The outside of the Titanic Museum in Branson.

Norma at the wheel of the Titanic inside. She had a blast.

Before we look forward to our sixth year on David's Garden Seeds® Farm, let's look back at year five.

At the end of November, we drove to El Paso and picked up my little sister so she could come spend some time here on the farm. The three of us drove to Branson, MO and had a wonderful time. The highlight of the trip for Norma was spending two days on The Titanic, a realistic museum in Branson. Norma is a Titaniac and loved every second that she was there.

Here is a bit of the new property with a cow just behind the fenceline.

Here is a bit of the new property with a light brown cow just behind the fenceline.

The field behind my greenhouse is the new property.

Dark clouds over the new property from January. This is a 12 acre field but we only bought 4 acres at this time. Land is so expensive!

This is the year that we bought another four acres that adjoins the farm. We made this purchase in January of 2024. Now we have eight acres instead of four! We are hoping to get another four but with prices sky high during this administration, our sales have been down. People just don't have extra money to spend.

Here are Alice and Trixie. Alice is about to pop.

Alice popped and we have Norton. Isn't he so sweet?

We got our first Nigerian Dwarf goats on April 26, 2024. The next week, the pregnant one had her first kid, a boy. On June 10, we finally got the play yard built for them so they have lots of room to run and play in addition to their shelter. We still have a lot to learn about the goats.

The girls love moving in and out of the coop. They are now living their best life!

At the end of May, we finally built our 53 hens a lovely outdoor enclosure where they can find live worms and eat grass. They had a covered run to play in and they still hang out in there most of the day because of the shade. Summer is just too hot here to play in the sun.

In the spring of 2024, we learned a lot more about Agritourism and ordered a book about it written by a successful farmer of "Pick Your Own" farming up in McKinney, Texas. We learned that we are going about it all wrong which is why we have not had any success. I am currently reading the book and we are planning our fall pick your own garden now which we will soon plant. We will give it a try and see if the tips work. If not, then we will rethink it but I do believe that one of the first things we do in our sixth year on the farm is to plant our first successful "you pick" garden.

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Good morning and welcome to the first day of our sixth year on the farm. Five years ago today, we went to the title company and bought this farm with cash. The hard work had just begun back then and still continues today.

Well, our 50% sale is now finished and I have a lot of orders to fill and send out.

Matt called. The car threw a belt so he is stranded outside of Devine. He has called a tow truck. David will have to go out and unlock the place as it is already 7:47am and I am not dressed. I got up and did the dishes from last night. I didn't do them last night because yesterday's breakfast dishes were in the dishwasher. David made us a nice breakfast.

Matt eventually got here. I went out and took care of all of the animals and the watering up front. I also planted a few more plants.

Matt had to buy a new serpentine belt for my car and his car's air conditioner still has not been fixed. We have a mechanic coming out to see if he can fix both cars.

I am now in my third outfit of the day as the humidity is really bad. A customer showed up while I was watering so I waited on him.

Our Sixth Year

We grew these beautiful Black Nebula carrots and sliced them up. Aren't they gorgeous? They are the sweetest carrots I have ever tasted.

As mentioned above, at the beginning of our sixth year, we are planning a small you pick garden where guests will reserve a time, pay an admission fee, come to the farm, pick produce and then pay for it by the pound. No, it will not be cheaper than the grocery store. We cannot compete with the grocery store. They sell in volume and get produce cheaper because of it.

We are farming organically and paying a lot for everything we use. We do not come close to having the volume that a large grocery chain has to get cheap things. Everything we grow will be from our seeds. We will work by hand planting and taking care of everything and we deserve compensation.

What we are selling is a wonderful, unforgettable experience of you and your children coming out to the farm, picking healthy, organic produce together and having fun learning where produce comes from. Your children probably won't talk for years about the time you took them to buy fruit at HEB but they will remember and bring up the times that you drove out to the country and picked all sorts of vegetables and fruit by hand, took it home, washed it, cooked it, ate it, canned it, or made jam with it. They will want to do it again and again.

Some may even want to be adventurous and start a garden in the backyard. If that is the case, don't forget that we also sell seeds! We have over 1,000 heirloom varieties as well as some open-pollinated and hybrid seeds. All of them are Non-GMO.

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Today, David and I left the farm early and drove to Marble Falls, Texas to pick up some yard equipment and parts for it. That was a long drive with an aching back. Then we drove to Round Rock to learn about bees. We have to take a class first in August and then they will let us buy bee supplies and bees.

There were no customers in the store today. School starts next week so I think everyone is out buying school clothes and supplies.

We arrived home after 4pm and I was in pain. I started mailing out seed orders and stopped at 5pm from the pain. Hopefully, my back feels better.

I put a roast and veggies in the Instant Pot and we had a delicious meal but I was hurting a lot. I fell asleep on the couch and finally went to bed.

Our Sixth Year

One third (4 acres) of this field now belongs to us. We bought it on 1/23/24.

We are planning in our sixth year to do some things on the new property. We still do not own enough property to get an agricultural exemption. In our county, you must have ten acres that do not include your home or business buildings so we need to acquire at least another four acres.

David wants to get bees and build a larger pond in the back. To get bees, I want to build an herb and flower garden so the bees will stay right here and feed off of what we provide for them instead of going away to other farms or homesteads.

Well, it turns out that we will be attending a bee keeping class in August of our sixth year which is a prerequisite to purchasing bees. This is one of our sixth year goals that will be happening in weeks.

UPDATE ON BEES: We got our first two beehives on August 23, 2024.

Of course, we want to plan and plant a successful spring of 2025 pick your own produce garden as well. But that depends on how well our fall of 2024 pick your own produce garden goes. We have recently let go our outdoor help so we may not be able to do much in the way of fall agritourism after all.

UPDATE: Today is December 18, 2024. The weather has been strange. Right now, we have a lot of green tomatoes. They are ripening slowly but who knows when it will freeze? It did get down to 28° early one morning last week. We have sold a few tomatoes that we have picked. No one seems to want anything else we have grown and no one has come to pick anything and pay for it. Pick your own is big in Texas, but not here, at least not yet. Of course, it stayed hot for so long that we did not get to grow favorite veggies except for tomatoes.

Thursday, August 1, 2024

Good morning. Happy August! I slept fairly well and my back feels so much better today. That is good because our seed counter worker is not here today. She is off for a few days. Matt went to the auto supply store early this morning and was told that the car part won't be in until later today. They said yesterday that it would be in at 6am. I just hate that but it figures.

I need to finish getting ready and get out there to mail out seed orders.

I pretty much worked on orders all day long.

Our Sixth Year

Our Nigerian Dwarf goats are so cute!

We would like to start milking our new goats and using the milk to make butter and cream in our sixth year. I would also like to use some to make goat milk soap. Right now, the two females are still afraid of us. Where they lived, they were not handled much and are not used to people so there is no way that I can milk Alice, the mother goat, because she just won't let me. We just bought a Nigerian Dwarf goat milking stand so we are getting ready for it but she will not have it right now. We should have said no to these goats because they are not tame. It is disappointing.

Friday, August 2, 2024

This morning, David headed off to the vet with Trump for a three week checkup. His worms are all gone and his skin is all healed. He has gone from four pounds to 11 pounds in just 21 days. He is a happy, healthy, very bouncy puppy. Trump bounces around like a bunny rabbit instead of running like a puppy. He is so funny and so cute.

We had six customers in the store today which is unusual for this time of year. I spent the day mailing orders out until 3pm. We took Ethel to the vet for her shots and a nail trim. She has put on weight as she is now eating again. For a long time, she was losing weight and would not eat. The doctor said she is healthy for a 15 year old Corgi.

Our Sixth Year

The farmer would not tell us the breed of meat birds we bought. We tried two. They were not very meaty.

We are going to try raising some meat chickens in the fall of our sixth year. We are getting day old Cornish Crosses on September 4.. They are ready for freezer camp in just eight weeks and have a lot of meat. We bought two of the two month old meat chickens this past spring from a farmer and they never got big. We finally butchered them after two months. The meat tasted good but there wasn't much.

I ordered 15 day old babies and they will be shipped here so we can raise them and have some good meat in the freezer for our sixth year. I think we need a bigger freezer!

UPDATE: We raised the 16 chicks and butchered them at ten weeks. Some of them were still small at eight weeks. We have eaten some and they taste good but it takes a lot of time and right now, we need us working on our seed business. We probably won't be doing this again for a while.

Saturday, August 3, 2024

Good morning. Hopefully, the mechanic will come out and finish fixing my car today. It is already humid out and the high is supposed to reach 105° which is insane. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just a dry heat but there is plenty of humidity to go along with that.

I watered plants and mailed seed orders. We had zero customers today. Our mechanic friend fixed my car out in the horrible heat. He and his family left and I drove it around the property. It seems to be just fine!

I finally got in the pool and cleaned it out. Had a good swim. David bought a rotisserie and fixed rotisserie chicken for dinner. We watched The Man With The Golden Gun as Svengoolie showed a movie we've seen several times.

Our Sixth Year

We bought Texas rice from a rice mill we drove to and now we sell it. The only ingredient is rice, no preservatives or chemicals.

Recently, for our sixth year, we ordered new products to sell in our Farm Store, like two varieties of Texas rice, Texas pecan flavored coffees, pecan treats made in Texas, quality air fryers, good quality cups with lids to keep hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold, and ten inch cast iron frying pans that you will enjoy cooking with. The prices are all lower than Walmart's and Amazon's prices so come on by and pick up good gifts from us.

Sunday, August 4, 2024

Good Sunday morning. It doesn't get light now until almost 7am. School starts this coming Thursday here. It has already started in parts of Texas which is insane. It is way too hot to think about school now. When I was a kid in New York, school never started until the day after Labor Day so you truly got most of the summer off. Now it gets earlier and earlier. No family vacations or good old summer times, just buying school supplies and clothes and shoes. With today's prices, who can afford it?

I ate a half of a banana and went out to feed the fish and water the plants out front. It is already so hot and humid out there. I then went to the back and fed and watered the rabbits, chickens, and goats and I started feeling sick because my blood sugar was very low. David made some egg breakfast tacos. I feel better now.

We had chicken and rice for lunch and it was tasty. I gave the Trumpster a bath and he smells so much better. I took Ethel out to go potty this afternoon and got stung by a black bee who left its stinger in my leg. I pulled it out with tweezers but it really hurts.

Over the course of my life, I have been stung many times by bees and wasps. Those stings hurt a lot but usually after an hour or two, the pain and swelling go away. It is now almost midnight and my leg is still throbbing. The swelling is gone but it feels like my shin is on fire from a hard kick. It is something I have not experienced before.

Our Sixth Year

We have a variety of pecan treats and pecan coffees to enjoy, all made in Texas.

We have lots of plans for the future but it all depends on how our sixth year on the farm goes! We need to find a few really good employees to help us out. They are few and far between out here in the country. We have one and she has been with us about four years but everyone else was let go or quit. We need to be freed up to do other things besides weeding and mailing seeds out.

We are grateful for all of you who have ordered from us over the years and for all of you who have come to visit our farm and Farm Store. Please continue to come out and support our small, veteran owned, Texas business.

Our Sixth Year Continues

8/5/2024-8/11/2024 - Acheta Powder (Eating Crickets!)

8/12/2024-8/18/2024 - Sawdust In Our Food

8/19/2024-8/25/2024 - Artificial Colors

8/26/2024-9/1/2024 - Artificial Sweeteners

9/2/2024-9/8/2024 - Gross Things In Our Food

9/9/2024-9/15/2024 - Artificial Flavors In Our Food

9/16/2024-9/22/2024 - Agritourism

9/23/2024-9/29/2024 - Fall Planting In South Texas

9/30/2024-10/6/2024 - Vinegar Hacks

10/7/2024-10/13/2024 - Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil

10/14/2024-10/20/2024 - Texas Bluebonnets

10/21/2024-10/27/2024 - Pollinator Garden

10/28/2024-11/3/2024 - Gardening For Wellness

11/4/2024-11/10/2024 - Prepper Garden Seeds

11/11/2024-11/17/2024 - Grow Milkweed From Seed

11/18/2024-11/24/2024 - Square Foot Gardening

11/25/2024-12/1/2024 - Indoor Farming

12/2/2024-12/8/2024 - Farm Shut Downs

12/9/2024-12/15/2024 - Repel Flies

12/16/2024-12/22/2024 - Coffee Beans

12/23/2024-12/29/2024 - Texas Pecans

12/30/2024-1/5/2025 - Master Gardeners

1/6/2025-1/12/2025 - Attracting Bees

1/13/2025-1/19/2025 - Small Space Gardening

1/20/2025-1/26/2025 - A Week In The Life Of A Seed Company

1/27/2025-2/2/2025 - Garden Business Lessons

2/3/2025-2/9/2025 - Minimalist Gardening

2/10/2025-2/16/2025 - Chaos Gardening

2/17/2025-2/23/2025 - Benefits Of Gardening

2/24/2025-3/2/2025 - Hortifuturism

3/3/2025-3/9/2025 - Farmers Market

3/10/2025-3/16/2025 -

3/17/2025-3/23/2025 -

3/24/2025-3/30/2025 -

3/31/2025-4/6/2025 - Best Drought Tolerant Perennials

4/7/2025-4/13/2025 - Foodscaping

4/14/2025-4/20/2025 - Regenerative Landscaping

4/21/2025-4/27/2025

4/28/2025-5/4/2025

5/5/2025-5/11/2025

5/12/2025-5/18/2025

5/19/2025-5/25/2025

5/26/2025-6/1/2025

6/2/2025-6/8/2025

6/9/2025-6/15/2025

6/16/2025-6/22/2025

6/23/2025-6/29/2025

6/30/2025-7/6/2025

7/7/2025-7/13/2025

7/14/2025-7/20/2025

7/21/2025-7/27/2025

Our Farm Journal Year By Year

Year One of Life On The Farm

Year Two of Life On The Farm

Year Three of Life On The Farm

Year Four of Life On The Farm

Year Five of Life On The Farm

Return from Our Sixth Year to Year Five On The Farm

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