How we got started

How our backyard farming experience began:

1. Garden/Canning

2. Chickens

3. Maple Syrup

          
We wanted to take the time to introduce ourselves and inform everyone on how our hobbies have come about since we started in 2011.

Nick and I have both attended California University of Pennsylvania. Nick graduated last May with a degree in Fisheries and Wildlife and is now working for Murray Energy. As for me, I am still finishing my degree in Art Education (K-12) which will be completed in May 2015.

Gardening

We started off small with a very bare minimum garden which consisted of basic things such as peppers, tomatoes, raspberries, and herbs. Ever since then we have expanded the garden drastically which now takes up the fence line of the property. Each year we also expanded the variety of produce that we were growing and also the amount of each product as well. When we expanded the garden we then realized we needed to do something more than just using them as fresh produce which is when the canning came along. Our first few run trials of canning was with raspberry and strawberry jam which then lead into our own tomato sauce, pickles, and hot pepper mustard. We also have been making our own pesto sauce each year which we can store in the freezer for the year. The garden is really where everything started and it has just expanded from there on out.

Chickens

Next in line came our lovely flock of chickens, which is definitely my pride and joy. I LOVE our chickens like they were our own children.  Let me introduce you to our flock of nine laying hens…

We started off with a small flock of three hens which we received from a local farmer who had over 1,000 chickens in her barn. Walking into her barn we thought she was insane for having that many chickens, but now we understand why. Owning chickens becomes obsessive; you can’t just have a couple. Ever since we got our first three hens we have continuously added to our flock until we have reached our number of nine now.  We have also have even attempted to hatch our own chickens in order to grow our flock larger. Although we didn’t have much success with this aspect of being a chicken farmer we still enjoyed the experience and can’t wait until we have the chance to do it again. We did end up hatching a few but they ended up being all roosters. Unfortunately we are not allowed to have roosters so we ended up trading them for 3 hens. 

We love our girls and have gained so much knowledge from this learning experience. We have had our ups and downs, chicken farming isn't always easy but at the end of the day it is so worth the hard work.

Maple Syrup

This is our newest hobby since we only started it last year. We had come across our neighbor tapping some of the trees in his yard and we were intrigued.  After doing some research we decided to give it a try. We have a few maples in our yard so we started off last year by only tapping 6 trees with a total of 9 taps within those trees. We were so excited to get those first few gallons of sugar water!  We started off by boiling down the sugar water with turkey fryers, which took all day just to boil down 8-10 gallons of sugar water. For the amount of sugar water we had this method did well enough for what we needed at the time. We spent most of the day outside but when the sugar water was boiled down enough we would eventually take it inside to finish. For the first time maple syrup makers we were excited to get anything we could even if it wasn’t a lot. We finished out the season with a little less than a gallon of syrup.

We decided to take the hobby one step further this season and have a total of 30 taps within a few areas. We also took the time to build a better way of boiling down the sugar water, no way were we using the turkey fryers again. So we bought some blocks, pans, and cut some wood for this project. It was simple to put together and is so much more efficient than those turkey fryers!