The joy of the garden - James Gibbon

Having a garden is one of the most fulfilling things you can do. The hard work and time put into the garden during the spring, combined with the constant watering and weeding is finally paying its dividends. As I discussed in my last post, we started to get our first cuttings of lettuce and other vegetables. Now we are starting to be overwhelmed with vegetables from our garden. The radishes, carrots, lettuce and tomatoes are in full swing and we are getting vegetables everyday from the garden. We even have a cucumber and should have more on the way! How exciting!

Summer will be over before we know it and I am doing my best to take advantage of every day out here on the farm. Whether it’s spending time in the garden, managing the chickens, or taking care of the horses - there is always something to do to keep me busy. I’m excited to see what more the garden produces and am already coming up with ideas for next year. Stay tuned for more updates!

Update: James Gibbon's Raised Garden Beds

For those of you who are loyal followers of Montana Farm Life, you might remember the raised garden beds that I built over the winter in our barn. If you don’t remember or you are a new follower of Montana Farm Life, below is a picture of what I produced for our garden.

Raised Garden Bed

I built 3 of these to add to our existing one for our outdoor garden. Now that it is springtime in Bozeman, Montana we decided it was time to fill our garden beds with soil and prepare them for planting. If any of you have filled garden beds before, you know how expensive it can be to fill them up with the perfect blend of compost and soil. To help reduce the cost, but still adding to the value of the bed, we decided to break our blend into 3 parts. 1 part being straw hay, 1 part being organic compost, and one part raised garden bed soil. This provides the nutrients our plants will need, but reduces the cost of filling the bottom third with straw hay. Below are some pictures of our final product and please comment with your favorite blends for organic raised bed gardening.

Farm Makeover | Tree Implants

Some people do plastic surgery, others prefer something a little more natural. That’s why we decided to get tree 🌲implants for the property to add some cosmetic design to our land in Bozeman, Montana. We recently ordered 3 large 25 ft spruce trees and had them shipped to our door. The process for ordering and installing the new trees was really cool and I hope you think so too. First, the truck loaded the tree and drove it to our property.

I should mention that before this happened, the truck used it’s giant spades to dig out a large hole where we wanted to put the tree. 🌲 Once the tree had a hole to be planted in, the truck utilized it’s hydraulic mechanisms to angle the tree and place it exactly where it needed to go. This was a really cool part of the process and we all pitched in to help guide the tree to the right angle in the hole. At this point the tree was then lowered into the hole and planted in the hole. The large spades let go of the tree and just like that, we had a 25 foot tree 🌲 planted near our house 🏠. How cool is that!

James Gibbon - Coronavirus

We are truly in unprecedented times. The global economy is partially shut down, NYC is on lock down, and millions of people are at home isolating themselves to prevent the spread of the virus. How did this all happen? Where did it come from? When will it end? …these are the questions we are all asking ourselves as we push through these unknown and pressing times.

In the meantime, I still have animals to feed, plants to grow, and a life to live. I am very fortunate to be living on a farm where I have been social distancing for quite some time now. Not much has changed for us besides making fewer trips into town for groceries and stocking up on coffee and toilet paper. The times I have driven into Bozeman, the town has been desolate. It’s like the whole town is gone on vacation except they’re not, they are in their homes isolating.

During these times, I can’t help but feel for the small and local businesses in our city of Bozeman, Montana. As we approach Spring and Summer, tourism is a large percentage of our town’s economy. With people canceling their Fly Fishing trips and postponing their AirBnB’s, our economy suffers. It is vital that our government does something to help these businesses survive these unprecedented times. The bill passed today is a great step in the right direction and I hope these actions continue. I remain optimistic that we will come out of this epidemic stronger than we went into it. I know we will pull through this together.

I wish everyone a very safe and healthy epidemic and until next time…

-JG

The Beginnings of Our Garden

Growing a garden is complicated. Especially when you live in Montana or anywhere else with a short growing season. Although our soils are rich, our seasons are short and it is vital to time our planting perfectly in order to ensure a successful garden. We do this by starting our seeds indoors in the late winter months and then transplanting them outdoors in the late spring/early summer. This ensures the tomatoes and other plants have ample time to grow and can hit the ground growing when our season starts.

Some of our tomato plants…

Choosing what to grow can be tough. We still haven’t completely planned out our entire garden and with limited indoor space, we had to make some tough choices. For us, an obvious plant to start early indoors was our tomato plants. 🌱 Tomatoes are delicious and when grown correctly, produce an enormous amount of produce. For our tomato 🍅 plants 🌱 we chose:

1. Purple Cherokee

2. Black Krim

3. Heirloom from our own seeds

Assorted flowers.

We also chose to grow a number of varieties of flowers. 💐 🌸 🌺 These will really add a lot of character to our garden this year and we hope to use some of them for decoration around our house 🏠. Below is a list of the different types of flowers we chose to grow (All are perennials):

1. Salvia

2. Columbine

3. Hyssop

4. Coneflower

5. Delphiniums

6. Verbena

We are really excited about what we have planted and are ready for summer! Please comment below on what your favorite kind of flowers/plants are to grow and we wish you a very happy spring :)

Chickens | Helpful Tip for Dealing with Heavy Snow

If you live in a cold climate that gets lots of snow during the winter then join the club! Living in Montana we get lots of snow and have very long winters. All of this snow makes it difficult to keep our chickens happy and ensure they do not get too bored or cooped up. How exactly do we do this? Well we get creative and make sure to give our chickens lots of love during the winter. ❄️

One of the things we do to help our chickens during the winter is shovel out snow. Our chickens hate walking through the snow and they don’t like to get their feathers wet. To help them, we carve out a path around the coop to give them the ability to make laps around the outside of the coop. This allows them to stay occupied during the sunny winter days, and keep them from feeling cooped inside the coop. We also bring them fresh lettuce, arugula, and apples to munch on so they have something to do.

When we do this, we see a dramatic increase in their happiness and it makes us very happy to see them enjoying their time outside. So if you live in a snowy winter climate, try this trick out and help your chickens survive those long winter months.

-JG

After lettuce…