Alpine Update: Water, Goats, Pumpkins, Chestnuts & Bees

It has been a while since my last post.  Spring has come and gone. When I bought the farm, the seller said he was thrilled to be finished cutting grass.   Little did I appreciate what he was talking about.  Once the grass started growing (exploding might be a better word), we haven’t had time to do much of anything except to react. 100 acres is not a small amount of work.

This first year is all about setting up the ‘systems’ that we’ll use for the life of the farm. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

The Well:

My well digger ,‘Guy’, drilled a 6-inch hole through the soil, the rock and the sandstone to find good water.  We hit rock at 30 feet and came into contact with a good pocket of water at around 130 feet.  Guy then lined the top 30 feet with a 6-inch pipe, resting on the rock.  Through this ‘clean’ hole, he fed the 3-horse power pump along with the power cable and a 2 inch water line to the bottom of the well.  We then fired the pump up for 48 hours to clear the mud until it put out clear, sweet, cold water.  Our well’s flow rate is around 80 gallons per minute which should be plenty for a 30 acre orchard.

Guy the well digger from Derek Waltchack on Vimeo.

The Goats:      My part-time overseer at the farm recommended that we find some goats to eat the foliage that was hiding a bunch of metal and wood lying on the ground.  I thought it sounded fun, so we found 4 goats for sale in Alabaster, 2 girls goats, a weathered (fixed) buck and a billy.  Billys tend to be nasty animals and they know what makes the girl goats horny.  Urine soaked beards.  Seriously.  Wanting to keep Alpine Farms drama free we said, keep your billy, we’ll take the other 3.

If you’ve never spent time around goats, they are super quirky and interact with us just like their a dog.  My kids named ours Lilly, Tiny and Buck.  It looks like Tiny and maybe Lilly are pregnant, so we’ll hopefully get to experience baby goats.

BEFORE YOU WATCH THE VIDEO, I SOUND LIKE A SISSY.  THE GOATS RESPOND BETTER TO A HIGHER PITCHED VOICE AND I FILMED THIS TO SHOW MY MOM:

The goats from Derek Waltchack on Vimeo.

Pumpkins:  We are attempting a 1-2 acre pumpkin patch.  Against all advice found on the internet with headings like: ‘How do you grow pumpkins in the south? You don’t’  we decided to try to crack the code.  Most pumpkins are grown in northern states.  These areas have milder summers which help to reduce different types of mildew blight that kill pumpkins as well as the bugs that love to eat the vines.

To try to be successful we’ll try a few tricks that we hope will work:

1. As soon as the plants poke out of the dirt, we’ll cover the dirt with wheat straw to try to separate the soil moisture from the leaves and keep them as dry as possible and keep. Moisture in the ground
2. We’ll use drip irrigation, again, to keep the leaves dry.
3. And we’ll employ an army of bees.  Many folks who grow pumpkins for the first time see large leaves and lots of flower buds, but then they don’t grow many pumkins.  For whatever reason there weren’t enough bees around and the flowers never got fertilized.  So we’ll make sure our bees do their jobs.
4. Prayer. (the reader should feel free to participate)

The chestnut trees:   We’ve experienced a mortality rate of 20% or so.  Not good, but not out of the ordinary either.  The trees that came from Florida seem to be thriving.  This year we’ll plant another 500  trees plus the needed replacement trees. I will get the tress in the ground before Thanksgiving to give them a better chance.

The Bees: They are doing great.  I plan on doing another entry on their progress.  Stay tuned.

Bottom line, it has been so much fun watching stuff grow and come alive.  The hard work is worth it.  Thankful.