The girls were practicing their gift wrapping skills.
Sorry I am late yet again but it has been one heck of a busy last couple of weeks around the OKA. The good news is I have a huge update for you this evening and there are more in the pipe mostly in the way of bee related videos and pics but more on that later. Continue reading
Pops is getting ready to throw some knowledge on me.
On the bright side big things are happening and we’ve had some great guests in for the last few days. Uncle Bigfoot and the Rentals have been here since Friday and as usual Continue reading
Ma And A Little Roundup.
Last Thursday the latest addition to the OKA herd made her grand entrance. Some of you who have been around or know us personally already know that Ma and I have a rather weird sense of humor. Continue reading
110 toilet paper tubes planted with tomatoes for our first Farmers Market event of the year.
The last few days I have been getting my chop and drop on. Continue reading
I saw these Rooter Pots a while back and thought I might like to give them a shot. I made the purchase and then researched them. I didn’t find much on them so I hope that’s not a terrible thing. They are basically a special built tool for air layering. I have tried with a plastic bottle and I have tried with plastic Continue reading
Ma here. I was headed to the house for some ice water and a minute out of the sun. I looked down and saw this message from the farm. Awww, the farm loves us. Continue reading
I got Pa one of them fancy heated Germination Stations for Christmas.
He’s been itchin’ to test it out, so a few weeks ago, we planted it on up. Now, by “we” I mean Pa. He planted, and I stood by watching and making our chart of each seed planted. In a few days we had a mess of seeds a poppin and tiny plants reaching up through that dirt. Continue reading
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/11/14/fsma-public-comment-period-about-close
This is ridiculous! I don’t find it to be troubling just because we are farmers that do things this way I find it troubling because it just completely goes against the grain of the way things are meant to work. Imagine for a minute a blackberry bush that you find growing in a treeline or pasture, how and where did it’s fertilization come from, who cares for it? Aren’t those berries some of the sweetest and best tasting berries ever? Sure they are! How did they get to be that way? I can tell you how they got to be that way.
Mother Nature has systems in place to afford plants the right things to make them bountiful. The birds and rodents that help themselves to the berries before and after you get there to harvest a few clean up the mess and fertilize the soil, the plant it self works to build it’s own mulch when the leaves and canes fall and the soil organisms team up with them to break it all down. No one goes out there with a jug of round up and fertilizer to “care” for the berries, they just do their thing, thanks to Mother Nature and her time tested methods.
We have teamed up with Mother Nature and try to use her methods here on Off-Kilter Acres every chance we get. One way we do that is by letting our animals, namely our chickens, ducks and a turkey do a lot of the work for us. We don’t need a running tiller as long as we have our birds. Not only do they work the soil, they provide a massive amount of manure to enrich our soil and they are one of the best pest reduction tools that has ever existed, not to mention they provide us with protein in the form of eggs.
Now why in the world would anyone try to buck this system? After all it’s been time tested for thousands and thousands of years, only in the last 100 years or so have we as humans decided that chemicals are the way to go. They make it easy right? Sure they do but they are not sustainable, none of the Big Ag methods are. So what is the hook you ask? The hook is the almighty dollar and they are attempting to scare you into paying them. Nothing sells like fear and they are trying to convince us that a little chicken poop is going to make us sick or is somehow unsafe to be on the same farm where you food is grown. Thanks, but no thanks Uncle Sam, I’ll take my chances with poop as opposed to your carcinogenic chemistry.
Plant a tree people, grow your own groceries, shop at farmers markets or buy from people you know that grow their own food it’s the only way stop this insanity.
It’s been a while and for that I apologize. When I started this blog I said I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of it. Well, life reared it’s ugly head and got in the way but I’ll do a short post here to show that we haven’t been laying back. We have lots of big things in the works here on the OKA and the weather is fine for working this time of year so stay close there are gonna be more regular posts now.
Off Kilter Acres table at Nowata Farmers Market.
The TexasPrepper2 greenhouse is all set in it’s permanent space in the garden/orchard, that trellis in the front is our newly planted hardy kiwis, I will be following up on them in the future. As far as the greenhouse goes, the rest of this post will kind of show you how we got to this point with it. What I won’t be doing is giving any particulars about dimensions because he is now selling a book with plan on amazon and it would be like stealing from him to do that. Go buy his stuff!
Off-Kilter Acres 