We are past the mid-point in winter and here in Colorado, it has been an exceptionally cold season, breaking and tieing decades-old records for low temps. Those cold days have had us inside more than we like. We even put our little one’s water table in the bathtub one day, just to shake things up. Snuggled under sweaters and blankets, we also had time to look at seed catalogs, make to-do lists, and dream a little bit about spring. We have several hopes and goals for the coming season.
Garden
In the garden, I would like to keep things tidier. For my birthday, Julio’s parents gave me a beautiful seed box and a gardening ruler to help with that goal. I am also going to really focus on developing the flowerbeds around the run behind the barn. I started to get some growth there last summer, but this will be my third summer planting there and I am hoping that I will start to see perennials and bee-friendly flowers take over that space. A colorful border there would be a beautiful sight from our kitchen window. I am planting Busy Bee Sunflowers again because they did so well last year, but also trying Burpee’s new Crème Brûlée Sunflower variety. I also want to get Sweet Peas to grow up the old metal door that I have used as a trellis for twinkle lights.
In the pumpkin patch, I am going to try to grow Luffa squash again this year. Last year, none of my seeds germinated. If they take, however, they grow big fruit that can be dried and used as a bath sponge. I think that would be a cool offering for our market days.
I am also growing more Mashed Potato Squash, which I tried for the first time last year. It is delicious. I would happily not sell any and just eat them!
I hope to develop the tea garden more this year by expanding my chamomile planting. It did so well last year! I am also planting a couple of flavors of lemon balm to blend with the chamomile for an herbal tea.
In the kitchen, I am growing baby houseplants for sale and microgreens to eat!
Alpacas & Chickens
Moira and Theodora are pregnant and due in mid-September. Our goal is to just take good care of everyone!
We would like to free-range the chickens more and maybe come up with a solution for letting them roam without the dog being stuck inside. It would be nice if they laid more eggs too, but for chickens, they are starting to get old.
Apiary
My bees have survived the winter so far, even that last cold snap. I feel so relieved and lucky. By now the queen will have started laying more eggs, building the colony for Spring. Spring bees are already being born. I snuck in on a warm day and gave them the rest of the honey out of storage and they still had plenty in the hive. I hope for a bigger honey harvest this year, and to that end, I am really debating whether to split them or just try to let them build up their population while otherwise preventing a swarm. I am not sure if I could pull the latter off, but I have plenty of frames of drawn wax in storage to help a split so they wouldn’t spend all summer building out the honey supers like last year. I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.
Home
I learned how to embroider this past weekend and I know it will be tempting to embroider everything. I learned using The Embroidered Closet, which I picked up at the library several times before actually checking it out. It turns out I love it and it is not nearly as time-consuming as some other hobbies. For now, I will stick to freshening up my closet, because I also need to keep working through the backlog of fiber from the alpacas.
I have not learned how to use the spinning wheel…yet. That is on the agenda for this year, but in the meantime, I am spinning with the drop spindle for at least 15 minutes a day. I plan to spend some time making dryer balls out of the second and third cuts from our girls that are tough to spin and to get good at carding fleece so that I can move on from practicing with merino wool to actually using the fleece from our herd.
Around the house, there are also some little projects I would like to tackle, like repainting our bathroom and finally getting a lattice under the deck, but for the most part, I am looking forward to getting back out on long walks and playing outside more.
What are your plans for spring!? -Kasey
Garden
Orchard
They’re wet, but probably enjoying a break from being hot. Alpacas can tolerate very cold temperatures, provided they have a windbreak.
The Bee & Bee is thriving! My big task at the moment is keeping an eye out for swarm cells and deciding if/when to split them into a second hive. In a nutshell, a honeybee colony is better thought of as a superorganism that reproduces itself rather than individual bees reproducing. When a colony survives the winter like this one did (yay! yay!), their population climbs quickly and they start to think about throwing off a swarm—a new colony. When that happens, they build queen cells at the bottom of frames, and once those are growing new queens, the bees gorge themselves on honey and about half of them leave with the old queen. They usually land on a nearby tree and scout bees fly out to look for a new place to live. Some beekeepers 
The bees have started to build drone comb in-between the two deep boxes that make the brood nest. Last week during my hive inspection, I was worried that it was swarm cells, but a closer inspection clearly revealed that it was drone cells. Drone (male bee) cells look like bullets. Queen cells look like peanuts and hang down from the bottom of the frame or perpendicular to the rest of the comb. I think they were annoyed that I destroyed some of the drone cells when I pulled the frames out. Sorry girls!
Yay! It was mostly cross comb, so I pushed it into the frame, wanting them to use the wax to build the comb on the frame instead of out from it. The bad news was that there was a patch of mold on the bottom board. The bee shop sold me some pollen patties a couple of months ago and I put one in the brood nest, but it started to melt and drip onto the bottom board. Clearly, that was the origin of the mold. I could smell that something was off as soon as I opened the hive. It wasn’t as sweet as usual. Fortunately, the spot of mold was small, so I was able to scrape it and flip the bottom board before the mold caused any real damage to the hive or the comb. Phew! Beekeepers, do you use pollen patties? This was my first experience and I’m not sold on them. I am so happy that the hive is doing well! 
That One Bee
I have started to harden off my seedlings (tomato, eggplant, echinacea, verbascum, and pepper) before transplanting them outside. My pumpkin seedlings were looking really good, if leggy, but they withered and died while I was hardening them off. If I am completely honest, I think what did it was that they were sitting on the kitchen counter overnight and, on an impulse, I watered them with leftover coffee and it was tooooooo much nitrogen. Sorry, plant babies. I love you. 
The alpacas are set for shearing during the first weekend of June. It will be Luna’s first shearing and we are a little nervous about how Miss Firecracker will handle it. She is still very protective of her baby. Luna is almost eight months old. It seemed like Miss Firecracker was weaning her back in February, but Luna is still nursing sometimes, so it is taking awhile. From what I’ve read, when left to their own devices, alpacas wean around 8 months old, so I expect that we will see the nursing sessions continue to wane over the next month or so, until they end completely. Miss Firecracker is not losing weight, and we are not planning to breed her again anytime soon, so we have no reason not to let her follow her instincts. 
Chickens
Soon the dandelions will be in bloom all over the lawns of America’s suburbs, and they present an opportunity for you. The blossoming of these little yellow flowers is your chance to help the pollinators without spending one cent or, in fact, doing anything at all. You can be a rebel, a little bit countercultural, and support the health of pollinators in the ecosystem that sits right outside your home. 
Dandelions aren’t just good for the bees; they’re also beneficial to your lawn and the other plants you grow. The taproot of the dandelion helps to draw nutrients in the soil upward, making them more readily available to green things growing nearby. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can eat the dandelions in a salad or make tea out of them (
We are hoping to see more growth out of our orchard trees in the coming year now that they are fenced in and safe from alpaca attacks. We need to be more regular about watering them, but for now, the blanket of snow is taking care of that. Our little orchard trees have stood up to some brutal winds this season, assisted by a slight windbreak created by the barn. 
Garden
The first Father’s Day after my father died, I was having a low-key, but difficult day. Nothing dramatic, no great outpouring of grief, just a sad day spent mostly on the verge of tears that never really came. That afternoon, Julio went on an errand and came home with a Fiddle Leaf Fig that he named The Last One. I had been filing our apartment with houseplants and he had made me promise that I wouldn’t bring home anymore for a while, but I really wanted a Fiddle Leaf Fig. So here it was, the last houseplant. (Or so he thought.)
I bought Fiddle Leaf Fig fertilizer, dutifully applying it once a month through the summer, and watered it exactly one Ball jar a week on Saturdays. I soon deduced that the humidifier was unnecessary, as it made no real difference in the humidity. I opted instead just to keep my tropical plants clustered together, sharing the sunlight and the moisture they “exhaled.” Over the summer and fall, the Fiddle Leaf Fig grew about a foot. I was delighted. I celebrated every new leaf that emerged, first as a tight coil, gradually unwrapping into a bright green, tiny leaf that, over time, grew and darkened into a deep green violin shape.
In January, we moved to our house. I was prepared for the Fiddle Leaf Fig to drop some leaves in response to the change in environment as everything I read about the plant suggested that big changes could stress the poor thing out. At first, it seemed to be enjoying its new home next to a sunny South-facing window. Then, I came down one morning and leaves had dropped to the kitchen floor. They were weirdly far away from the plant, but I thought the dog must have accidentally dragged them away with her tail.
Getting rid of the packrat that was breaking into our home each night through a gap under our balcony was a long process and a different story, but now I had an answer on the plant. It wasn’t dying; it had been robbed. I moved The Last One and the small orange tree we were given as a housewarming gift to the west-facing window in our bedroom and leaves and fruit stopped disappearing. A month later, the Fiddle Leaf Fig had a handful of tiny leaves. It kept growing and I kept fertilizing it once a month and watering it deeply once a week. A year later, I repotted it into a bigger pot. Almost two years later, it is hip-height and still thriving.
I watched the resurgence of The Last One with awe and amusement. I am generally pretty successful with my houseplants. I only lost one, a pothos, to the move, and I subsequently killed a young Parlour Palm because I couldn’t find the right spot or the right watering routine. Other than those losses, however, my little indoor jungle has done pretty well. None, however, have thrived like The Fiddle Leaf Fig who could. This plant, known for being easy to kill, so challenging to keep that Julio joined a Fiddle Leaf Fig support group on Facebook when he brought it home, has proved itself resilient beyond what I thought possible. I do not exaggerate when I say it was at one point a potted stick. The rat took all of the leaves and the young portion of the trunk. I couldn’t imagine that it would start producing leaves again without any way to take in sunlight. I am thankful that I neglected the plant in those first days after its losses, too distracted by another new life to count the plant as a loss. That pause gave it time to start again, growing back with vigor. Fickle who? -Kasey
Repot the plant once it is rootbound. One way to tell is if roots start to come out of the drainage holes in the grower pot. Make sure the new pot has adequate drainage. Choose a new pot that is one size up from the current pot. For example, an 8” pot after a 6” pot.
Brush the Alpacas Before Shearing Them
One of the biggest disappointments we had this year had to do with the beehive. Kasey keeps our bees and this is her first year. She got the bees on May 2nd and now wishes that she had immediately tested the bees for mites and treated them, but she was new and nervous about it and it took a few weeks to get used to working with them before she was ready to check for mites. She did so the third week of May and the mite count was really high. If she had understood her options better, she probably would have used Formic Pro, but she didn’t understand that the temperature restrictions were just for the first three days. Knowing that it would soon be really hot, she instead used Apivar, adding it May 25 and removing it on July 20th. 
The garden grew SO. MUCH. BETTER. this year overall. We grew a delicious assortment of winter squash and pumpkins, patty pan squash, zucchini, greens, some tiny carrots, green beans. The Harvest Moon Squash was a variety we’d never tried before and it was delicious when stuffed and baked. 
When we cleaned out the barn, it produced a giant mound of old, old horse manure. We were able to give a lot of it away for people to compost, but Kasey also used a lot to create a base layer for flowerbeds around the edge of the horse run. The plan was to grow wildflowers there to support pollinators. Her dream is to have lush perennial wildflower garden that takes not that much maintenance. She planted lavender, sunflowers, apache plume, Veronicas, and cone flowers there. The lavender was really the only thing that grew. Everything else scorched. She needs to test the soil, but it seems like the soil is too hot. The plan is to mulch it over the winter to draw out some of the nitrogen, but it was a good lesson in checking soil PH. 
There’s a lesson to be taken from my garden this year about being patient. First there were the seedlings that sprouted randomly in the containers I dumped my soil from failed seed starting into. The mystery seedlings are still going strong. Then, in the patio garden, I had some squash seeds that I didn’t think had germinated, so I did a second pass and now I have a crowded, random batch of plants. I will probably have to move some once they get bigger.
I am very proud of how tidy the rows of greens are. I can be a bit of a 
The corn is growing! Last year the seeds did not germinate, so I am very excited. This Indiana girl is hoping to see it knee high by the 4th of July. Last week, I planted a second type of sweet corn and some more beans to fill in gaps where seeds didn’t start.
It has been so wet this year, that mushrooms have come up in a few places in the garden. It was one item on the long list of things we’ve had to check to see if they are toxic to alpacas now that we let the girls graze the backyard. (On that list, the Columbines, poppies, and, yes, the mushrooms.)
I planted three packets of sunflower seeds and they’re starting to pop up in a lot of borders and fence lines. I’m feeling very protective of them and managed to chase Clementine away from one just in time yesterday.
The rabbits have dug the entrance from their warren into our pumpkin patch again. I filled it in again. I keep seeing the snake by the raised pumpkin beds. I spent some time on a website about Colorado snakes yesterday. I think it is either a garter snake or an Eastern racer. Either way, it poses no threat to anything unless in the unlikely event it decides to climb into the beehive.
I spent some time this morning on my own and then with my little helper watering, weeding, and doing succession plantings or “try again” plantings of almost everything, including greens, herbs, corn, beans, cucumbers, and several types of pumpkin. The pumpkin patch is starting to show lots of growth, so hopefully we will see you in October! -Kasey
Sol Homestead LLC 