September 2018

We moved to Montana on August 11, 2017, with grand plans to be fully up and running on our "homestead" within the first year.

View from our house of the future garden site (where the white pickup is parked)

You know what the say about the best laid plans, though, right? Turns out that things generally move slower than expected, especially when you're facing the harshest winter in the past several years and you're about an hour from the nearest hardware store.

So the winter of 2017-8 was generally spent recalibrating our expectations.

Nov 5, 2017 - and the snow never really left until April.

By springtime, however, we had a fenced-in garden (100'x150') with a handful of raised beds, and a few seedlings that we prayed we didn't plant too soon!

And by the end of summer we had learned a lot. Like that we'd bankrupt ourselves if we continued to buy soil instead of making our own, that it's tough work to haul 75 gallons down for watering every day, and that manure can still hold persistent herbicide from non-organic hay.  Talk about some tough lessons!

But despite the occasional setbacks, by the end of summer we had a harvest!

Hooray! We started to harvest carrots, summer squash, cucumbers, herbs, tomatoes, and beets. We started having delicious home-grown meals, and began canning the rest.

After a slower-than-expected start, Fire Truck Farms was finally up and running!