Miller Homestead North

Its been quite some time since I have posted on here, but there has been a recent homesteading development that merits a few posts.  Miller homestead is expanding, and there is now a Miller homestead north!  Our family purchased a property in the Adirondacks in the 1940's, part of which was a very small scale dairy farm.  A homestead, if you will.  Since that time, much of the pasture land has been fallow.  Last spring several acres of the former pasture land was cleared of saplings and brush.  One area of it was set aside for a future orchard and soil preparations were begun.

The soil is very sandy and acidic (pH was approximately 4.5).  The area was fertilized, limed, tilled, and seeded with buckwheat as a cover crop.  The buckwheat grew quite well.  My mom was checking out the variety of insects attracted to the flowers.

In the fall, the area was again fertilized, tilled, and seeded, this time with oats.  The oats were seeded in mid-september, and that did not seem to give it enough time to really get going before winter hit, but at least the soil was in much better shape than it was in the spring.

Over the winter I spent quite a bit of time planning out what to plant in the new orchard area in the spring.  I ordered trees from several different different nurseries and planned to put them in the ground in late april.