Welcome!

Hello and welcome to the inaugural posting on our blog! We are Sarah and Nathan Rumbaugh and with this blog, we hope to share our successes, experiments, and learning opportunities with you as we transform our historical home and .6 acre property into a micro-farm. The Dusty Rose Micro-Farm is a teeny tiny farm in a teeny tiny town in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Our home is a historical building that was built in 1836 and we are told it was originally the first hotel built west of Washington, Pennsylvania. We moved in at the end of June in 2010 and have been living our dream ever since.

(Yep, that's The Dusty Rose!)

Right now, we are preparing our garden beds for the winter by adding compost from our compost piles and covering them with leaves to keep in the moisture over the winter. We do have a few crops overwintering: yellow, red, and white onions, garlic, strawberries, and our perennial herbs will be tucked in tight until spring. Seed catalogs are starting to arrive in the mail and we are starting sketches and maps of our spring planting plans. We will keep you updated with our plans as the fall and winter progress.

Our micro-farm does include backyard livestock. At the moment we have a total of 19 chickens and 2 ducks. Our primary flock of laying hens consists of heritage breeds who all lay different colors of eggs. Our secondary flock is a small starter flock of Mille Fleur D'uccle bantams that I plan on breeding and showing. We also have a pair of Pekin ducks who have taken up a role as yard guardians (yardians?) and who take very good care of the chickens. Ducks certainly weren't my first choice of livestock, but I will tell you honestly that our little farm-yard wouldn't be the same without them. :-) The ducks and chickens provide us with plenty of fresh eggs that we eat, share with family, and sell to those looking for fresh eggs.

We hope to add some Nigerian Dwarf Goats to our homestead within the next year or so in order to increase our self sufficiency. The goats will provide milk with which we can make cheese, ice cream, yogurt, and soap. And of course we can drink it too! Right now we are doing our research and reading up on goats as backyard livestock so that we are prepared well ahead of their arrival date.

At this time, our gardens consist of several raised-bed plots that we have been building and expanding on over the last few years. We have successfully grown tomatoes, peas, carrots, cabbage, corn, tomatillos, lettuce, horseradish, dill, and several herbs. We tried growing beets and beans in addition this year but the deer got to them before we could protect them and they never recovered. :-( This year we have some good plans for how to keep the pests out of the garden  and how to use our birds as farm-helpers to best maximize our crops. We're working up a very ambitious list of veggies and fruits for this spring's planting and we hope you'll stay with us to see how it all turns out. 

So... now that you know a little about who we are and what we are trying to do, we want to know what you would like to read about from us. We have a list of topics that we have come up with based on our own successes, failures, and learning process, but we would really be interested in what topics you would like to know more on! After all, we are hoping that this blog will help others in their own journey towards self-sustainability through creating their own micro-farms. :-)

The topics we've come up with so far include:
Backyard Chickens
Raising Chicks
Seed Saving
Gardening for Sustainability
Container Gardening
Raised-Beds (construction, starting-up, maintaining, etc)
Recipes from the Garden
Canning and Preserving the Harvest
Cottage Crafts
Herbal Remedies
Livestock for Small-Spaces
Livestock Housing for Small-Spaces

So... what else would you like to know about? Leave us your comments and suggestions below and we will do our best to add them to our list of things to blog about!

~Sarah