Welcome to my Blog

nAfter many years of being a netizen and having a website and having a lot to say about sustainable agriculture and my own farm I have a Blog of my own. I do have a blog of sorts at my website on the Farm Journal page but I do not keep up with the journal and sometimes it is a year or more between posts. Also this blog told the story of Boulder Belt Organics which was located not to far away from our present farm on land we rented for almost 12 years

Okay, a bit about the purpose of this blog. I intend to use this space to tell the tale of my farm Boulder Belt Farm near Eaton, OH. This is a brand new (to me and my husband) farm that we bought the 1st of September 2005. It is a 9 acre spread with both flat and hilly terrain, a pond, a big barn, a store front and house for all of us to live in.

Some History

The nine acre parcel that makes up this farm was deeded back in 1900 making the present farm a bit over 100 years old. The house and barns were built sometime after 1900 but before 1925. The store front and pond were added in 2002

The farm is located on the 40 foot pitch in Preble County, OH which has a lot of historic and prehistoric significance. It seems that the second (and last) battle of Preble County may well have been fought on our land. This was a battle that the Indians, lead by Little Turtle, won. They killed about 15 white soldiers and got away with over 70 horses loaded with supplies.


The Plan
The plan is to grow lots of produce and some poultry on the nine acres and sell the harvest right off of the farm at the farm store. For those of you new to Boulder Belt, we have been engaged in full time farming for the past 8 years or so, growing produce and poultry for direct local sales. We are planning on continuing the CSA in 2006 and we are planning on going to the Uptown farmers' markets in Oxford, OH in 2006. Though if the on farm sales take off we will be dropping the farmers markets because they cause a lot of wear and tear on both the equipment and out bodies which are not getting any younger.

We are planning on planting a lot of fruit trees, brambles, berries and grapes over the next year or so. This means we will not have much in the way of fruit for several years other than strawberries, and whatever we can get from the apple and pear trees already here. But that's okay because we will be growing a lot of vegetables like we always have (in past years we generally grow between 50 and 85 items) and by spring we should have our first batch of meat birds growing.

We also are planning on selling organic/sustainable garden amendments like fish emulsion, compost, rock powders, kelp along with tools and season extension items such as row covers and greenhouse plastic. And we will be consigning from local farmers things like vegetable seedlings in the spring.

It's an exciting time for us planning a pretty major expansion to our farming business.

Stay tune for updates