Category: Our Blog

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Come See Us In Galena, IL This Weekend!

We’ll have all of our Etsy best sellers in tow, and then some! As you may (or may not) know, we make everything with only organic ingredients, beeswax from our beehives, or from our neighbors’ beehives, and all flowers/fruits/herb ingredients come from our farm or a neighbor’s. We love making these products by hand, in the healthiest ways possible.

Just a quick rambling list of products we’ll have with us this weekend include; lotion bars, heel balms, cuticle creams, menthol chest rub, paw wax, lip balms…as well as, slate coasters, engraved holiday cutting boards (they’re so cute!), wood laser-cut Christmas ornaments, Galena cork coasters, cedar garden herb markers, wood tabletop holiday decorations, festive wood wine boxes….and so much more.

We’ll be sure to keep you posted on Instagram instagram.com/archiesacres and instagram.com/archiesacresshop throughout the day too.

Also, while I have you here….we’re working on getting our store setup on this site so we can shift away from Etsy a bit. It’s been quite the process since neither of us really knows what we’re doing, but we’re working hard at it. We plan to be able to sell our products on this site in the next few weeks!

Currently, our store is archiesacres.etsy.com

Ok, that’s it for now. We hope to see you locals this weekend!

Thanks for reading! 🙂

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2022 – The Year of Actually Writing on Our Website

Good morning! And happy 2022! Wow, it’s been almost an entire year since we’ve added anything to our website! If only thinking about it actually counted. 2021 was a big year on our farm and we were very busy. Firstly, and most importantly, we added another family member! A human family member this time. Our daughter was born in July. She’s a healthy, happy little force to be reckoned with and it’s been a lot of fun being “too busy” with her to write on this website.

2021 also continued our Etsy store’s progression into becoming a successful online store. Our store has gone bonkers since Covid began in 2020 and has only continued to get busier and busier! I remember when we first started our store, we were surprised when we got a sale and now we’re surprised when we don’t have dozens of sales a day! It’s been so much fun! A lot of work, but so much fun. Also, personally, I love knowing 100% that the lotions/lip balms/bath salts etc that we use are completely organic…because I made them! We even added an organic “vapor rub” to our store that is super popular already. Because, I’m serious, we’re having so much fun with this! I have a whole list of new products that I want to release, but I haven’t had the time to take the pictures! That’s on my list for the next few weeks though.

Another change in 2021 is that the goats, Tilly and Moose got a new barn! They had been toughing it out in their open-ended half shelter for years! And for those years, we really wanted them to have a barn! But barns aren’t cheap so we had to wait until other projects were completed and thanks to Covid, we finally got them the barn of their dreams. We wanted to invest our Covid relief money back into our own community so we found a great father/son owned company that makes incredible barns and were so happy to give them our money. Their customer service was amazing and I’ll write a post allllll about this adventure and that great company as well.

Also, Hanna got a new job in 2021! It’s in the same industry but on the client side of pharmaceutical trials. I don’t like writing much about her career online or on social media because that’s her thing and she’s a pretty private person. But she loves her new job and seems very happy! Which makes us all very happy! Best of all, the company is on the West coast so her days start at 8:30am instead of 7am, so that’s a win-win!

2021 was a good year for our chickens, cats and dogs. Nothing catastrophic happened to any of them, so that’s all you can ask for out here in rural America. We found out this Fall during the re-roofing of our house that there are A LOT of bobcats in the area so we were very worried about all of our creatures. Our roofers saw a couple bobcats feasting on a deer near the end of our driveway which isn’t the norm. Bobcats mostly travel alone. We’ve had bobcat sightings here and there over the years, but never such a solid bobcat presence as we have this year. We’re not mad about it though, because bobcats are cool. Foxes are cool too! We love most of the native predators and appreciate them and are happy that they are still around as nature intended, except for raccoons. They may be cute but they are a nuisance and serial chicken killers.

Ok, the kids are up so I have to go. But more coming soon! Thanks for reading!

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Exciting Farm News!

Hello again! You read over the weekend about our rough year of weather incidents in 2019, so this is a post about how we decided to be proactive! After all, it’s much more fun to try to make your own success than to wait to be lucky.

So we sat down and made a plan. And that plan began with buying and setting up a 50ft x 20ft high tunnel. What is a high tunnel? It’s an unheated, plastic-covered structure that provides environmental protection and control, compared to open field conditions. So basically, it’s an industrial-sized plastic covered half tunnel that uses the heat from the sun to warm up everything inside of it, while keeping precipitation out.

Hanna and her parents mid-setup. This entire process took several months, working a few weekends a month.

High tunnels are tall enough to walk into and we can grow tall, trellised crops such as tomatoes or cucumbers inside. Our high tunnel is about 10 feet tall at its highest point. In the next month we’ll fill it with 8-10 garden beds, that way we can specialize the soil conditions based on what we are planting. We will also use it to start plants next month. And we’ll also keep some plants in it year round so we can control the amount of water they get. Lettuce, spinach, garlic, onions, and eggplants will be included in this high tunnel since they didn’t handle last year’s rains very well. This way we can ensure that our CSA members get these in their monthly shares.

Digging 3ft holes to add stabilizer poles.

This high tunnel is also a season extender, we can start plants a few months before the last frost and keep them going well past the last frost. That means 10 months of growing and eating organic produce! How great is that?! Why not the entire year you ask? Well, December-early Feb can be brutal and the sun can only do so much.

High tunnels are pretty pricey investments, so we purchased ours with help from a NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Agency) grant program. The NRCS helps producers integrate high tunnels into their operations and provides financial assistance through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. And because we are “beginning farmers” we were seen as a priority and were moved up the list a bit. FYI a “beginning farmer” is anyone with less than 9 years of experience, which is definitely us. Through the EQIP we were given a grant to purchase our high tunnel. They gave a certain amount of money per square foot up to $8,500! So we could have gotten a 50ft x 100ft high tunnel. But why be wasteful, when we didn’t need or require so much high tunnel. We kept it simple and reasonable, also we wanted one that we could install ourselves, since finding good help out here is surprisingly difficult!

We finally finished adding all 4 stabilizer beams this November.

Just a little background on the NRCS, since we think this department does amazing things for the environment and deserves some love! The NRCS is a part of the FDA and does a lot of good for farmers and conservationists. The NRCS provides farmers, ranchers and forest managers with free technical assistance, or advice, for their land. Common technical assistance includes: resource assessment, practice design and resource monitoring. They care about conservation and protecting natural resources. And the people who work at our local office (Freeport, IL) are great! They offer grants to help with erosion control, habitat building, animal protection, reintroducing native plants etc. a lot of great things. They have also given us a grant to plant a pollinator habitat on our land for the wellness of bees, insects, butterflies etc. How great is that?!

Next weekend we’re getting the family back together at the farm to put the plastic over the high tunnel then it’ll be time to start planting! We can’t tell you how excited we are about this! 2020 is going to be a GREAT year!! Of course, pics of the finished product to follow…

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2019, It’s A Wrap!

Hello friends! Yes, it’s been a long time since our last post, and we apologize, it’s been a crazy busy time for us. But with a new year comes new goals and brand new opportunities! One goal is to be better about blog posting! So here goes…

Here’s a quick wrap-up of 2019…

2019 was a bit of a tough weather year for our farm. It was a rainy mess of a growing season in our gardens. And it was a tough season weather-wise for our farm pets. 

Archie watching a storm roll in.

The rain totals during the Spring and Fall months were outrageous! The Spring season started with a freak snowstorm on April 28th that left 7 inches of snow on all of our budding trees, right before a rainy week in May that brought us 9 inches of rain. This late snowstorm killed all the buds on our magnolia, cherry and pear trees. We didn’t have a single pear or cherry in 2019 and we had 4 magnolia flowers bloom all year. FOUR!

The beginning of the April 28th snowstorm.

It would rain for 3 or 4 days then stop for 1 or 2, then it would rain for 3 or 4 more days throughout the entire month of May and well into June. The ground was so muddy and saturated that trekking to the gardens was a chore, let alone planting anything.  Most of the local farmers in our area couldn’t plant their fields until mid-June, so many that the USDA gave them an extra month, until July 15th, to get their seeds in the ground without being required to claim a total loss on the season. We waited as long as we could but by the end of June we had to try to make it work in the mud, and none of our eggplant plants survived, only a third of our cucumbers survived, we got one crop of lettuce out of the entire Spring, many of our potatoes were underdeveloped and our tomato plants battled blight and root-rot all season long. Oh, let’s not forget that half of our onions rotted in the ground and more than half of our garlic was so water-logged that we couldn’t, in good conscience, include it in our CSA shares.

The rains finally calmed down by the 3rd week of June and then we had 2 or 3 weeks of zero rain, which is extreme, but it actually helped dry out the oversaturated earth, until an intense heatwave arrived during the 2nd week of July. The heat index was in the 100s and still, no rain. It was around this time that our son was born. So we lucked out, being that we live in a farmhouse built in 1852, we don’t have central air, so to spend several days in the A/C of a shiny new hospital in Rockford was a blessing for us. But not for our plants and animals back home. In the heat. We came home to a very sad garden and some very stressed out animals.

The drought conditions lasted into early August. Then the gardens were back up and running again, everything was happy and everything was started to look pretty.

A little morning harvest session with Archie.

But then by September, the torrential rains were back again. Many towns in our area had declared a state of emergency because of flooding. And our garden was back to drowning. In total, we had 3 floods in our gardens in 2019, 2 in the Spring and another in the Fall. To be honest, if we weren’t so completely smitten with our newborn son, I think we would have felt completely demoralized by the results from this past year’s weather. But we are hopeful and optimistic for 2020. We spent the beginning of the winter months plotting and planning our comeback! And we’re excited!

We’ve made some improvements to our farm because of the weather. And we have also made a plan to remodel our gardens! But more on that in the coming days… 

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2019 CSA Produce Guide!

For those who have signed up, thank you for choosing to eat local, fresh and chemical free food by being a part of our CSA!

It looks like Spring may have started to arrive after an excessive winter here in the Midwest. It has been wonderful to see the chickens out and about the last few days because they haven’t left the coop in months! Not exaggerating one bit.

So we wanted to go over our expected crops for this year. This list is a general estimate based on years past, but we’re (mostly) confident in it’s accuracy. The intention is to give our CSA customers a general idea of what to we’ll have available each month.

If you prefer a visual, please scroll our Instagram feed to see all the yummy stuff from last season: https://www.instagram.com/archiesacres/

April & May

Asparagus, arugula, spring onions, radishes, spinach, leaf lettuce, Swiss chard, herbs, rhubarb

June

Peas, garlic scapes, kohlrabi, beets, green beans, tomatoes, Swiss chard, lettuce, kale, herbs, eggplant, raspberries, zucchini, cucumbers, snap peas, snow peas, asparagus, arugula, spring onions, radishes, spinach, leaf lettuce, Swiss chard, herbs, shishito peppers

July

Garlic scapes, kohlrabi, beets, green beans, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, radishes, mulberries, bell peppers, shishito peppers, ground cherries, Mexican sour gherkins, tomatillos

August


Onions, carrots, tomatoes, shishito peppers, bell peppers, hot peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, sweet peppers, beets, herbs, onions, potatoes, green beans, garlic, zucchini, cucumbers, mulberries, ground cherries, Mexican sour gherkins, tomatillos, peaches, apples, pears

September

Onions, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, hot peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, sweet peppers, beets, Swiss chard, kale, lettuce, herbs, onions, potatoes, green beans, garlic, zucchini, cucumbers, Mexican sour gherkins, apples, pears

October

Delicata squash, butternut squash, carnival squash, spaghetti squash, beets, carrots, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, Swiss chard, kale, lettuce, herbs, onions, carrots, green beans, garlic, tomatoes, hot peppers, sweet peppers, pumpkins

It’s not too late to sign up!

If you’re in Northern Illinois and would like to join our 2019 growing season, we still have a few CSA spots left. Please check out our previous post: https://www.archiesacres.com/our-2019-csa/

And/Or complete this form:

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Celebratory Spring Cocktail – Cucumber Mint Smash

Cucumber Mint Smash Cocktail

All work and no play…

It appears as though Spring has finally sprung. Yay, finally! So yesterday, after a hard day of trying to catch up on farm work, we needed a refreshing cocktail to enjoy while relaxing on the porch. Enter the Cucumber Mint Smash! This cocktail was exactly what the farmer ordered!

You can use whichever spirit you prefer for this recipe – we’ve tried it with both Vodka and Gin, and both work “smash”ingly!  And as far as gin goes, we use Hendrick’s, which by itself is outstanding, so imagine how amazing it works in cocktails! The recipe below is very user friendly and easy to follow…

Cucumber Mint Smash Cocktail
This refreshing cocktail is perfect on any nice day!

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Cucumber Mint Smash

Great refreshing cocktail to celebrate spring and summer!

Course Beverages
Cuisine Cocktails
Prep Time 5 minutes
Servings 2

Ingredients

  • 4 oz Vodka or Gin
  • 1/2 Cucumber (peeled)
  • 3 Sprigs Mint leaves
  • 6 oz Sparkling water/Soda water
  • 4 dashes Bitters

Instructions

  1. Peel your cucumber, roughly chop half of it and place in a shaker.

  2. Add your vodka or gin and mint to the shaker.

  3. Muddle the cucumber, mint and alcohol together. Add several ice cubes (4ish) then shake vigorously.
  4. If you don't care for seeds/pulp in your drink, use a strainer to keep them out. Pour half of the mixture in the shaker into each glass.
  5. Add 2 dashes of bitters to each glass and add ice.

  6. Add your sparkling water (we love to use the Lime LaCroix flavor for this cocktail), stir gently.

  7. Garnish with sliced cucumber and mint sprig (optional) and enjoy!

So there you have it! Let us know what you think!  We always appreciate comments or suggestions for improvements, so please let us know.

Cheers! And Happy Spring!

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