Dorothy, Author at Texas Pioneer Creations

Posted on April 8, 2020April 8, 2020 by Dorothy — Leave a comment

Bunnies and more at the farm

While cleaning pictures off of Dorothy’s phone, we found a few that felt appropriate to share this week on the blog. These aren’t from our home or garden; they were taken at Wunderlich Farm Interactive History Park right here in the Houston area. We were spending the day there helping an Eagle scout project build bird feeders for an upcoming birding program there at the farm. (Don’t worry, this was early March, before the COVID related shut downs and social distancing became the norm.) It had been a busy day there for them between the scout project and framing the new blacksmith building but we all had a great time out there. As usual, Dorothy had snapped pics of a few fun things during the day and we realized sharing them would give others a chance to see parts of the farm that they may usually miss on market days. So grab the kids and enjoy our first little mini tour for your Wednesday afternoon.

Bearded Chickens at Wunderlich Farm 2020

Second bearded chicken at Wunderlich Farm 2020 — Bearded Chickens at Wunderlich Farm 2020

They have free range chickens at the farm and it’s a bit hard to miss them if you are near the barns on the back of the property. Farmer Steve has many different varieties there on the homestead but she was fascinated with the bearded chickens on this trip so that’s what we got pictures of. Yes, you can actually see the chicken’s nesting boxes and their eggs when they are collected daily. His chickens lay eggs of a few different colors and they all taste great! For the kids asking what the chickens eat, free ranging chickens love to find bugs on the farm and will wander over almost the whole grounds hunting for them. You can find the chickens even roaming into the big barns and the big garden in search of food or to see what the humans are up to. (Leashed dogs do not really seem to bother these chickens at all, so no worries there!)

Bunny at Wunderlich Farm Spring 2020 — Curious bunny at Wunderlich Farm 2020

Near the big barns and historical homes you can find the bunny area on the farm. This little one pictured was roughly a month old, if we remember correctly. The farm has multiple varieties of bunnies and they are all easily viewed by your whole family. It wasn’t a normal market day when we were there so the bunnies were all snug in their regular bunny houses. On market days with good weather, you can find a few playing outside in their play pen right there near the big tree. Bring your camera for those markets- you don’t want to miss a cute picture! All bunny houses are tagged so kids can learn the names of their favorites. Farmer Steve also has informational signs in this area to teach visitors about bunnies, just in case a docent is tied up in a lesson when you come in. Please make sure you get permission before handling the animals and follow all the rules when you’re allowed to hold them. It’s totally worth it to get a chance to snuggle a bunny.

Observation hive at Wunderlich Farm 2020

Honey info sign and honey press at Wunderlich 2020 — Observation hive at Wunderlich Farm 2020

While helping show a visitor around the farm that day, she went to the building with the outdoor and observation hives to answer a few of the visitor’s questions. It was a cool and overcast day so the outdoor beehives were quieter and the visitor had questions about beehives that were just easier to answer while looking at the inner workings. Dorothy thought it perhaps a bit wiser to just show her the observation hive than anyone opening an outdoor hive so they went inside the small white building. Want to laugh? When she removed the white board covering the glass for the observation hive, she jumped coming face to face with that many bees even though she could clearly see the glass! Don’t feel bad if you giggled at that; we all did! The observation hive here on the farm is a great way to see some of the innerworkings and relationships of bees, hive structures, and the life cycle in action. We were able to show the visitor a queen, let her see how the bees interacted, and even explain the process of removing honey and bottling it up. When you visit the farm next, make sure you stop by and watch for a bit. They have many signs like the one pictured above that help explain the process of “how they’d do that” so that you can learn even when a docent isn’t handy. The outdoor hives area also has a few great signs that explain how bees help farmers and gardeners, the large amounts of crops that depend on bees to pollinate them, and general safety information. Worried about being stung by the bees? It rarely happens on farms, especially if you stay on your side of the fencing and don’t harass the hives.

We think we’ll wrap up today’s first ever mini tour here and pick up next time with the outdoor cooking area, candle making, laundry fun and a peek at something for the blacksmithing building. Make sure to subscribe so you can be notified when that goes live. We all hope you and yours enjoyed a little something different for the day. Once this has all passed, please do try to come out to Wunderlich Farm for a tour or market day. They have docents on the grounds to help bring the history alive for us all plus the buildings are all open for self tours. There are open gardens to see, livestock to observe and pet, school room to experience, branding stations, crafts and home keeping skills areas, and so much information about our past hiding right there in plain sight. During the week, they are typically doing school tours so they open for general public tours on the last Saturday of each month. Their website and facebook pages are great about noting events on the farm. See you there again real soon!

Going beyond history…..
Wunderlich Farm, KleinHistorical.org

To reach Wunderlich, you can find their website here and on Facebook right here. While COVID has them closed to the public, they are hosting story times on their Facebook page, posting regular pictures there too, and we understand they might still have some farm fresh eggs available. Contact them for details.

Have another spot you think we’d love to see, share about, or experience? Have a festival, market, or event you’d like us to come to? Want to share your opinions with us? Let us know in the comments or email Dorothy@TexasPioneerCreations.com to let us know!

Posted on March 19, 2020March 19, 2020 by Dorothy — Leave a comment

Still here and staying calm during COVID

Like most of our city, we’ve made the painful decision to stay home amid the COVID-19 situation. Luckily, our main base of operations is our own house and our junior staffers were on spring break for the first week. The kids enjoyed their free time, caught up with their friends online & by phone, playing games and guitars, and watched more YouTube than their parents would probably want to calculate honestly. The adults spent most of that time trying to remain busy and calm, counting the days until the next farmer’s market and our children back to school. Dorothy finished getting the soap making and book keeping all moved into one room of the house (woohoo!) There was massive progress on getting garden boxes and beds prepared, weeded, and planted. Then week two kicked in and we faced the dilemmas of school closures, markets and events being canceled, and the general worries of being a parent and small business in this rapidly changing situation. It’s been stressful on our whole city and we wanted to let you know we’re still here, doing fine but just like most of you it’s a bit crazy.

We hope that you and yours are all doing well as you can in all of this. We’re working with our local markets, fellow vendors, wholesalers, private labelers, and charitable groups from a distance to help share information and updates with our cherished customers and followers until this has passed. There are no markets or events for the month of March, including Founders Day at Wunderlich; they have all been canceled as of March 19^th. We’ve been advised that Schulenburg SausageFest, Mancuso’s GatorFest, and Chappell Hill’s Bluebonnet Festival are now canceled also. Fingers are crossed that all of these measures do the trick in ending this, everything will be normal again soon, just in time for spring crops and the farmer’s markets to reopen. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone again soon, happy and healthy. Please do keep reaching out to us for information as you need it. We’re monitoring our texts, emails, and voicemails to respond to everyone as quickly as possible. We’ll keep posting info as we get it here to the website and our Facebook page; plus more pictures from the scene here on the blog. We’ve also tried to ensure that the website inventory is up to date so your orders will be processed quickly and smoothly.

Great employee in the booth at Wunderlich Feb 2020

As you can see, our supervisory crew has approved of the new layout in the soap room and will ensure that we find time to relax a little when stress gets too high here. The kids are back in school and staying busy. We’ve used this time to reflect on how we’ve expanded our skills over the past year, enjoy the little moments, and finished getting our liquid soap making back on track. Dorothy will get posts made for you about when the liquid soaps will be live, how we’ve finally conquered bread making, learned cheese making and canning and blacksmithing, grew new produce, crafted a vendor group of talented local artisans and makers that are outstanding in their fields, and the personal goals we hit over the past year. Make sure to subscribe so you’ll get notified as the posts go live; some of the stories out of it all were honestly funny and a good read.

Stay safe and healthy everyone.

Happy Washing!

The TPC Team

Posted on March 9, 2020March 9, 2020 by Dorothy — Leave a comment

Playing in the dirt on the micro-farm

We’ve been hard at work in the gardens so far this year. We ripped out more grass and flowering bulbs for planting edibles and built more boxes to grow in. The greenhouse was taken apart as our part of the world reached the 70s and we started moving everything from it out into the growing areas. Most of the plants made it through the winter here in Houston and we’ve spent the last few weekends in the booth, transplanting, evaluating what containers we have or want, or working the garden beds to get them ready.

Since we are the geeks that we are, planning the garden beds and containers is a multi-week event here. We literally pull out all seeds that we’ve gathered, purchased, or been gifted over winter and spread them over the table top. Then out comes notes of prior years gardening, our gardening books, Dorothy’s infamous gardening binder which is stuffed with info she’s saved over the years, and then pull up our favorite websites so we can learn about anything we’ve never grown before. We also grab little two to five inch plants for transplanting if needed. This year we hit a new geeky record as graph paper was pulled out and a diagram of the planting beds was made to scale! Yep, we literally mapped out where everything was going to be planted in the front beds on graph paper in hopes of keeping some sanity this time.

The back yard micro-farm area was planned mostly over the Christmas and New Year’s break as we cared for everything in the green house. The grape trellised wall will be back this year and this time we’ll try to keep it scaled back a bit. In past years we’ve honestly let it spread as far as it wanted but the massive crop was a bit much to handle last time! Just in case we accidentally get another harvest like that we’re plotting to learn wine making. We learned our family’s not big into jams & jellies, the kids can only devour so many pounds of grapes before they go bad, so wine making seems to be a logical next step for us. Would be a lot of fun to make wine out of our grapes and then make that wine into soap. We’ll see how it goes this year and keep you updated.

The fruit trees are in full swing, except for the plum tree which is driving Dorothy nuts. We lost our blueberry bushes but that was due to the dogs, not weather. All of the citrus trees are flowering and putting out new leaves and branches. The nectarine tree is covered in fruit while the fig tree is popping out leaves like crazy. Blackberry vines are awake and producing also; we’re anxiously awaiting those! We are keeping fingers crossed this year that our limes and grapefruit make it through. If all goes well, there should be produce in our booth at the farmer’s markets. We also expanded the herbs and veggies in our little growing patches with hopes to grow enough to share. The aloe is sending up shoots constantly and those should be split out soon to give away at markets also. Keep fingers crossed for us!

For those who worry, we have kept our pretty flowering plants too. We’re all fans of the pretty colors and varying flowers we’ve grown over the years. One gardenia was lost, not sure what killed it but it’s gone, and a rose bush we thought was destroyed has come back strong. The butterfly flowers (lantana, duranta, calendulas, coneflowers, daylilies, etc.) all seem to be doing well. We still have multiple varieties of roses everywhere too. The plumeria tree is showing signs of waking but will be a bit before any flowers might emerge. We love having these in both the front and back to bring in the bees.

We’ll be trying hard to keep better updates for everyone here online about our little micro-farm. We realized that in the past years, we’ve mostly shared info with people as they visited us in the booth and that’s not really helpful to everyone. It seems to be a bit surprising to people that we grow so much in our little corner of Houston, smack in the middle of a subdivision. It also seems to be a shock how much of our ingredients come from our own garden. Pictures will be added here to the blog and website in addition to our social media to keep you in the loop. And feel free to ask questions online or in person about what we’ve got growing. Odds are we’ll whip out our phones in the booth to share pictures of our little projects in addition to answering your online queries.

We must wrap it up for now as there are weeds to pull before the day ends. Stop by and say hello when we’re out in the market or we’ll see you here again soon. For easier updates, follow our blog and like us on Facebook to get alerts when the next post goes live or market days. Have a great time out there, stay safe, and happy washing!

Author: Dorothy

Bunnies and more at the farm

Like this:

Still here and staying calm during COVID

Like this:

Playing in the dirt on the micro-farm

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: