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At the beginning of year three on the farm, we started this blog to document
our journey into self-sufficient homesteading and voluntary simplicity.
We're glad to have you along for the ride!
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Posts tagged garden:
I hope my poor, malingering blueberries will
malinger no more! The little things haven't had much going for
them in the two years they've been in the yard. I bought them for
a few bucks at Wal-Mart when they'd barely grown a root apiece, then I
stuck them in sweet soil and mulched them with nitrogen-leaching wood
chips.
I'm hoping to
remedy the damage with a little TLC. Yesterday I treated them
to some soil acidifier, as well as a nice mulch of mixed pine needles
and decidous leaf mould from the hill above the house. I also
used a gift certificate to order a few larger plants from a more
reputable nursery. The pullets are busy
scratching up and fertilizing the new ground in preparation for our
second round of blueberries' arrival this spring.

I also decided to experiment a bit with the mudhole between the
nectarine and grapes. The soil there is pure clay and in our
recent wet spell the chickens churned it up into a mass of mud. I
found some old grain seeds hidden behind my desk and sowed them in the
muddiest spots. If I remember right, the grain is rye, meant to
be planted in early fall as a cover crop. But maybe it'll do
something to hold the soil together and outcompete the Japanese
honeysuckle which is what naturally grows in that area. Only time
will tell...
I get so caught up in the flow of seasons,
always joyously anticipating the next one along the chain.
Yesterday, I noticed that the darkness was already coming later --- 6
pm and Mark and I were still out preparing firewood for the
night. Walking Lucy, I found mole salamander tadpoles drifting
under the ice in floodplain puddles, their feathery gills sucking
oxygen out of the frigid water. Signs of spring on the last day
of the year!
Inside, we harvested the first tomato off the plant Daddy gave us at
Thanksgiving. I've had zero luck with growing tomatoes indoors in
winter until this plant came along. But this is a hybrid variety
carefully bred for indoors life. Daddy paid fifty cents per seed
for his start, but quickly learned that he could keep the plants going
indefinitely by taking cuttings (one of which he gave me.) Our
house is really too cold even for this little guy, and about 70% of the
flowers don't manage to set fruit, but I'm curious to see how long I
can keep it going.
Happy New Year, everybody! I have a feeling that this year will
be the best one yet!
Yesterday I received my
last paycheck from my nonprofit. From here on out, it's freelance
or bust!
While musing over the above, and cooking our Christmas turkey bones
into stock, I dug up this carrot in the garden. Its split bottom,
with the small side twining around and seeming to strangle the big
side, reminded me of my life in the nonprofit world over the past
year. I'll leave the obvious symbolism to the reader to tease
apart.
My resolution for 2009 is not to be that carrot. Saving the
world, keeping us fiscally afloat, visiting with friends and family,
nurturing my own household with tasty treats, feeding my soul through
art and long hot baths, feeding my body with wood chopping and digging
in the garden --- I hope to keep all of the sides of my life in closer
balance. Meanwhile, that carrot went into our bellies. 
It was warm enough to continue the ditch
digging operation today which will be running from the hand dug well to
the trailer through the garden.
The goal will be to prevent any future freezing of the line thanks to
the warmer temperatures underground.
I don't think I'll miss carrying water in 5 gallon buckets, but it
really isn't all that difficult once you get the hang of it.
In a 500 square foot trailer, you have to be
pretty quiet not to wake up a guest sleeping on your futon. As a
result, I wandered outside into the morning drizzle to stay out of my
cousin's hair.
Squishing through
the mud, I found myself drawn to those big trash
bags of leaves Mom and Maggie collected for me this fall. Various
sources on the web had admonished me to shred my leaves before using
them as mulch, but when I began to shred them with the lawn mower a
couple of months ago the mower exploded. Nix that idea.
Instead, I decided to experiment with using whole leaves for
mulch. So I
spread some newspaper around each grape vine then doused the root zone
liberally with silver and sugar maple leaves.
I ripped into bag after bag, happy as a couch potato opening up potato
chips, until I came upon the first bag of black walnut leaves.
Then the second, the third. Yikes! Time to scurry back
inside and figure out what can safely be mulched with black walnut
droppings.
About a year ago at a party, someone who seemed very knowledgeable told
me that the juglone in black walnut parts is really only detrimental to
germination, but an extensive search of the internet showed no sources
which agreed with that assessment. Instead, most websites agree
that the juglone produced by walnuts messes with the metabolism of
other plants, causing them to wilt and exhibit stunted growth.
Some plants are tolerant to juglone in the soil, including onions (and
garlic, I hope, since it's in the same genus and I used black walnut
leaves on two of my garlic beds), beets, cucurbits, carrots, parsnips,
beans, corn, and the Prunus
genus (cherry, nectarine, plum, and peach.) So I moved on to my
nectarine, cherry, and peaches to use up the walnut leaves. I
hope my unshredded leaves work well as mulch --- I've had terrible luck in the
past with wood chips (even well composted) and am in need of a free
mulch that really does the job.
Another half inch of rain fell yesterday
morning, but by lunch time the sky had cleared --- perfect weather to
go out and look around. On Christmas, Mom noticed that some of my
garlic were poking green shoots up out of the ground, so I mulched them
with leaves to put them back to sleep for a couple more months.
While I was mulching, Mark came out with the chainsaw. He was
going to cut up some more firewood, but I side-tracked him, begging him
to take down the wild plum first. Now if the soil ever dries
we'll be able to put our new plum in the ground!
Next, I gathered up masses of old bark from around the wood chopping
station to scatter in the mud outside our trailer door. The last
few weeks' endless rains have turned heavily travelled parts of the
yard into mud pits, and I hope that some judicious application of bark
will make it a bit safer as we slip and slide our way in and out the
door.
I moved the predator eyes to new locations, helped Mark split some wood
then stack it by the stove, and gathered some kale for supper.
Life doesn't get much better than when I can spend an afternoon
completely outside!
(Oh, yeah, and public
service announcement to the one other woman in a thousand who buys
fresh underpants once every four years --- the sizes on the outside of
those six packs are not the same as your pants size. If you buy
the size which is the same number as your pants size, when you open
your package of new underpants the day after Christmas and hold one up
to your waist, you'll find that you could fit two or three of you in
each one. Turn the package over and read the size chart before
buying! Doggone it --- no fresh underwear for me!)
In my natural habitat, I am a frugivore, so I
have slowly been building an orchard around our trailer. My trees
have faced varying success --- to be totally truthful, I haven't done a
very good job with them in the past.
It all started three years ago when we planted an orchard before moving
to the land. Apples, pears, peaches, and plums were pretty much
totally eaten up by deer that summer. Since moving in, we've
continued to battle deer, which nibble on our apples and pears whenever
I turn my back. We've had better luck with peaches and
nectarines, though, which may just be because the deer don't like
them. Or it may be because I read somewhere that peaches need
drainage and decided to plant them in raised beds to battle
our clay soil.
This winter, we're only putting in one fruit tree, a plum which Daddy
ordered extremely cheaply from his extension office. The poor
tree got caught up in the holiday mails, and even though Daddy sent it
priority mail it arrived a week later with dry roots and a bent
top. I soaked it overnight, then heeled it in while I prepared
its new home. The plum will be replacing a wild plum by the barn
which finally bore this past spring in time for me to discover that the
large stone and skimpy, untasty flesh made for a fruit even I won't eat.
The ground beneath the wild plum is the most recently reclaimed portion
of the yard. Baby plum trees and wild blackberries formed a
thicket threaded through by Japanese honeysuckle --- a mass even the
chicken tractors wouldn't quite knock down. I skipped the area
each time I mowed, but Mark bushhogged it with the lawn mower one day
last summer, knocking down all of the tall growth.
So yesterday I lined the bottom of my plum's new raised bed with deep
layers of newspaper to prevent the honeysuckle from twining back up
around our new tree, then scoured the yard for logs to form the sides
of the bed. After filling the bed with half frozen compost, I
called it a day --- Mark was visiting a friend and there's no way I'm
cutting down the old plum by myself. Stay tuned for part two, the
planting of the plum.
If you find yourself bored with plain old egg
shaped watermelons then maybe you might be ready to take the square
melon challenge.
The first thing you need is a collapsible square box, which does not
look easy to build, but if you can spare 90 bucks you can have one
mailed to you from Michigan.
A square watermelon sells for over 80 dollars in Japan and most people buy them as a
decoration. If a guy could get half that here at a farmers market it
might just be a new potential cash crop for your backyard.
Mark
is hibernating today as he refills his mind with quiet, but luckily I
have about twenty things I want to post about. Tonight, you get
the photos I promised you this morning.
My predator eyes hanging method is simple --- a wire strung through the
hole in the unit which slips over a screw I drove in various posts and
tree trunks. When scaring away deer with the predator eyes, it's
essential to move them every few days so the deer don't get used to
them, so I'm hoping the easy hang approach will make moving them simple
enough that I'll do it in a timely manner. I appreciate those of
you who commented this morning about your good experiences with the
product. I hope I have equally good luck!
On an unrelated note, for those of you who have chickens, I highly recommend that you check out
Harvey
Ussery's website. I've noticed recently that whenever I read
an article I really like in the Backyard Poultry Magazine or Mother
Earth News, Harvey is the author. Specifically, you must check
out his article about a Vermont composting facility which breeds chickens
on mounds of compost and manure with no added storebought feed ---
this is something I may have to try out on a much smaller scale once
our manure source has their next load ready for us!
Tomorrow evening, we'll return you to your regularly scheduled male
perspective of the farm.
After 4.3 inches of rain in
eight days, I have to admit that I'm considering asking the rain gods
to hold off for a day or two. I wore tevas for my farm chores
this morning --- no reason to soak my boots when mud will end up
squelching between my toes anyway. The yard is full of standing
water, the creek is still far too high to drive out and bring in our
clean laundry and linux laptop.
Instead, I installed the Nite
Guard Predator Eyes Daddy sent me for my
birthday --- thank you, Daddy! Despite the abysmal review on
Amazon, Daddy swears by these solar-powered, blinking LEDs. He
tells me they keep away the deer, and at this point I'm ready to try
anything. Once I bring the laptop in from the car, I'll try to
remember to post an image of my installation setup --- I decided to go
a lot simpler than Daddy's tripod design, instead just putting screws
at several locations around the yard and hanging the predator eyes from
a wire.
In other news, today is my thirtieth birthday! Joey gave me
another stunning birthday present --- he fixed the comments system on
our blog! Check it out and leave me a comment --- I look forward
to hearing a lot more from you all now that it's easier.
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