Summer Solstice

Happy summer solstice! As always it’s been far too long since I have written. I truly need to learn that I don’t need to write quite so much when I make a post.

Streamlining my writing is hard. I want to say every little thing, I want to fix every spelling error right as it happens, I want to include only the very best images. But I really need to get past that and learn to just write more regularly.

Today, being the summer solstice, is one of the handful of pagan holidays I celebrate. It’s a tough one – there’s no corresponding holidays on the American calendar. The only corresponding religious holiday is “Midsummer” – or a celebration of the birth of St. John – an obscure and rarely noted celebration that almost nobody knows about let alone celebrates. But in pagan cultures, celebrating the seasons and especially the solstices is a big deal. There’s just no culture available for the summer one in the US. There’s not a single major holiday that makes it easier or is even close to the date. Want to decorate your house in lights, stars, and have a fire for Yule? That’s easy! That’s stuff that got absorbed into Christmas from paganism so it’s available commercially everywhere. Want to have a golden cloth or summer herbs for making an amulet on the summer solstice? Tough out of luck. You’re lucky if garden centers are even still carrying the herbs you need so late in the season.

But pagan celebrations always make me happy. They have such a deep focus on being spiritual, feeling happy about your world, celebrating with people… Not to mention their deep connection to agriculture and the seasons. It always makes me feel a little more at peace to celebrate them, and a little more hyped for homesteading. Being pagan often lends itself to a desire to create and build and maintain with one’s own hands. Fae, deities and spirits generally appreciate things made with old-timey love, rather than a purchase. You can’t exactly give a fairy a gift card to Starbucks. So I find a thread of homesteading and older skillsets tends to run deep through people drawn to pagan faiths and the corresponding celebrations always make me feel a deeper connection to both nature and those old skills passed down for thousands of years. Skills on which our society is built and in which handiwork and love shine.

Today, as I said my prayers at noon (honoring the power of the sun, and welcoming the slow rebirth of winter) I thought a lot about my plants, the lifestyle I want to maintain, and why I want to maintain it. It was a good time to review what I hoped to get out of the year and reflect on my love for this lifestyle.

And speaking of this lifestyle, while we’ve had some setbacks this year I would say that the experience has generally been more positive this year. Of course terrible things still exist in the world, and even in my life… And I likely give a great deal more time and energy to such things than I can easily spare… But the homesteading has been improving over last years struggles. The garden is lush and flourishing. We may have finally resolved our Evil Groundhog problem with the capture and ultimate demise of not just a baby groundhog but the mother as well, leaving our garden in a more peaceful state. Our berry canes are just beginning to reach fruition and the garden is recovering from the attacks by said groundhogs. We’ve even stayed on top of the problems more than usual this year, such as making sure every tomato is staked and tied before they even reached 2′.

The chicken flock is slowly making it’s transition into a breeding flock of wheaten ameraucanas. I continue my search for good stock, but it’s slow going and difficult. The best stock is in Texas – on the other side of the country – and very little is available in this area. Next year I hope to have my own breedings of birds for my flock. Right now, we are still an easter egger flock and I even have a broody hen on some eggs.

And my efforts to gain tri-color rex continue to advance, admittedly slowly but present. Over the next two years we may have rapid turnover in both of our livestock stock. I hope we see real and dramatic results from that!

All around things continue to advance in the deliberate and more positive way. Though some aspects continue to provide difficulty, I hope we see better results this year than ever before!

300.

300 is how many seedlings I will need to start this year to plant my whole garden. That’s a HUGE number compared to my previous years and doesn’t even cover half the seeds that will be going into the ground, since many of them are direct-sow. For me and most of the people I know, this is some epic-levels of gardening going down.

Ok, I know for some people it’s not that impressive. Most people who do homesteading, hobby farms, farming, etc are planting whole acres. They wield small tractors, horses, or at rolling devices to till and seed. I still do all that by hand. I don’t even have a whole acre to my name, let alone available to plant. But for me, this is a huge step. The kind of step that I am hoping will lead into even larger scale production.

I finally finished the gardening layout. For reals this time. I discussed it with the boys and we agreed that it would be best to just expand the garden beds even further and we came up with the final garden layout below;

 

 

 

We added a second path, widened the original path (which is currently only 1′ wide and tedious to walk on) and are planning on expanding it to half again it’s current size. (Everything from the second path on will be new.)

We added carrots to the list of vegetables grown, and swapped out some normal onions for green onions. There’s also been some major improvements to the locations of crops grown. The spinach and regular herbs now reside where the kale once did. This helps mix up the crops a little. Kale and spinach, while both similar leafy greens with similar nutritional needs, are in different plant families. (Spinach is an amaranth, kale is a brassica.) This helps deter pests. The kale has been moved far away into the edge of the sun in front of the peas, still surrounded by dill. The dill may get shuffled a bit more into the sun because dill and carrots are not supposed to grow next to each other and they’re a bit close right now. Surprisingly, in my garden, the locations that have mid-day shade are the ones we have the most competition for. Mid-day summer sun and many plants just don’t mix around here. The carrots are taking up residence where the kale usually lives, in rows along the shadiest spot of my garden bed.

We HAVE to use raised beds, or everything floods. Most people are concerned about their raised beds drying out quickly, but we need that additional 6+ inches to lift the plants out of standing water. (Cleveland gets near-rainforest levels of precipitation each year.) We’re going to have some issues anyhow because the path is right in the wettest spot on that half of my lawn, so I have some concern about soil erosion if we get a very wet spring. Because of how massive this garden bed addition is going to be, we’re seeking out more organic matter and dirt to put in that spot. On thursday we’re going out to get bags of composted horse manure, as much as we can fit in the wee little car that Dan drives… It’ll be bagged in black plastic, which from a sustainability standpoint is maybe not so good… But I can reuse those plastic bags on the garden bed this spring to help warm my soil, kill weeds and germinate the 128 pea seeds we plan on growing. Afterwards, standard black garbage bags are recyclable. So we’ll get more than one thing out of that carbon footprint.

We’ll also be placing an order for dirt (leaf humus, sand, topsoil and compost mix) and seeking out some fresh woodchips. The woodchips are a desperately needed long-term addition to help break up the clay. A combination of sand (which I bought a few bags of recently) and wood chips do wonders for our dense, mucky orange clay that’s just 6-8 inches down in most areas. Do note, wood chips do take real amounts of time to break down. Typically I am seeing them break down significantly after 2-3 years if they have plants growing on them, a healthy worm population, and some nitrogen mixed in. Some of the bigger chips still remain, but in general they add a large amount of biomass to the soil that is essential for absorbing water, holding it over time, and draining it during floods. A 4′ high pile of woodchips, removed from my chicken pen floor a few years ago, has broken down into a 1′ pile of dirt at this point that weeds can’t resist growing in. This year, I hope to take the wood chips from my chicken pen floor to trench into the garden beds, then replace them with fresh wood chips to help keep the chicken pen cleaner and healthier.

And maybe, if you have been with us for a very, very long time… You will remember this post, showing where I once tried to grow a root garden bed, very deeply embedded in the shade. It was WAY too much shade, and so the plants never grew. But that dirt is still there, contained, waiting to be tilled up, the bed taken out, and the dirt recycled into the newest parts of my garden bed!

So plans to expand the beds, grow enough vegetables to see our needs met from our own land regularly, and have enough to can, are moving forward! I am excited to make big progress on homesteading this year and improving our over-all sustainability.

Whoops, more garden space!

I was coming back in from weeding, feeding (with compost) and pinching suckers in my garden. Dan was sitting on the old wicker couch that is slowly crumbling outdoors and when I offered him a hand up my eyes settled on a forgotten home depot bag on the bench. A slight breeze came through at that moment, blowing it open a bit. Inside were several heirloom variety seed packets… Eggplants, cucumbers, cantaloupe, winter squash, etc. The cucumber packet was puffed up like a jiffy popper, puffed out in all directions.

Oh no.

They’d been outside for WEEKS.

I tore into the bag, only to find some DOZEN of perfectly sprouted, healthy, green cucumber plants. Every Single Seed had sprouted. The winter squash was also starting to sprout and all the seeds had been wet and warm for daaaays.

Well, there’s no stopping it now. Either they germinate and grow right now, this year, or they don’t grow at all ever. But my garden bed is literally FULL!

The plants in my garden bed have grown, pretty much doubled in size, since this photo was taken, and this was just about a week ago. There’s literally no space left.

Which means digging a new patch of garden and hoping for the best. We have PLENTY of compost still, so in it went. Dan bought me a bag of sand to help break up the blue glacier bed clay that makes up most of our soil. Tomorrow we go out and finish double digging with that sand and some more compost. Then we mulch and plant every seed we can.

Whoops.

It’s SO late in the season. It makes me so sad, even though it’s only a loss of about $10 in total. I sure hope we get at least SOME delicious food out of this effort.

A proper update

I’ve been stuck indoors for the past few days with a second degree sunburn plaguing my shoulders. It started as just a normal sunburn. We went to observe some potential lands for the ecovillage, and the cloudy day when it was supposed to rain turned out to be sunny. So my pale skin turned into red skin. Then, the day after that I helped my sister with some minor home repairs and property cleanup. That day I wore sunblock… To no avail. The next day I woke up with shoulders covered in blisters so hot and angry that I could not dress. The pain is still there as the skin started peeling off before the skin underneath was ready, and now it’s like my whole shoulders are covered in a thin scab from being rug burned. It hurts.

This really set me off as we had a village meeting that evening. It really highlighted my frustration with a certain point of sexism in our society, the free the nipple movement. It’s not that I’m immodest and wanna shake my titties in front of guys, it’s a matter of comfort. If it’s extremely hot out or I have something like a second degree burn across my shoulders I shouldn’t have to strap something across my boobs (and sub sequentially, my shoulders lest it fall down) just to make a bunch of guys feel better about their lack of self control. Heat is hot. Burns hurt. These are practical, physical realities for men and women. But women are required to toss some fabric on under these conditions anyhow, and that bugs me in a big way. And while the group I was part of probably wouldn’t have cared much if I went topless, I felt uncomfortable about it anyhow. I ended up just tying some fabric around my chest in a band so it didn’t touch my shoulders… But the whole thing felt dumb.
(Fun fact, men weren’t allowed to show their nips either until the 1930’s. Prior to that, men were required to wear swimsuits that covered their chest for modesty reasons. In fact, in the 1910’s men were required to wear swimsuits that didn’t cling too tightly and may have even been required to wear skirts over their boxers so they weren’t so indecent!)

Because of the burn, I was forbidden the outdoors until I could wear a shirt without flinching again, which was about 3 days. When I came out, I found my garden beds were starting to grow with a gusto…. And so were the weeds. The birds had gotten big seemingly overnight and so had the rabbits. Turns out that being absent from your farm for half a week has big impacts!

So I finally got to go weed my garden and take some photos (my camera is still broken so I borrowed a smart phone) this week. There are some exciting updates on the farmstead itself!

Remember the sad, sad tomatoes?

Surprisingly, they all made it! Some of them are still a little on the smaller side, and some are still recovering. But there’s a huge patch of tomatoes getting bigger by the day growing in my back yard! I have started pinching suckers and blossoms from them. I’m looking to get a crop that I can harvest for canning instead of having them to eat fresh, so I’d like the plants to get extra big before they start fruiting. (I did leave a few blossoms on one plant so we could have a few to eat.)

I have some onions that got planted very late, but are starting to grow energetically. The patch looks bare from about 10′ away, but if you get close you can see literally dozens of onion sprouts peeking through! I’ve had to remind my helpers that these are onions, not weeds.

Somehow the corn made it. But with only two stalks, I’m not sure that they’ll actually pollinate and produce. They were pretty weedy. This whole bed has since been weeded.

The beans and peas are on the northmost wall of my garden bed, but because my lawn isn’t on a true North South line, they are shaded for a few hours in the morning. They’re still growing robustly despite that and are very thick. They’re starting to shade out weeds growing near by.

And speaking of shading out weeds…. The kale! The kale is growing so thickly and is producing some strong, healthy leaves! We’ve started to eat the occasional leaf on a sandwich. The weeds are struggling to grow under these crowns!

We have a few other plants not shown. The watermelons are starting to recover and spring back with lots of new growth and the strawberries are flowering again. The zucchini is flowering as well, which means delicious vegetables are right around the corner! We’ve had some very serious issues with blossom end rot in previous years… This year we planted the zucchini with a handful of crushed egg shells in the hole. Hopefully we won’t see those problems again this year. And the more wild plants like the shiso leaf, the mint, the lemon balm, the plantago and the dandelions are doing well… But they are struggling against the other, less beneficial weeds in the lawn like the cats foot. I hate that stuff.

We also have a few new faces on the farm!

Two leghorns and two australorps came to us from another farm recently. It’s been about a month and they have finished their quarantine period.  We waved goodbye to the old leghorn (who wasn’t laying), our newest chick and our chick from last year to make room for these new birds. They’re all pullets still, under 24 weeks, but the leghorns are already laying strong and their eggs are starting to normalize in size. Soon they will be in the pen with all the other birds.

We also have seven little chicks from some eggs we stuck under our broody. We set a dozen eggs, but like every hatch, there were some problem chicks that didn’t make it. We may even loose one of the ones we have now. It appears to have some unabsorbed yolk, or a small hernia. We brought it indoors to try to recover. Only time will tell. But six chicks is a nice number to have. And our broody hen, a blue Ameraucana, could not be prouder!

We had our NPIP certificate renewed last month. NPIP is the National Poultry Improvement Plan. If you read my post about vaccines, you’d know that flock health is a pretty important topic to me. NPIP is a simple test provided at a low cost to check for avian influenza and pullorum typhoid. These are both very serious conditions that threaten flocks nation wide. NPIP certification is easy… A tester comes out to test your flock. You get the pullorum result immediately with a simple blood prick test, and a throat swab goes to a lab to check for bird flu. The tester does all the work, you just hand him your chickens. In a flock of a dozen birds they may test 4 or 5 birds. Then you get a certificate.

If a test comes back positive your flock may get destroyed or permanently quarantined to keep these serious diseases from spreading.

Aside from having an official lab test and government agency reassuring buyers that you have a healthy flock (and are willing to risk the entire flock on that fact), NPIP certification is required to ship birds or hatching eggs to most states. The regulations vary a little, but if you don’t have NPIP it’s illegal to take your bird across state lines or to most poultry shows.

Our tests came back clean which means we’ll be able to offer hatching eggs for sale again! Hooray!

So, a lot of exciting and positive things are happening on the homestead this week, despite my arms screaming in pain whenever I lift them above chest level.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go strap some fabric that will assuredly catch on the dry, painful, cracking skin all across these burns to appease the masses while I travel to get some chick feed.

A small update

My camera’s battery charger is missing and my phone is no longer sending photos to my email. I am quite put-out by this as it means no more good photos taken when I am home on my ownsies. I shall have to rely on Greg’s phone to take nice pictures as mine is not a smart phone. I am also missing my tablet cable which is a bit frustrating.

But my life with gremlins aside, myself and a few others spent Saturday and Sunday moving dirt with a gusto. We double-dug the garden bed, loaded it down with as much compost as we could, stirred in some vermiculite and sand, covered it with cardboard to shade and smother any weed growth from the now-improved soil and piled some wood chips near by for future mulching.

The wood chips came from my parent’s front yard where a pair of massive 50+ foot oak trees sat, fused and entwined at their base. Mom loved that tree and would be turning in her proverbial grave to see that dad had it cut down and the stump ground without a thought on what to do with all of the glorious carbon sealed away in those respectable old trees.

Luckily (through much beration of my father for not even bothering to MENTION to his kids that he was having the tree taken down when he knew I wanted the wood, and through many calls to the tree company) I managed to save some of it. A disappointing fraction of the whole. A few dozen massive logs from the top section of a pair of trees with trunks so large I could not wrap my arms around them and taller than my parents 3-story-house. A slab perhaps large enough to make an end table. And a substantial pile of finely ground wood chips from the huge stumps the trees left behind.

Those wood chips will become part of my garden bed, feeding microbes, worms and plants in turn. Those plants will go on to feed me (or my animals which also go on to feed me). And in some small way I will absorb some of the biological uniqueness of that tree into my own being… Or so some distant romantic part of me would like to believe. The chips will be the carbon to my over-loaded nitrogen heavy compost. They will be a mulch for the top to keep the water in. And a massive amount also went into the chicken pen where it will keep my birds happy and healthy.

What’s especially nice is that they are very fine wood chips, mostly being perhaps similar in size to those you might get if you hit a pencil repeatedly with a hammer. And they’ve been sitting in my driveway, aging, for a few months… Which means that they also are already starting to break down. Indeed, in many ways they look more like dirt than my compost does!

So my garden bed is ready. In a week, the cardboard will come off, the dirt will be raked, the mulch will be spread and the plants will go in the ground. Hooray! It’s a shame that in the meantime, the weather is cold and terrible.

I have been making a mad attempt to harden off my millions of tomatoes. They have been sitting on windowsills outside my few windows that get sun. Tonight it is in the 40’s so I tried to bring at least some of them in. In the process I dropped one of my plastic pots with 5+ seedlings in it off the windowsill and it broke. The tomatoes were damaged and scattered. Some may be salvageable. I replanted them all, so we shall just have to wait and see.

And we cleaned rabbit cages today. Our winter was late and only ended recently. The rabbit bedding builds up a bit in the winter because it often freezes and it’s hard to handle shovels with metal bits when it is 10*F outside. So today all the rabbits got moved into cleaner territories, and we also gave the water bottles a thorough cleaning with soap, hot water and a wee bit of bleach on the insides. One of my NZWs seems to be having some health problems with a back leg. I’m not really sure from what. It could be that she injured it in the cage bars or some other accident. It’s hard to notice because rabbits are often still when they are relaxed, but she hops a bit oddly and has trouble getting off her side. We’ll be keeping a close eye on her but it could mean a cull, which would solidify my desire to move solely into purebred standard Rex in several beautiful colors. I would breed in my remaining NZWs that have shown such robust health for a bit of diversity, and breed them out to be purebred Rex.
The only requirement for purebred animals in the rabbit world is that they meet breed standard for 3 generations. The majority of my rabbits aren’t purebred anyhow since I don’t know their history. To some people, meeting breed standard and breeding true is enough to be considered purebred, which my rabbits do. This method of record keeping actually benefits rabbits on the whole as it means that breeders can easily increase genetic diversity, health and production in different bloodlines. We don’t run into nearly as many pesky health problems from closed herdbooks as other “pure” animals do such as horses and dogs.

It would be a good shift, I think, to move into purebred Rex. I love their furs and NZWs are common enough that I could bring them back easily if I ever wanted them. We shall just have to wait and see.

Garden Madness

Working on a garden can be very strenuous, but I have been finding it to be extremely rewarding this year. I shifted gears with my garden this year and instead of just sticking plants into the ground and hoping they would work I’ve been trying to focus on growing just a handful of things well. But the resulting time spent researching, frantically working, and tenderly caring for plants has been pushing my limits. So much has been going on that this will be a big post… Hopefully to go with my big garden this year!

In previous years I had some success with Red Russian Kale (which is perfectly suited to our cold climate and will even over-winter our heavy snows) and various squash plants. The squash plants like my lack-luster care so much they grow whether or not I bother to plant them and I often have volunteer acorn squashes popping out of my garden. The biggest problems I have had is powdery mildew and blossom end rot. A bit of research says that if I mulch my plants and give them extra calcium that they will grow into happier, healthier plants and rot less. So kale and squash; plant with some ground egg shells and top off with some wood chips. Check. We’re all good. Beyond that I can practically toss them in the ground and ignore them. I have two leggy zucchini seedlings starting to sprawl in their seedling pots and about a dozen direct-sown kale seedlings starting to pop out of some weedy ground outside. I am feeling pretty confident about caring for these buggers.

Next to these lovely zucchini is a watermelon and some corn. I think my corn seed has been rendered sad by age as only two of the dozen seeds I plants germinated. So that will likely be a “stick it in the ground and hope it grows” scenario. I have to pick my battles and learning how to grow corn for two sad plants is not a priority. The watermelon seems to be doing well… But I only planted it because I wanted to see if I could get some fruit and, really, I have lots of garden space available. I did a bit of learning but thus far none of it has stuck. We’ll just have to see on that plant.

Somewhere down the line I had pretty much given up on m pepper plants. But right when I did, two tiny, waxy leaved seedlings popped out of the same cup. They are heirloom bell peppers and in theory maybe I can save a new crop of seeds from these two. The Adam and Eve of my own little local pepper landrace. They have been living under the heat lamp ever since, but haven’t grown much. Fingers crossed I get anything out of them.

The plants I have decided to focus on learning to grow extremely well are tomatoes. And so far so good. I had 30 seedlings as of this morning, meaning not only did my 27 seedling survive transplant shock from tiny seed cups into large pots filled with compost and soil… But actually the soil being looser allowed for three MORE tomato seedlings to come up in those same pots.

These tomatoes are perhaps a few inches above the soil and growing fast. You can see (in the big pot on the lower right, nest to the lowest plant) two of the tiny seedlings that decided to emerge after transplanting. Now that the seedlings are in larger pots, there’s a daily scramble to keep them in the sun. As I mentioned previously, our house has two south facing windows, which are partially shaded. So every morning it’s a small scramble to move them to my east-facing windows to catch the morning sun, to crowd them in my singular south facing window (as seen above) for mid-day, then shift them to the west-facing bay windows with added artificial light for the evening and over night. To utilize my extremely small space, I have been placing plants both inside and outside of the window. This also hardens them off simultaneously. Despite being hardened off and transplanted at the same time, they’ve been surprisingly resilient and I haven’t lost a single one.

I feel like I can learn to care for more than just one plant at a time, so I am also going to be attempting potatoes in feed bags and strawberries this year. For the potatoes I shall be using some very-sprouted Yukon Gold organic potatoes I have in my cupboard right now and some seed potatoes from a friend. But while I was learning how to tackle this project, I discovered a big problem in my gardening.

My compost sucks.

I have a dozen breeder rabbits, a dozen kits and a dozen chickens at any given time. My grass clippings and leaf litter tend to be allowed to rest and decompose right on my lawn to add mulch and biomass to our sad, clay-heavy soil. You would think that all of this messy bedding would make AMAZING compost. But it doesn’t. It comes out yellow-ish, smelly, wet, clumpy and gross. In the videos of potatoes their compost was crumbly and beautiful. And while the earthworms SWARM in my compost, it’s just not broken down like theirs is.

And I think I know why. Compost relies on a carbon/nitrogen ratio to break down. Too much of either can drastically hinder the process. Most compost piles have a lack of nitrogen, and so trouble shooting for compost piles says to add nitrogen in the form of urine, manure, or greens. But these are compost piles that people make to toss vegetable scraps in from their kitchen or weeds, to put on flower beds. Not compost piles made from various forms of animal waste to feed a massive vegetable garden.

So I ran a quick mental calculation. The bulk of my compost is rabbit bedding. My rabbits bed in hay (including some alfalfa) which has a 20:1 C:N ratio. Which is OK for breaking down into compost, but is a bit nitrogen heavy. No problem on it’s own. Another big chunk of my compost is chicken manure plus shredded newspaper which SHOULD be about a 70:1 ratio… But the newspaper often clumps and doesn’t break down. So I often add leaves, straw, or hay as bedding to break it up and help keep my coop clean. Resulting in a ratio of about 60:1. I have some table scraps, which go in and probably have a ratio of about 20:1, based on what ends up in my compost. Plus there is the occasional dead animal, feathers, dog poop, etc. which probably has a C:N of around 8:1. It comes out to about 40:1 and that makes up about 1/4th of my compost pile. Combined with 3/4ths hay, it should be a perfect ratio of around 25:1.
But the other 3/4ths aren’t JUST hay. Perhaps 1/3rd of that bedding is actually rabbit poop which has a C:N ratio of 15:1. And then there’s the urine. An adult rabbit may drink a single 32oz bottle in a day. A mom with kits may drink as much as 100oz a day. All of that comes out as urine, which is nearly pure nitrogen (0.6:1). There’s probably about 3.5 gallons of urine a day hitting that hay, or about 1 cubic foot every other day. Now some of that runs out of the cages into the drain in my garage. But at the end of the day, the urine completely saturates a good chunk of the bedding as well as the manure, and I’d be willing to bet that the C:N ratio of my discarded rabbit bedding averages somewhere around 10:1, and it makes up 3/4ths of my compost. Meaning that I probably have a C:N ratio of about 17:1, which is nowhere near the 25-30:1 ratio for ideal composting.
Additionally, we get a lot of rain and snow, and my compost pile is in the shade. I don’t have a lot of straw going on so air pockets are hard to create in my compost. It compacts together and breaks down very slowly because it becomes urine-soaked poo mush with bits of half-decomposed hay strewn through it. The earthworms RELISH it. There may literally be a hundred worms per square foot in my compost pile. But it’s not breaking down.

So I decided to prep a tiny batch of compost for potatoes special. I took a big tub, and mixed shredded leaves and some sifted aged wood chips into the compost. I made a small pile in the shade and I will let it rest for a few days and then stir it daily for a week or so before I plant my potatoes in it. It’s my hope that this pile will break down swiftly into the black gold that I need.

So the potatoes will be going into bags with this specially-prepped compost. And the strawberries get their own bed that’s undergone a similar treatment. I spent some time this week double-digging the spot in my lawn upon which once sat my animal tractor. It first housed three different rabbits over winter and then two half-grown hens in the spring and was an awful, gross, smelly mess of poop and rotting feed. A bit of compost, some half-rotted straw and a bit of elbow grease turned it into a good place to plant strawberries.

It’s mulched thick with straw over the top while the bed contents break down a bit. I shall probably be moving some of the straw and giving it a good fluff with the pitch fork today or tomorrow to help it along. It’s my hope to get the strawberries living in it, mulched with straw, in about a week.

It is about 4×4 feet, in lots of sunlight and so should be a rather expansive home for these six everbearing strawberry plants I picked up a few days ago. It’s my hope that they will spread and run madly throughout the bed and grow into a thick cover. While each of these plants had grown blossoms and berries on them already, my partner picked them all off while I prepped the bed so that they would put more energy towards leaves and roots. I can’t wait to see some runners taking root!

When I go to amend this year’s garden bed with compost, I shall be doing something similar. I will rake all of our yard litter (the lawn clippings and aged leaves) into my garden bed. I may sift some wood chips and add those as well. I have some vermiculite and sand to help break up the clay that I will be adding. Then I will be mixing in lots of almost-finished compost filled with worms. It’s my hope that the ground will respond rapidly to this mixture and finish breaking down the compost fast. After letting it sit for a few days and occasionally fluffing it with a pitchfork I hope to have well-rotted compost and soil that I can feel confident planting seedlings into.

Which leaves me prepping my garden bed for this work in advance. I will be having several people over on Saturday evening to re-dig the bed and mix in amendments. So yesterday Greg and I went out and built a new border for the garden bed. We actually moved the edge of the bed in by about a foot so that I would be able to reach both sides of the bed. I have long arms, but the 4-5 feet that the bed is wide is too much. So with a few garden stakes and a bit of string we marked a new edge for the bed and built a border. We dug the over-flowing soil into the bed, and dug up the old markers. We flattened the dug spot and lay down a barrier of cardboard (to help keep the border out of the soil and suppress weeds), then placed logs and stones along the line, close to the dirt. We then shoveled a small amount of wood chips over the border to help secure the logs and stones and cover the cardboard, as well as to help the border blend in. Mission complete! Border built!

After I took this photo I watered the border in and trampled it a bit to help compress everything into place. It’s my hope that it will stay put while we work the soil throughout the week and into the weekend when we amend it. I have a few friends already lined up to help me haul, dig and transport gross compost, wood chips and dirt. Hopefully this bed will look like black gold in a week’s time, just in time to get my plants in the ground. Wish me luck!

Seed Starting 2016; Tomatoes Edition

Whoa. I went to make this post and noticed that I have been doing this blog and this homesteading thing for 3 and a half years. I have butchered countless rabbits, kept a dozen different breeds of chicken, tried out more plants than I can count… And yet I STILL don’t really have this whole gardening thing down yet. I’m not really sure what I am doing wrong, but I am. This year I have a new strategy.

I am attempting to make ONE plant a major focus of my life. I have collected more mason jars in the past year than I know what to do with, see, and I want to fill them with at least one successful crop of something. Last year I picked up a lot of some 100 dirty and used mason jars, mostly wide-mouth quart size and mostly lacking rings for about $40. Then for Christmas this past year I got a box of six old-fashioned blue mason jars, two dozen pint jars (to go on top of my 2-3 dozen I already have), a ton of lids and rings and some dry-goods caps. So that brings my jar count up to some ridiculous number that I haven’t actually counter around 150. Maybe a dozen or so of those have food in them.

As such, I am seriously focusing on tomatoes this year. Very seriously. I want to fill those jars with tomato paste, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, whole tomatoes, and if I get lucky enough that my other veggies come up, some salsa as well.

My hope is that by growing a LOT of one plant, and by learning intensely about that ONE plant, I will finally get something to grow with serious success. And so I have this massive number of tomato seedlings just starting to come up.

So the first thing I learned from my previous failures; I am terrible at keeping plants watered, and preventing them from drying out. This little pre-made cheesecake lid keeps all the seedlings watered from below. I just fill this up with an inch of water and walk away for a couple of days. The fact that the seed cups are all so tightly bunched together also helps retain moisture. The natural materials of the seed cups wicks the moisture up to the seeds (like a paper towel with the corner dipped lightly in a pool of water sucks it up into the whole towel), while gravity keeps them from being over watered. I do not water the surfaces, I just pour some water down one of the sides between the seed cups. So far this has been a success. I am using old seeds and don’t expect all of them to sprout.

In previous years I tried multiple different methods for growing seedlings that ended in various forms of disaster. Lamps in the basement where I forgot about them, plastic covered boxes in windowsills that grow mold relentlessly, spaced out containers that dried out, containers that were too big or too small… I have bought potting mix, seed starting mix, sterilized my own compost…. Bleh. So much work that amounted to a fat lot of nothing. I want plants that will live with easy to use methods that work for me. There’s a concept in rabbit raising; get rabbits that are already living and reproducing in the conditions that you want to raise them in. So I want to try to grow plants and start saving seeds that will handle my growing methods. But I also need to understand that just like rabbits can’t eat a diet of nothing but bananas, I have to cater to my plants. And the plants need light, heat, water and air. They need care that they just won’t get in my basement or in a grow box. I need something that’s easy and idiot proof and plants that will grow under those conditions.

This year I decided to hell with if my neighbors think I am growing something sketchy in my windows and set up the plants in my living room, right in my front bay window, with nice bright, hot, lights on them. Since I don’t have enough lights, when I get a lot of sun I just shift them into a window that has light coming into it. The windows in my house are really awkward. My street is approximately north/south, which means the front of my house faces the west (sunset) and the back faces east (sunrise). And my south facing windows face my neighbor’s house right across their driveway (maybe a dozen feet away), which blocks a huge amount of the light. I have a grand total of TWO south facing windows in my whole house, and they are both pretty useless. So in the morning the plants go in my kitchen/dining room windows if there’s a good deal of sun shining… And in the evening they stay in the bay windows. During mid-day, if the stars are aligned just so, I get light in my singular first-floor south-facing widow and they go there (as they are in the first picture).

Unfortunately I did manage to screw up even that. After the seedlings sprouted I put them under a bigger, brighter lamp than my little desk lamp I was putting precariously close to them before. But the lamp put out TOO much heat and managed to crisp 2/3 of the seedlings in a cup to death. I didn’t notice it until I went to take the pictures… Which made it a great time to take photos of my failure in action. Yay? The third seedling in that cup, despite the heat stress, is now bouncing back. Mostly.

Too close!

Just right!

The other downside to this method has been fungi. I used last year’s failed empty pot soil mixed with some organic potting soil that has been sitting outside for a while and I didn’t sterilize any of it. I don’t want to have to bake my dirt in and over at 200*F for 20 minutes or some other nonsense in order to grow plants in it. So I didn’t. And while I’m getting some mushrooms, it’s NOTHING compared to when I was trying the whole plastic grow box method that retained moisture on every surface. So far I have just pinched off the various fungi and removed them. They’ve been sparse at best.

I also have a tray that you can see in the background with some other veggies. Even I know better than to put all my eggs in one basket as it were so I’m still giving the other plants a shot. But I’m not really as invested.

Peppers (hot and bell), zucchini, watermelon, cucumbers and corn are all making an attempt to grace my garden this year… And I tried direct-seeding some “purple” broccoli in my front lawn where I am attempting to grow some flowers in a newly made bed. I have a tiny bit of one zucchini peeping out from one of these pots (third from the left, top row) if you look closely.

I chose watermelon because I really, REALLY would like to get some fruit this year! I will also me attempting to build a small(ish) strawberry bed again this year… Once it’s officially not snowing anymore that is. That could be another couple of weeks since we had snow, oh, yesterdayish? The last bed of strawberries got trampled by dogs. Alas. This one will need better protection.

Fingers crossed I get some delicious produce this year!

To Make An Ecovillage

Ecotopia; A vision for the Future

Well, that’s the goal anyhow… Actually producing one is another matter entirely.

Let’s start with some clear definitions on this project. I was rather vague about what an ecovillage even is and what the project we’re pursuing is last time I posted so I shall be more up front this time.

An Ecovillage is an intentional community (a group of people with a desire to deliberately come together to support one another as a community under similar belief systems as a society) where the focus is on being sustainable and ecologically responsible. Ours would be a large plot of land, many aces, in northeast Ohio. People could come and build sustainable, community, and tiny houses on our land, grow plants and animals, collect water in rain barrels, hunt for deer, use kilns to fire clay, wander into a shared root cellar and generally homestead. Resources would be shared, from food, to money and cars and decisions would be majority vote or even consensus. Ours would be an egalitarian society, a sort of utopian socialism that puts both communism and capitalism to shame. The sort of society that is praised and lauded and exists in the most egalitarian and democratic places in the world with the lowest poverty rates and highest job satisfaction percentages. Places like Norway and Sweeden which have the highest rates of happiness for their citizens ever seen anywhere. Nobody would ever get rich or become powerful in our village, but nobody would ever go hungry either. Nobody would ever be without a job, a home, or medical care. Nobody would be standing on the shoulders of the poor, rising above… But so too would nobody be those carrying that burden of the rich and powerful.

Utopian idealism? Maybe. But tell that to the Nordic countries who consistently rank highest on objective surveys for the best places in the world to live and work and have children. Tell that to Bernie Sanders, who is now one of the top presidential candidates for THIS country who hold the same idealism, when nobody thought he could win. Tell that to the statistics that show that getting an education is the most affordable in socialist/democratic places like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, New Zealand and France. Tell that to an America that is the third WORST developed country to try to afford an education in. People want that life. And we’re not stupid, we know there will be problems and concerns. They’re things we’re already working through. But we are sick of income gaps and the creeping power of the government. We want something better, something more fulfilling, something that’s more natural and speaks to the heart. Most of all we’re willing to give up gas stations, fast food and HD flat screen TVs with a DVR and Blu Ray to get it.

In reality, many Ecovillages exist world-wide and are already practicing various forms of this utopian idealism. One of the most famous in the US is Dancing Rabbit in Rutledge Missouri. Two hundred and eighty something acres of nothing in the middle of nowhere, deliberately removed from society in the creation of something new. An egalitarian and sustainable commune filled with 50+ college age kids, families and open minded people interested in experimenting for the future. Another is The Farm, one of the largest communities around with a focus on religious and spiritual aspects, wrapped up in a church-like setting akin to a new-age Amish lifestyle. The Amish themselves could be said to like in a sort of ecovillage, and indeed, certainly consist of an intentional community.

Each of these places has some aspect about them we don’t like. Strict religious requirements that lead to a cult-like feeling, a separation from the modern world that leads to questions about openness and a lack of publication or lifestyles that are extremist that could cause a lack of effectiveness and membership. And most importantly? We love our city and our area, our hometown of Cleveland Ohio, one of the most impoverished major cities in the US. And we want to be able to effect the people here most of all.

To that extent I brought together a group of people that may be interested in the project; friends and family, people passionate about gardens and animals, about recycling and social change, about composting and peace. And we talked. And we talked.

And slowly we started to see something take shape. Mission statements were drafted, tossed out, and re-drafted. Technologies were considered. Research on crop yields, on building and agricultural laws, on natural building techniques, on emissions calculations, on natural biocides, on water management, on holistic animal management, on forestry… The list goes on and on and the amount that just I have learned over the past year would not fit into a dozen text books. Numbers were calculated and calculated again, adjustments were made, costs projected…

And thus fell our harsh reality. We just don’t have the immediate start up capital that we want to achieve our current goals. Not that we’re sitting on nothing, and don’t have plans the generate more. But we are pondering the purchase of 40 acres and a mule, here, not 5 acres near a suburb. Because there are nearly 10 of us that want to bring the project together, that want open spaces and forest, that want to garden and raise animals, that want to live in the socially just society we are trying to build, free of sexism and classism and racism, and all the other “isms” that plague our society… We just can’t get a small property, not if we want to truly be a village. Not if we want to open up applications for other people. Not if we want to change the world.

To solve this problem, we’re going to be holding a crowdfunding campaign and separately seeking out other people interested in our idealism who want to help us fund the project in exchange for a place in our society. We have enough to put the down payment on a property. A big one, 50-100 acres of land to house a small village worth of people. The kind of place I can invite my readers or fellow homesteaders to come live with me on, in our own little slice of heaven. We could even break ground THIS year! Imagine for a moment the dream; growing food, living in a home in the woods with a wood burning stove, and having a client base right next door who always wants to buy them from you. Well, that’s what it’s going to be like. That’s what I dream about at night while falling asleep; getting to grow food and feed people and as a result of that work my needs are taken care of. I couldn’t care less if there were green slips of paper involved in the middle of it or not. Who cares? If my needs are met and I am happy, what else matters?

But we do not have the money for the infrastructure to really achieve our goals… Solar panels, cooking oil cars, electric tractors or draft animals, start up herds of anything we want to raise at all… Chickens, goats, cattle, pigs… Plant heirlooms and feed people who live on the land with us. Create community spaces, buildings to serve as places of worship or learning, or to hold meetings in. That’s what we want to do. We want our life to be abundant and flowing and natural and beautiful. Hopefully we can get the ball rolling on funding the project. We’re certainly willing to put our money where our mouth is!

What about you? What do you want out of life? Would you live in an ecovillage? How would you raise the money to fund your dreams?

Garden Changes 2014

Homesteading can be such a slow process sometimes. Last year I was just getting my first litters of rabbits, just starting to really learn. This year, though the rabbits are producing well, winter feels like a waiting game and our recent burst of temps in the 40s hasn’t helped with that. By the end of the week we will be in to 20s with snow again, but all I can do is dream of spring!

This year I have once again placed an order for heirloom seeds and I will be ordering a truck load of dirt to expand the gardens. In these moments of quiet without much going on I have time to reflect on the changes I need to make.

Last year;
The Good!
Tomatoes grown from store bought seedlings and Red Russian Kale did extremely well. We got lots of tomatoes for a while and the Kale is STILL growing!
The random modern jalepeno plant I picked up produced quite well!
Strawberries did very well if somewhat infrequent. They also spread significantly and we expect they will come back very strong in the spring.
Our Basil and mint thrived, flowered, seeded, and then flowered and seeded again! Herbs do well here.
The grapes were delicious, but didn’t give as many as we would have liked. We will try cleaning up the area around them to reduce diseases.
Everything that came out of our garden was delicious!

The bad…
I got the cold weather crops into the ground too slowly. Most of them didn’t grow at all over the spring and by the time they really took hold it was broiling hot out and the seedlings died.
I started some of my plants indoors and they were tropical plants. The result was they didn’t get enough heat to take off as we keep our house at a cool 62 most of the time.
The soil, filled with sand to make it “loose” in my root bed compacted severely. After spending all year in the ground my carrots, beets and onions gave me plenty of tops and only a few inches of roots and were constantly trying to force their way up out of the garden beds!
The corn grew surprisingly well for months, but the pot it was in was too small for three budding corn plants. By the time they could be transplanted they were so crowded they never really took hold outside. Then they got dug up by my dog.
The arugula we got sucked. The flavor was far too strong and it bolted very easy. Not even the rabbits wanted it anymore!
I didn’t trim most of the plants back properly, giving them real time to grow before trying to fruit again and again.
I got some veggies in abundance and did not have a way to process and store them for later use and so they simply went to the animals.
Because I did not turn my compost pile, it needs extra time to sit post stirring before being used a lot.

The Ugly?
My zucchini, pumpkins and cucumbers all had strange issues I have yet to identify the cause of, but its not just me. My sisters cucumbers grew equally strangely.
-The cucumbers grew pale, with the top half growing thick and round and the bottom half staying small and tightly curled. Then the plant eventually just started dying from the roots up, leaves and stems drying up and turning pale.
-The zucchini grew quite well, giving us several large fruits before suddenly the fruits stopped growing properly. The plant itself seemed healthy but the fruits would grow to about 6 inches before the ends of the fruits would start rotting away. Late in the season the plant also developed powdery mildew.
-The pumpkin grew a single vine which turned pale, fast. That vine then produced one little blossom and died.
-My whole lawn is still a bog, even after the ammendments last year.

So this year there are some things I will be doing again to bring my lawn and garden around properly!

The gardens and lawn will be amended heavilly early in the year. Probably when our next big week long break in the weather is scheduled. This is our biggest change!
I will be bringing in a huge batch of wood chips again… And double digging them into my planned garden sites into the existing, clay heavy soil. They will offer some mass, absorbtion and drainage to the back yard. They will also be scattered to fill in low areas, wet areas, and in the chicken pen to add to their deep litter which was so effective over the past year. The number one thing people are shocked about with my chickens is that they Do Not Smell. That is because of their deep litter of wood chips!
On top of the double dug soil and wood chips I will spread my current garden soil out. The leaf humus was combined with the feces of many meat chickens over the months and has turned into a rich, thick, black soil that is high in nitrogen. Seeds from other plants, roots from weeds, spilt scratch grain and general garden litter is prevelant in this soil now and I no longer want it on top where such things can take hold and spread. Instead this will add to the general nutrient level of the soil and will help to raise the general height of the garden beds.
On top of that will go a thick layer of this past years compost, stirred and rotted all winter to make sure it has broken down properly!
On the topmost layer of the garden beds will go a mixture of leaf humus, topsoil and sand. The topsoil/sand mix I find to be too thick and compacts too easilly, while the opposite is true of leaf humus. A mixture of the two should be ideal for delicate seedlings, retaining moisture and draining properly. The mix will be mostly leaf humus still, but a bit of topsoil and sand will give it some real grip and support for seedlings!
Individual areas of the garden bed will be lightly amended for the individual plants. Egg shells will be ground down for the spinach crop, magnesium and other required trace minerals added to the squash area, etc. Since all the soil is being tilled together and altered heavilly, there will be no significant crop rotation this year.
We will be positioning our plants more appropriately for our environment. Last year we accidentally planted our tomatoes in the shade, our delicate greens in the sun, and everything else was a bit scattered. Now that we know where the shade falls we will make our placements in a more effective manner!

We will also be doing something very new to us. We will be using “cover crops” and nurse crops. We ordered a large amount of radishes and red clover to plant with other plants in order to give them support and extra nutrients as they grow. We will also be putting in at least one large flower bed in our front and side lawns and using a clover cover crop there as well. We will have medicinal, edible and bee attracting plants such as Echanacha and sunflowers. It is my hope to build a top bar hive (or two?) And place them on my garage roof in an attempt to attract and capture swarms of wild, local honey bees.

The last major change is how we grow our seedlings and handle our early season crops. They will still grow in toilet paper roll seed starters, but they will be placed in our terrarium with our snake. This is a glass box, surrounded on one side with aluminium, and always has a heat lamp shining into it! This should give our plants the heat and light to grow, grow, GROW into huge seedlings, strong enough to withstand the hardening off and transplant to outdoors. After that, when they finally move to their garden beds, they will have small hoop houses over them for the first month before the temperatures finally rise up enough to support the crops without them.

There will also be a few thing we did right that we will be doing again! We will be getting a few more strawberry plants and expanding the garden bed there. We would like strawberries to become a major cover crop for our lawn! We will be planting a LOT more kale this year. We will be putting down woodchips anywhere we can. We will continue to harvest local, wild plants… And next year we will make extra sure to have enough jars and freezer space to store the harvest!

What are your garden plans for the year? Now is the time to plan! I hope we all get bountiful harvests next year!

New Produce Regulations Threaten Small Farms

I hate to have such a news-y blog post but our great, grand money-grubbing government and FDA has done it again. They’re overhauling our food regulation system only for fresh produce, and it could seriously effect small farms. Some of us could loose our only real opportunities for profit because of this bill they are proposing. Currently it has a heavy focus on regulating fresh produce production with no focus on regulating big industry farming with accountability in areas such as corn or dairy.

The bill is called “Standards for the Growing, Harvesting, Packing, and Holding of Produce for Human Consumption”.

Things like this slip by many of us who are just getting into the industry (and many of us who aren’t) with no notice. This bill has been in proposal for months now and yet I am only just now hearing about it? They’re not making these things known to small farmers. This does not show up on the evening news. There’s nobody delivering pamphlets about it. And because of a lack of exposure there’s no campaign to make these terrible regulations STOP before they get worse. The best part is? It takes the better part of a week to read all the nearly 550 pages of the bill and understand them all. How on earth are we supposed to even propose a carefully written comment to our government about the poor management of a bill that, because we spend all our time farming, we don’t even have time to READ THE BILL. Ignorance is how they push it past us, and we should not tolerate it!

This bill will cost small farmers thousands of dollars a year. In the proposal itself it says that it will cost “very small farms” (previously in the bill suggested to be people who SELL less than 25K/yr in produce, not even who make 25K/yr profit) nearly $5000 annually. That means it could take what little profit you make and sweep it away if you’re a very small farm, especially an urban farm.

The bill is very vague on it’s regulations in regards to small farms. Most of us have direct accountability for our food anyhow. If I sell you a chicken and it makes you sick, well, then I’m screwed. You know exactly where that chicken came from and you’re gonna tell everyone I sell chickens that make people sick. We don’t need more regulations because we already have the highest standards from the highest level of accountability and transparency in our food production.
Now they’re imposing regulations on small farms that, due to poor wording, could make it so that many farms cannot sell “value added” products such as chopped bagged salad mixes, jams, jellies, pickles and other canned goods, grain mixes, milled grains, dries fruits or roasted nuts. These products would make your small farm a “food production facility” and subject to dozens of more regulations that would cost you thousands of dollars to meet each year; more than what most of us make profit-wise. Some small farms may not even be able to sell regular produce because they use things like saved rain water for their plants.

This same bill is coming from the organization that has allowed companies like Monsanto to control our food supply, that has banned raw milk because factory dairy production can’t meet safe raw milk standards, that is run and paid for by nothing but retired big agriculture CEOs pushing their own agenda… By the same organization that thinks it’s OK to pump our animals full of hormones, to feed calves cow’s blood in place of milk, and has NO regulations on a whole range of chemically and genetically “enhanced” plants that are banned in over 50 other countries. You’ll notice that this bill does NOT regulate those things at all. It almost exclusively effects fresh produce.

Please note that the comment period for this bill is only until September of this year. It’s only open that long because of a 90-day extension and it’s only JUST NOW showing up in our news at all. Take a moment out of your day, even just to write a few lines on this to our government and the FDA to express our displeasure with them once again trying to run small business farms into the ground. If you want to take more action, contact all your family and friends. There are less than two thousand comments on it right now, and we can make that number skyrocket. Share this through your social media, through e-mail, ask people to just take ten seconds out of their day to write something as simple as “Please re-word this bill to make sure that small farms are protected. I support my local small farms and they are concerned about how this bill will impact their already small profits.” It only takes a moment and it makes all the difference in the world.

Support your local small farms and businesses. Write a comment. Make sure the FDA knows how you feel about it. Do you eat local, organic, sustainable produce? If you don’t say something that could no longer exist in just a few years. Don’t let that happen; make sure your voice is heard!

Huffpost article on the bill;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-miller/for-farmers-farmers-market_b_3716429.html?utm_hp_ref=green

Comment on the bill now!

http://www.regulations.gov/#!submitComment;D=FDA-2011-N-0921-0087

The entire 547 page proposed bill can be seen here;

https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2013-00123.pdf

 

Let’s fix this!