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| The first salad harvest of the year! |
Holy scha-moley, it felt like warmer weather would never come, and in the past few weeks we’ve been steamrolled by some pretty intense heat. That, coupled with some intermittent storms, has made our homestead look like a slow-motion explosion of plants. Cucumber seedlings burst from the ground, yarrow flowers unfurl overnight, the buckwheat we planted weeks ago grows an inch a day, and our trees are leafing out like crazy. Summer is practically here!
Here are some of our notable projects this past month:
Making trellises.
As I began looking at my list of plants I wanted to grow, I realized that we needed trellises. Lots and lots of trellises. So we headed out to the hardware store to gather materials. We drove some posts, strung some wire, and created these three trellises for tomatoes, cucumbers, and watermelon.
Then, since we still had more tomatoes to plant, we rigged up these trellises with old rebar and dumpster-dived panels. Look at all that nice vertical growing space!
Transplanting starts.
After weeks of anxiously watching the temperatures, I finally knew that it was warm enough to plant my summer crops. Everything I grew from seed (that survived)— peppers, tomatoes, and basil— plus some plants that we purchased, are now in the ground and thriving.
Planting summer crops.
Corn, garden beans, black beans, butternut squash, pumpkin, and all sorts of flowers got put in the ground this month— as well as the starts we bought from a festival we just attended. (See below.)
Creating a simple greywater system for our bathtub.
Now that we have a bazillion trees and other plants in our backyard, we are using a lot more water than before. Zach was growing frustrated by watching perfectly good water spiral down the drain while he was showering, so he set out on a mission to figure out how to get water from the tub to our yard.
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| Foraging nettles |
After a lot of research and some false starts, Zach figured out an ingenious system using an ordinary garden hose. I’ll post detailed instructions in a later blog post if anyone wants to duplicate it. It’s nice to be able to shower knowing that the water will be used again!
Foraging food.
After cooking with dandelion greens for a couple weeks, I was emboldened to branch out. The stinging nettles in the woods near our house are finally big enough to harvest, so we spent one morning foraging them, along with some garlic mustard, a highly-invasive weed that has garlic-scented leaves. We dried some nettle and made some delicious pesto with the rest. I’m hooked on free food!
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| Musicians at the festival |
Attending the Baker Creek Spring Planting Festival.
This deserves a whole blog post (update: check it out here!)— what an awesome time! The seed company we buy from hosts a heirloom plant festival every year, and we drove down to the Ozarks to check out the live music, international speakers, greenhouse tours, and tons of vendors selling heirloom plants. We bought a bunch of sweet potato slips, some perennial greens, strawberries, and a hardy fig tree.
Building a sweet potato bed.
Coming home with the festival with 25 sweet potato starts, we decided to build a bed to suit them! We managed to complete this foot-deep, 4’x12’ raised bed in one afternoon, thanks to my dad helping us haul lumber and these handy-dandy blocks that make building a raised bed a cinch.
Happy May, you guys!
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