Homestead Update 3/28/2020: Spring Is Not Quarantined

The kale is a-growin'!

I don't have to tell you it's been a crazy month. The whole global pandemic thing is not only causing death and throwing a serious wrench in everyone's plans, but stirring up a giant cloud of anxiety and helplessness and paralysis that often feels suffocating. All too often I find myself glued to social media, willing my stress and anxiety to make things better.

Nectarine blossoms— our tree was covered in all sorts of bees and wasps today!

Fortunately, though, my garden has other plans for me. More than ever, I've been struck by what an incredible privilege it is to have a bit of earth to garden. A place to grow food, a place to play in the dirt, a place to sit and watch birds picking at my compost pile and squirrels digging holes in my garden beds. Our fruit trees are green with buds, and the nectarine tree has unfurled pink blossoms. The elderberry is sending up shoots. I'm finding mint poking up several yards from where I planted it. Our stinging nettle (a tasty wild green) has propagated itself all along our side yard. Our little suburban homestead is bursting with abundance, even with very minimal tending, and I don't think I've ever been more grateful for that.

Elderberry

Yesterday I gave a snapshot of what our backyard looks like, so today I thought I'd start with a quick panorama of our front yard. We have big plans for this lovely patch of earth!

Empty garden bed (still need to figure out what to do with it) with an asparagus bed at the end. Chives are growing nicely! See next photo to hear about the very green grass...

Our bed of winter rye cover crop— it's been this color all winter! (Plus some volunteer kale.) We're hoping to plant summer crops here in May (perhaps a Three Sisters guild of corn, beans, and squash).

The northern side of our yard, with our hardy fig, lots of volunteer kale, a smattering of spring greens, and two hazels.

Our elderberry and strawberry bed

Other things we've been up to…

Digging a pond

Zach has been wanting to make a pond in our yard for multiple years now ("But where will I grow my tomaaaaaatoes?!" I've been whining), and a couple weeks ago, he finally dug one in the southeast corner of our backyard! It took him a couple hours and he hit some sort of water pipe (even though the utility guys didn't mark anything there), but we now have a pond-in-progress! We decided against using a plastic pond liner, and Zach's been experimenting with using clay to seal it off, with limited success. In the meantime, we're running rainwater from our garage roof into the pond, and will be getting some water plants soon to fill in the edges. I'm excited to see how the biodiversity in our yard will increase when this is up and running!

Spring crops!

My spring crops have sprouted, and some of them are getting tiny true leaves— maybe I'll be eating some fresh chard, spinach, carrots, and radishes soon! In the meantime, I'm making good use of the perennial greens: kale (which survived the winter), dandelion, violet leaves, clover, and henbit have all made their way into my pesto this week, and soon I'll be able to harvest plantain, stinging nettle, and (hopefully) asparagus. We're hoping to add more perennial crops to our garden this year, but they are surprisingly hard to find online, and the shipping is very expensive. So we're trying to figure out another source. (If you happen to know where I can buy sea kale, skirret, perpetual sorrel, Turkish rocket, or Good King Henry, please let me know!)

A polyculture in between the clover: some mixture of kale, radish, spinach, chards, and peas

Spearmint emerging from its slumber!

Comfrey, an important mulch/biomass plant, is coming up nicely in several places.

Stinging nettle— the cooked greens taste like spinach and are waaaay easier to grow!

Indoor summer seedlings

Our seedlings indoors have really taken off— tomatoes, peppers, flowers, valerian, lovage, St. John's Wort, tomatillos, sweet potatoes, and a few others are making good progress! Some we'll plant as soon as the last frost is over, while others (such as the tomatoes) will need to wait until early- to mid-May. I've been growing them in 4" pots— I've tried growing them in smaller cells, and I had to repot them halfway through, not to mention that they dry out and die much more easily. But growing them in the larger pots seems to be working well so far!

Propagating plants

I've been trying my hand at dividing some of my perennials to plant elsewhere/give away. So far I've tried stonecrop sedum, oregano, thyme, and mint: I just dug up some of the roots, pulled them apart, and stuck them in moist soil. We'll see if any of them survive.

What have you been up to lately?

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Homestead Update 12/13/18: Just All the Orange Vegetables

Well, the garden season is (almost) over, and in the middle of the hectic atmosphere of my Christmas job, I’m left with a few moments to reflect on the past few months of finishing up the garden. 

Stuff that’s been going on in our homestead...

The Monster Orange Vegetable Harvest.

Zach and I officially have enough orange vegetables stored away to give us Vitamin A poisoning by the end of winter. Our butternut squash plants, despite being attacked by hordes of white squash bugs and every disease known to mankind, produced over a hundred pounds. Zach and I also learned that sweet potatoes are an AMAZING crop for the St. Louis area. Even when it hardly rained and was stupidly hot for weeks on end, I barely watered them. They just grew like weeds. We planted some very late in the season (late June), and they still grew huge tubers. The bugs hardly touched them. Weeds couldn’t compete with them. It was magic! Between the 4x10 bed in the front yard and a few random plantings around, we picked 120 pounds of sweet potatoes before the first frost.

This is one of the big rules of lazy gardening: find what grows well in your area, and grow a lot of it. I thought we were doomed to zucchini, but it turns out that sweet potatoes loooove hot, humid weather. So they’re perfect.

Monster harvests of other crops.

Daikon radish, tomatoes, beans, sweet potatoes

In the last few weeks of summer/early autumn, we raked in tons of food in addition to the “Vitamin A crops,” most notably tomatoes (I was making new batches of tomato sauce every day for a while). For days I spent a ton of time boiling down almost-ripe tomatoes, harvesting daikon radishes and beans, drying herbs, and trying to protect the hardy greens (kale, parsley, chard) from the worst of the weather (the kale is still alive and kicking!). I currently have a single red tomato sitting on my counter that ripened from a green tomato I picked in October. Who says you can’t eat a “fresh” garden tomato in December?

The Great Chickie Molt.

In early November, our chickens started losing their feathers, in response to the shortening days and the onset of winter. They looked incredibly scruffy for several weeks, but now they’re fluffily svelte again (except Izbushka, who is still pretty scraggly). They aren’t laying eggs at the moment, but I’m hoping they’ll lay at least a few more during the winter.

Pumpkin Pie.

And finally... drumroll, please... I made pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving out of the pumpkins I grew in my own yard. I feel like my homesteading cred raised a solid point just for that. Sadly, the pumpkins weren’t as prolific as other orange veggies... but you can bet that there’s a lot of butternut squash and sweet potato pie in our future!

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