The Suburbarn Homestead

For All You City-folk…

June 22, 2009 at 1:31 am (gardening)

If you think you are going to buy a few acres of land and then go live off of it because, “They did it for hundreds and hundreds of years, it can’t be that hard,” then I have some news for you. You better practice first. Practice a lot.

If I was using my “crop” to subsist off of, then I’d be dead, because so far, I ain’t got squat. Well, that is not entirely true. I would have a nutritious diet of daylily flowers and clover. Yum, yum. I suppose, if I was brave, I could follow the honey bees from the clover to their hive and try to get some honey and then die when the hive swarms me for invading, because it is a wild hive, and not at all like the ones you see in boxes on the TV. Oh yeah, those people are wearing body suits for a reason.

I am glad I started small, because this homesteading thing is a lot harder than it looks, and all I did this year was plant an organic garden. My tomato plants are growing nicely, and are producing tomatoes, but none of them are ripe yet. I am not sure if it is enough to actually do anything with, or just enough that it will be too much for us to eat. Something ate all of my zucchini plants, except for one, and that one hasn’t produced anything yet. I am not sure if you get anything from just one plant or not, or if you need two plants. I guess I’ll find out later in the season, won’t I? My pepper plants are dying a slow and painful death, and I cannot discern the cause.. One of them is obviously being eaten by something, as it is nothing but a stalk, however I have not caught anything on them or around them. The rest simply having grown at all since I planted them, and are now a light green, turning yellow. I am beginning to think the peppers will be a bust. The green beans are growing nicely, now that I know they need to be watered every day, but I planted them late, so they are not producing anything yet.

Now, my flower garden in the front of the yard by the mail box is doing beautifully! It has daylilies (which are edible, by the way), irises, a clementis vine that never dies, but never does very well either, marigolds, dianthus (which will be the ground cover when the garden is mature) and a lone daisy that survived the winter last year. They are all flowering beautifully! So well, in fact, that I will need to learn to identify marigold sprouts so I don’t pull them up as weeds next year.

My shade garden in the back is doing alright. It has several dianthus in it, which are doing well in the dappled shade, some begonias to fill in space , some wandering jew which needs to be transplanted to the front, as it never does very well in the back, some wave petunias in a lovely shade of magenta, two amaryllis that come in every year beautifully and a slew of daylilies, variegated hostas and yucca.

Now if I could get the vegetables to produce like the ornamental gardens, then I’d be set.

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Compost for me!

May 13, 2009 at 1:08 am (composting)

When we first moved into our cottage, eight years ago, my husband graciously granted my desire to be crunchy and built me a compost bin. He made a fantastic bin–a wooden frame with walls of chicken wire, five feet high and divided into two sections, a “stewing” section and an “adding” section. When I pointed out that I could not turn the compost pile inside the bin, since it was five feet high, and I am only 5’2”, he gleefully (well, as gleeful as he gets) showed me how to turn the entire contraption over, so that I could turn the compost “the right way.“ He moved it to a corner of the yard, where we filled it with leaves and grass and scraps from the kitchen. Then I tried to turn it over. It wouldn’t turn. It wouldn’t even budge. Even the chicken wire didn’t bend! I looked like a young fool, a new homeowner trying to be all yard-knowledgeable, pushing on a wire covered wooden frame filled with leaves, grunting and red with exertion. I am glad I was not a neighbor, because I would have laughed at me.

So, for eight years, the compost bin composted, and was filled, and composted, and was filled again. Great heaps of compost taunted me from the bottom of the chicken wire, secure in their prison, nourishing the ground underneath the bin. The nourishment began to leech into the clay around the bin, as the worms (and there were a lot of worms) made their way toward their composty delight. Occasionally, I would catch them and then put them in vegetable or flower garden, but they never seemed to stay there. They must have made their way back to the kitchen scraps waiting for them amidst the pile of leaves.

And then, after eight years (of nagging), my husband finally cut off the bottom of the chicken wire so that the compost is now free!! (Actually, he didn’t do it because I nagged him. I did nag him for eight years, but it was not until he caught me down there with wire clippers about to molest his compost bin(before this incident it was always my compost bin) that he finally cut the chicken wire away). So now, I have eight years of compost at my disposal!

compost-bin1

That’s a lot of compost. You see that pile of dirt on the right? That’ the compost. And that is not even half of the compost I’ve managed to scrape out of the bottom of these bins. My plants are gonna be the most fertilized plants around, let me tell you. I’ve already covered half of my shade garden, and I will still have plenty for the vegetable garden and to make compost tea for the flower garden (which has rock mulch) out front.

Composting the way I did it is not the ideal, obviously. Despite my over-ambitious husband (but who can blame him, with an over-ambitious wife?), composting is rather easy.

1. You get a bin, any old bin will do: a bucket, a tote, or a wooden frame covered in chicken wire. Just make sure it is not so big that you can’t easily shovel the compost pile.

2. Fill with stuff! Not just any stuff. Carbon stuff and nitrogen stuff. To have perfect compost, you need 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. That ends up being about 3-4 pounds nitrogen material to every 100 pounds of carbon. What is carbon material? Leaves. Yes, the same leaves you rake up every August. What is nitrogen material? Grass clippings, kitchen scraps and manure. The vegetable matter from your kitchen is probably enough to equal the 3-4 pounds of nitrogen, especially if you drink coffee or tea and add the grounds to the pile.

A note on kitchen scraps and manure–you do not want to add any of these that contain animal material, ie, no meat or poop that comes from eating meat. Why? Firstly, it smells bad. Secondly, it attracts rodents. Yes, rodents as in rats. Thridly, it could be carrying some sort of disease, and then that pathogen will get into your compost, and then it will get into all the things that you put the comp0ost around, like your vegetables. You then eat said vegetables, and get sick. Yuck. You can compost meat materials, but that is a different process that what is happening here. That is expert composting. We’re not there yet.

3. Areate the pile. You do this by getting an old fashioned pitched fork and start stabbing it. Once you’ve gotten all of your anger out by stabbing the compost pile (great way to get the anger out from old boy/girl friends that dumped you or from bosses that are mean to you), you turn the compost. You simply shovel the compost with the pitched fork (or you could use a shovel, but you can’t do the cool stabbing bit with it) and then plop it down again with the lower part of the compost pile on the top.

If you do this perfectly (like anything in gardening is perfect!) your pile will reach about 114-135 degrees in the middle. The sides are the regular outside temperature. Then, in two weeks, you’ll have a lovely pile of compost. Or you could wait eight years like me and do it all in one go. I don’t recommend that though.

If you have any questions about composting, let me know. I am by no means a master composter, obviously, but I have access to one, so if I dont’ know the answer to your question, I can get it for you.

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Talk About Conservation!

April 11, 2009 at 2:28 am (homeschooling)

Yesterday was a gorgeous day on the White Homestead (it doesn’t have a real name yet, so I’ll just call it that until I come up with one). The day was so beautiful, and of course, the kids wanted to stay inside and watch TV. Well, the baby didn’t really care, but the preschooler wanted to watch TV. She’s a TV addict. Which is another great reason to have a homestead, which I might go into at a later post. Anyhow, the day was absolutely beautiful, and could not be wasted on inside time. But, I had to wash the dishes, as the dishwasher was on the fritz, and it was full (and it was starting to smell). “How can I keep the kids outside, and get the dishes done?” I wondered.

“Ah-ha!”

Do the dishes the old fashioned way! So we did. J One tub of warm soapy water for washing and two of clean water for rinsing. Then onto a towel for drying in the sun.

washing Both the kids had a blast washing the dishes. It took us four kettles of boiling water to get the water warm, because it the water from the hose is still pretty cold. Let’s face it, even in the summer, it’s pretty cold. Lily got into it quick enough, and it did not take Jack very long to catch on. That blue bowl he’s holding was squeeky clean when he was done with it, as he washed and rinsed it several times before he moved on to another dish! rinsing1

Lily was a big helper, she showed Jack what to do several times, and he was a willing student, although, he really didn’t get it. He ended up very wet, pouring water all over his diaper cover and getting a lot of it in his diaper too. We even caught him pouring some of the soapy water into to the clean water when he though we weren’t looking. rinsing21 Lily, on the other hand, took her job as rinser very seriously (she got tired of washing pretty quick. The dishes had been sitting the dishwasher for a day or two, and the washing water in the tub was only warm, so it took some elbow grease to get the gook off). At one point she told me I was going too fast, and had to slow down, as there were too many dishes in the first tub of clean water. Jack just concentrated on rinsing his blue bowl. rinising31 Lily rinsed off each of the dishes and then placed them on the towel to dry. After each type of dish (plates, bowls, utensils, pots, etc) we changed out the clean water tubs so that the dishes would truely be rinsed, and not just dipped in less soapy water than the washing tub. We even recycled the water–we used it to water several of the new flowers that we planted in our shade garden. drying After we filled up our towel, we would wipe the dishes dry with a dish towel and take them inside to put them away. Jack did eventually give up his blue bowl in favor for a larger tubberware container. All in all, it took us two hours to wash the dishes (about three days worth, mind you), but stayed outside, in the beautiful weather, and we all had a great time! I was so much fun, that I have decided we might to it again when was have another sunny day!

Double Digging is hard!

March 19, 2009 at 11:48 pm (gardening)
Tags: gardening

The warm weather has arrived, with no fear of anymore frosts, so I have no excuse to stay inside. My self-sufficiency project will start with growing my own vegetables. In order to do that, I need somewhere to plant them. We have a bed at the back of our house that was covered in spearmint when we first arrived. My husband has tried to kill it several times, but of course, he cannot. it is mint after all. Mint is indestructable.

Mint also keeps pests away from veggies, so this is where the veggies will be.

doubledigging1

This section is perhaps twenty feet long, and four feet wide. Plenty of space to garden in. It faces the southeast, not the best of directions for the sunlight, but I think we can make do with it if I am careful with what I plant where along the line. As you can see, we used it as our compost pile for the winter, because the “other” compost pile is down at the bottom of the yard. Who wants to walk all the way down there in the winter? So, the entire bed is covered in not so partially decayed leaves. Perfect fodder for the organic matter in double digging.

For those of you who do not know what double digging is, it is a simple process,but not the simpliest process to explain. Basically, you dig a hole one foot deep. You then turn the dirt, with a pitchfork, another foot deep. You then add organic matter of some sort to the turned dirt and turn it in with it. Then you put the dirt back on top of your hole. An excellent tutorial, and the one I used for information is How to Double Dig a Bed.

I cleared away the leaves, and found a little garden already in progress. A garden of thistles! doubledigging2 Now that I know that thistles like to grow there in the winter, I will have to learn how to harvest them. They are an excellent herb for healing. I double dug the bed, and forgot to take pictures of it in the inbetween stages, so that all I have is a photos of it at the end of the dig. doubledigging3

The soil here is red clay, which is very mineral rich. The trick is getting the minerals out of the soil. Even when I began to dig the bed, it only had top soil for about 4 inches down. Not a good base for veggies to grow. This small patch took me several hours to do–double digging is much harder than it sounds! You want exercise, go double dig your bed. You’ll be buff in no time.

So why homestead in the suburbs?

March 13, 2009 at 1:21 am (Uncategorized)

I am a downtown girl. Once, a few years back, I thought I was a downtown girl, since it had been almost 15 years since I had lived “in the city”. But I went to visit a friend who lived in downtown Bethlehem, PA and it felt like coming home. Didn’t matter that the apartment was tiny, the roads were one way, we had to walk everywhere, that everything was so close up. That’s what made it feel like home, everything was right there. She never had to use her car if she didn’t want. I found it all beautiful.

So what is a downtown girl doing homesteading? She married a farm boy. Not a real farm boy, mind you, those are few and far between these days. But as close as you can get to one in this day and age without him working on a conglomerate farm. He has experience chickens, ducks, dogs, cats, goats, rabbits. Of course, by experience I mean he played with the animals and occasionally watched him mom and dad try to do something with them. They grew their own vegetables and canned them. His mom even has a shelf unit in the basement for the mason jars of food that she cans. He pretty much played when they did that too. However, children tend to absorb things like osmosis, and he did pick up some farm learnin’ and he definitely picked up a farm mentality. Which means no downtown for him. He can’t take the tight, enclosed space.

I, on the other hand, cannot take the extreme isolation of a life in the country. I would gladly live in a commune. So, we decided on the suburbs. We live in a little cottage on a ¼ acre in the foothills of North Carolina. At the far back edge of property is a little arm of a local creek, which stays wet enough throughout the year to house a water habitat. The front of our property ends at a neighborhood street. In between is our homestead.

Wait a minute, I am sure you are saying, you settled on the suburbs. What happened to the homestead? Obviously you weren’t in a farming mentality when you married this bloke, as you don’t live on a farm. Or even something closely resembling it. The farm boy couldn’t have done it.

In retrospect, he was the first in a string of mind-changing events that bought about my attempt to homestead. I got into the voluntary simplicity movement. It was right up my alley, as I was already rather unacquisitive, much to my mother’s chagrin. I am also one of those hippy types, that has her head in the clouds most of the time, and would float away if my rock of a husband hadn’t tied my balloon sting. So eventually all my reading and trying to get my husband to get rid of his stuff and go all natural and environmental, I came upon the homesteading movement. Some call it self-sustainability, which I have no problem with, however my husband finds that name all hoity toity, so in order to get him to comply with my wishes, I used the down home word: homesteading.

At first my husband was reluctant to believe that we could homestead on a quarter of an acre. But he’s all into saving money. Especially after we had kids, and he figured out how much money they take and especially since he is the only wage earner at the moment. Money talks. So I learned the language, and spoke it. For several years. And then I caught the one part of the sustainability movement my husband might catch onto: retiring early! So I worked on that, which at the same time trying to get a different place to live (a larger plot so that I could homestead better) with a larger house (so the kids could have a playroom and keep stuff off the floor since it drives him crazy).

Then two things happened. I got a hard bump on the head from The Universe. And The economy bottomed out.

The Universe works in mysterious ways, as a good book says, and it certainly did for me on this strange and illustrious journey of mine. I was being an ungrateful wretch, as I was wont to do quite often, feeling badly done to and ill used and abused and such. I was complaining about how I didn’t get what I wanted, how my stick-in-the-mud husband didn’t give me what I wanted and that I did not get what I wanted from The Universe, despite my asking. I did not receive from The Universe, despite my asking. Then, someone told me, “You have to love what you have into expansion.” Ouch! I was disliking my house, my yard, my stuff, my life and I was blaming it on my steady, hardworking husband. So I had to take a hard, long look at how I was viewing my life.

Of course, the first thing I took a look at was my husband. I chose to marry this man, with his country mentality and all. So he complained about the dogs barking next door (actually, all the next doors). So he didn’t want to move, we had a perfectly good house here, with a perfectly good yard in a perfectly good neighborhood.

Next, I looked at my house. So I didn’t have a big house. I didn’t want a big house. I am the one who has to clean everything, and in a big house there is more to clean. So I didn’t have a playroom. I didn’t want a playroom. Having one would mean living in the playroom, because the kids want to be where I am, and I want to be where they are. Living in a playroom would be awfully dreary. I figured a playroom would put my dear husband at ease by having the kids stuff contained. But he didn’t want a playroom either. He just wanted the kids to clean up their stuff. Or, more realistically as they are both under 4 years old, I clean up their stuff. That was a great excuse for everyone to have less stuff.

Next, I looked at my yard. So I didn’t live on a body of water, there was the drainage ditch in the back of the house and I could add a pond whenever I was willing to dig a hole deep enough. The drainage ditch, if property cultivated, could serve as a small creek bed, it was, after all, part of the Reedy Creek system.

Next, I looked at my stuff–and found I didn’t want anything new. Except for a laptop, which I had always wanted. So I started getting rid of the stuff, and made some pocket money doing it.

Finally, I looked at my life. What was it I wanted? I wanted to write. I wanted to stay home and raise my children. I wanted to home school. I wanted to feel connected. I was already writing, staying at home and raising my children, and home schooling as far as one could with one’s children not yet being school age. I did not feel connected. So, how does one feel connected? Work with the land, honey bun, work with the land. If I, a downtown girl, at home in the city streets, no yards, tiny apartments and the only bugs being flies and mosquitoes, was going to work the land, then I was going to get something out of it. And I did: a few pretty flowers, ivy, hostas and tiger lilies. Oh, and lots and lots of mint.

Then the second thing happened: the economy bottomed out. Suddenly gas went up to $4 a gallon, insurance of all kinds went up, utilities went up, taxes went up and my driving all around Charlotte went up–in smoke. I had to economize, and we were blessed, my husband makes a good salary. But even we had to cut corners. So, if I was going to be stuck home all day with two small children, I was going to get more out of it than flowers and mint. This sustainability thing started to sound even better to me, and it began, for the first time, to sound good to my husband. So, our adventures in homesteading have begun.