It's Easy Being Green

Our newest additions to the Half-Acre Homestead have arrived.  We picked up three Auracana chicks from one of our friends yesterday who made a big order and wanted to share in the fun.  Auracanas are the “Easter Egg” chickens that lay green and blue eggs.  We’ve kicked around the idea for a year or two, just wanting to start out with a couple hens to provide us some eggs.  Our decision was pushed last year when we had a terrible problem trying to combat the swarms of squash bugs that devastated our zucchini and summer squash plants, leaving us little to enjoy.

Unfortunately we lost one little girl late this afternoon.  It seems the long journey was just too much for her.  She was sluggish on arrival but some sugar water helped perk her up.  Her activity improved along with her eating and drinking but late this afternoon she just quit moving around and wouldn’t get back up again.  We were really excited about her because she had different coloring from the other two girls and it looked like she was going to be a standout.

Our other two girls seem to be doing just fine.  We’ve been getting a kick out of their little antics, spontaneously falling asleep and waking up.  They love to cuddle too.  They’ll roost in the home office for a few weeks until the weather is nice enough for them to transition out full time.  Now it’s time to build them a little garden hen house.

Popularity: 7% [?]

If you’re looking to become more self-sustaining, growing and preserving your own food is an excellent way to achieve that goal.  Not only is it probably one of the easiest ways to achieve your sustainability, it is also one of the cheapest.  For some reason, I had always imagined home canning to be a bygone era but reaching back I could vividly remember one of my Mom’s old high school friends canning her own jams and jellies frequently when I visited.  Maybe I thought, it’s not that far out of vogue.

As Homestead Hottie and I looked for more and more ways to make our life more green and self-sustaining, food preservation seemed to be a logical next step following our entry into growing some of our own food.  Home food preservation does take time but the end results are so worth it and will save you a ton of money in the long run.  You won’t have to rely on a run to the grocery store for a canned good but simply walk into your kitchen pantry.  Check out this video as I show you how we turned a bumper crop of green tomatoes into a half-dozen quart jars of our own, homemade pasta sauce.

If you didn’t catch my post on how to ripen or use all those end of season green tomatoes,  click here.

Popularity: 11% [?]

This past week we had a brief taste of Autumn here in southwest Indiana.  We fell out of our 90 degree temperatures and sticky humidity to land in a string of a few days that left us topping off right around 80 degree during the day and dipped us well into the 50’s at night.  It summoned the first opening of the doors and windows of the season, bringing a halt to the endless whine of the air conditioner for the first time in about three months.

Admittedly the delightfully cool temperatures were a bit of a shock to the system.  My Homestead Hottie bundled up in her fuzzy housecoat and flip-flop slippers morning and night, only breaking free during the afternoon warmth.  I, attentively watching marinated chicken grilling over red hot coals out on the deck, found myself standing as close to the grill as I could get without climbing right in and singeing myself to a crisp.  Darling Daughter has taken to pulling pairs of sweat pants from her dresser and waving them about until we get the message and put them on.

While we were grateful for the change in temperatures and the flirt with Autumn, we’ve found ourselves back in the upper 80’s this week.  The air conditioner has come back on and the windows and doors have found themselves sealed tight, waiting for the next opportunity to let the outdoors in.  The Indian Summer is a good reminder of what is to come and a spur to kick us into gear and hopefully get a good fall crop of vegetables sown before our first frost of the season.

For the past week we’ve been pulling plants ravaged by the long Summer season and sending them to the composter, the beginning of  a re-birth that will find them once again turned back into the soil but in a completely different form than the started.  The open space feels weird.  Sure the garden beds are beginning to look much more clean and tidy but I begin to feel  like I lost a good friend.  I’m missing a plant that produced so much and yet it feels like I just didn’t have enough time together.  The counter tops here at the Half-Acre Homestead tell me otherwise though, filled to the brim with fresh produce and at least two-dozen red, yellow and green hued canning jars preserving the Summer’s bounty.

Some have told us we’re about four weeks away from our first frost.  The long, warm Summer would tell me otherwise and thanks to a quick glance at the Farmer’s Almanac Frost Predictions this week, the good people there predict we’re about 60 days away from our first brush with Old Man Winter.  That means there is plenty of time to reap more goodness from the garden beds before we have to put it away.  Homestead Hottie and I have been busily sowing lettuce, spinach, peas, snow peas, carrots, potatoes, green onions, swiss chard, turnips, beets and radishes.  All are cool-season crops that, in theory, should grant our dinner plates with some more wholesome goodness before we begin dipping into storage.  I’m also experimenting, planting some Butternut squash to see if by chance we can eek out a supply of sweet winter treats.

It is also time for me to dig out a large stack of old, wood-framed windows I picked up thanks to Freecycle.  They will form at least one new cold frame in the square foot garden, hopefully keeping one of the beds warm enough to extend the season for some produce into Winter.  My to-do list once again begins to grow making me feel a bit like the local squirrels beginning their seasonal acrobatics, hop-scotching around to build their nest and food cache before a long Winter’s rest.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Termination seems like such a dirty word.  The societal stigma attached to it is enough to make you feel vile; rolled in the dregs of society and tossed out into the street for all to see and smell.  You, left to feel like nothing more than an offense to the olfactory and beyond.  Why is it I feel like I should embody that feeling, sulking further into my own self wallow?

There is this great aversion to getting fired.  Nobody wants to hear it and most don’t want anybody to know it ever happened to them.  That’s why our corporate forefathers came up with terms like “let go”, RIF (reduction in force), laid off, “opting out” and canceled contract.  Like wrapping a blanket around a Billy club, is it merely to ease the blow to one’s ego?  Or is it like a golden ray shining down from above, making employers feel at ease, almost angelic in letting you down softly and tiptoeing around the word fire or terminate.

This week, I’m learning to embrace being fired.  I was ambushed.  Walking back to my desk at the end of my shift late Friday night, there sat my boss.  He magically reappeared, wearing the same damn clothes he left the office in four hours before.  It wouldn’t have won him any awards for his performance but he tried to act sorrowful.  He wasn’t soft about it at all.  He didn’t even try to let me down easily.  It’s the only time he’s ever really truly had the balls to act like a real manager and he managed me right out the front door.

The kick in the ass brought an end to two years of this Midwestern misery.  They moved me 1800 miles away from home promising a long-term commitment.  From day one though, it’s been anything but.  I was sold a bill of goods and unfortunately drank the Kool-Aid.  Each quaff left a taste in my mouth that grew more and more wretched.  Luckily I choked and regurgitated the rotgut and am now cleaning house.  One chapter is ending.  Another one is beginning.

It’s ironic this has hall happened because just about two weeks ago T and sat down and made lists.  Not for grocery shopping or things to do around this half-acre homestead.  These lists were our priorities in life; a test to see where we each stood at this very portion of our lives.  Little did we know that these lists would come into play just a few days later.  Here is how my priorities panned out:

1)                  Make sure my T, my wife, and my darling daughter are taking care of emotionally, physically and financially

2)                  Find a job that makes me happy

3)                  Live life as sustainable as possible

4)                  Buy a farm, ranch or other plot of land to build a life on

5)                  Financial freedom: ditch the debt, save more

T’s priorities were surprisingly similar.  Our thoughts and notions on what we wanted to achieve together weren’t as far off as we might have expected them to be.  We never expected to be in the position of changing career paths this quickly.  I had a contract that would leave us a year to think about our next moves but now that has shriveled and died right on the vine.

So another chapter begins.  We have two months, possibly three, of funds to get us through until the next opportunity beckons.  We’re looking at ways to stretch every possible dollar and every possible resource we use on a daily basis.  It can only help us make it through and last even longer than some would anticipate.  It will be the true test of our skills and desires to live life in a more sustainable, environmentally friendly and happiness inducing way.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Since I last posted about the progress of my new raised garden beds, I don’t think we’ve had more than two days straight without rain.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the rain but right now our yard is more like a mud bog with some portions verging on marsh-like.  I keep expecting to look out my window to see large water birds wading through the yard, looking for fish.

In order to complete my raised vegetable beds, I needed to locate the three items I needed the make the recommended growing media.  If you happened to miss my previous posts on creating this year’s garden check out Spring Fever and Garden Planning.  The three soil amendments I was in search of included bulk compost, Sphagnum peat moss and vermiculite.

Vermiculite ended up being the most difficult item to locate.  Even though it’s included in just about every ready-made bag of potting soil, I found it almost impossible to find by itself and in a quantity that was large enough as to not break the gardening bank.  Needing 25 cubic feet of the material, I quickly discovered that most gardening centers in my area wouldn’t be able to get me even close to that amount and they weren’t interested in ordering it in for me either.

Daylight Farm Supply was kind enough to price it out for me in 4 cubic foot bags and offered to order it in if I wanted it.  There was going to be a bit of a lag time to get the order so that’s when I got to thinking about the one place I drive by on a daily basis, specifically geared toward agriculture: The Warrick County Co-Op located in Vanderburgh County.  Sure enough they had vermiculite in stock at a little under $20 a bag which was the cheapest I was able to find it too.

Once I found my vermiculite supply I was set.  I ordered 4-scoop loads of well aged manure and compost from AP&P Soil Masters on Kansas Road and had them dump the large pile in my driveway.  After paying the driver I headed out to Rural King to get some peat moss and then to the county co-op to pick up vermiculite.  I spent about 3 hours playing mixologist, combining equal parts compost, peat moss and vermiculite to create my raised bed planting mix.  Without a wheelbarrow, I made a makeshift soil transporter with our little red wagon and two huge planting containers as my carrying buckets.

I’ve been dodging rain showers ever since, trying to get the rest of my raised beds filled with soil mix while trying to take care of other responsibilities around the house.  Today, rain be darned, I destined to get some more work done.  I finished filling in the raised beds and built the square foot planting grids to go over the tops of the boxes.  This is the grid system that lays out your planting squares.  It’s built using 4 foot lengths of wood lath that you buy by the bundle for about $5.

I also dug two holes about two feet deep on either side of my main aisle.  These were to sink my 4×4 poles into the ground to support the two picket fence panels.  I will also be attaching a swinging gate and building an arbor over the top of the 4×4’s.  The garden looks so much different from the last time I took a picture of it.  I’m excited about everything I was able to get done today and can’t wait to get out and starting getting some Spring veggies planted to take advantage of the cool weather.

It still looks like a construction zone but you can see my newly filled raised square foot gardening boxes with their planting grids and the new picket fence and two 4x4 posts waiting for a swinging gate and an arbor over the top

Popularity: 4% [?]

Being the nomadic little family we are, last year’s vegetable garden and all others prior to that, have been one year affairs with little planning.  We literally moved to a new rental house at least once a year if not twice depending on the circumstances.

Before moving to the Midwest, we enjoyed high-elevation mountain living in Flagstaff, Arizona.  At 7500 feet, Flagstaff has a growing season that lasts barely 90 days.  If you blink, you might miss it!  Transplants couldn’t hit the soil until late May (snow that month wasn’t out of the question) and you had to hope you’d have something to harvest by late August before the first frost set in.  It was an incredible challenge and consequently we chose to always keep the veggie garden on the small side.  It ranged from just a few potted vegetables at our townhouse with a 10×10 foot patio to a 4×8 foot raised garden bed at our biggest rental house.

Here in southwest Indiana we’re strangely in the same USDA climate zone as our old home in Flagstaff but our growing season is double what we’re used to.  It feels like you can grow half the year and that is awesome!  Because we were renting the house we just bought, we kept the vegetable garden small and spontaneous.  I planted a strip about 4 feet deep and 20 feet long against our northern fence.  It was originally lawn space so I crudely turned the heavy clay soil with a pitchfork, tried to get rid of as much grass as I could and plopped in some transplants from the local farm market.

Now that the house is officially ours and we plan to stick around for awhile, I decided to actually plan this year’s garden space as most experts recommend.  Our 80 square foot planting space last year included about 6 tomatoes, 2 zucchinis, 2 lemon cucumbers, 6 regular cucumbers, 6 collard greens, 2 eggplants and about a dozen stalks of sweet corn (which didn’t do very well because there were so few of them).  We packed a lot in to that tiny space and we didn’t have to buy produce the entire Summer.

I then began to lay out different ideas on graph paper.  I tried different sized beds and layouts until I came up with a design that I liked and that maximized the amount of space I had to grow in.  When you come up with your design, make sure to list your priorities before you get started.  I wanted to plant as much space as possible yet keep it accessible and pleasant to look at.

After mulling several different designs for a day or so, I didn’t like anything I came up with so I started drawing a few more.  I simply tweaked the designs I had previously come up with.  Finally one I put down on paper felt right and I knew I had a winner.  I opted on a central aisle that is 3 feet wide, big enough to roll a wheelbarrow up and down.  Branching off the main aisle will be wraparound aisles for harvesting that are about 2 feet wide.  That’s less than recommended by Bartholomew but I think it will be okay since I don’t plan to roll a wheelbarrow up and down those aisles and don’t mind to brush my vegetables as I walk by.

Planning the raised beds on graph paper also made estimating cost and materials a lot easier.  I was able to quickly come up with how much lumber I needed and calculated the formulations of soil mixes I’ll need to buy to fill the planting beds.  I’ll also make photocopies of the full-size garden plan so I can actually plot out what will get planted where.

Over the past two weekends I bought the lumber and built 6 of my raised garden beds.  I still need to build 3 more beds but that will take just a couple hours of time.  To make sure I was still on track with my plan, I laid out the finished beds to see the full-scale look of garden 2010 and I like what I see so far!  I’m exited to start putting in my soil mix, mulching my aisles and building the gate and arbor that will serve as the entryway to veggie heaven.

Stay tuned for our next installment as I put the finishing touches on the raised beds and get to growing!

Popularity: 8% [?]

Imagine the joy of this past Saturday.  The sun was shining.  The sky was a vibrant blue.  Birds were chirping.  It warmed up to a positively balmy 50 degrees.  The snow had completely disappeared.  Now imagine today’s disappointment when I awoke to see another dusting of snow outside!

Mentally, we are definitely done with Winter.  I’m not sure what has all the sudden pushed us past the tipping point here in our household.  Maybe it’s the cabin fever talking but regardless of the reason, we want to see an end to our current season.

My "pile" of seed catalogs. It's one of my many piles that endlessly frustrates my poor wifey.

I’ve been trying to make myself feel better by burying myself with a pile of colorful and always enticing seed catalogs.  It makes me not only feel better but provides a little glimmer of hope that I will one day be back outside, enjoying the warmth and sunshine while laboring or simply enjoying our garden.

As you probably remember from previous posts, I’ve been toiling with my vegetable gardening “method” for the year.  Historically, our little family of three has moved just about every year, going from one rental to the next.  That won’t happen this year since we’ve actually solidified our existence and purchased a house.  Now we can put down some more permanent roots in our garden as well.

Last Fall, I took some time and read Lasagna Gardening.  I’ve known for awhile that no-till gardens are much more environmentally friendly and figured Patricia Lanza’s book might be enough to spur me in the no-till direction when planning our permanent veggie garden.  About halfway through her book though, I was frustrated.  What I needed to know, the way to lasagna garden, was literally two paragraphs worth of material in the beginning of the book.  Lay down a thick layer of newspaper to smother weeds and grass and then simply pile up loose, friable, organically supreme soil for your garden beds was the basic gist.  I’m glad I only checked the book out at the library and didn’t waste the money buying her book.  It was perfect for a beginning gardener who might be discovering this new found hobby but not for me.

I felt like I didn’t have many other options though and tried to mentally design how this lasagna garden would look in my backyard.  Our yard is already small and so I was really only looking to expand my vegetable space to about 19 feet by 12 feet, a little more than 200 square feet.  I started looking for cast-offs from everyone’s front yard, Fall decorations: straw bales.  Lanza’s soil mix suggests straw as a good component to help build your raised beds up above the original soil surface.  The idea is that the straw will compost with your other organics and produce a top-notch soil.

As Winter pushed deeper into the calendar, my straw bales sat untouched, well at least by me.  Dixie, our doofy but lovable dog, has been smart enough to use the straw bales as a warming perch this winter.  Every morning she sits with a yoga-like patience atop those bales, warms herself in the early morning sun and keeps watch for the mouser cat Haley to wander back from her early walk to eat breakfast.  The more Dixie sits, the more the straw bales break down making it easier to spread into future garden beds but frankly she seemed to be getting more use out of it as a makeshift sundeck.

Dixie sits atop her straw bale sundeck. It's a product of my procrastination and her keen, dog-like ingenuity. To the right you can see our composter, poorly visited bird feeder (which will be moved) and a torn up piece of trellis used to keep Dixie off of what was left of the collard greens.

Knowing my yearning to pick something, my wife gently nudged me in one direction with a little Valentine’s Day present.  It was Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening:  Grow More in Less Space.  His concept, ditching the inefficient practice of gardening in long single rows, made much more sense for our tiny backyard.  I haven’t blogged a bit lately, in part because I’ve spent the past seven days reading Bartholomew’s book from cover to cover and embarked on the design process of our own square foot garden.  Check back tomorrow for more on how I designed our 2010 vegetable garden and what I’ve been able to get done so far.  Hopefully it will trigger you to start planning your own and make the most of your garden space and your wallet!

Popularity: 9% [?]