Week 38, 2019
A lot has been going on since our last update. We are starting to see the results of some of our work and adding more projects to the list. It is still slow going, we are focusing on building the infrastructure that we will need later.
High Tunnel
This project by far was the longest lasting project on the homestead. We broke ground at the end of October 2018 and finally finished up in the middle of March 2019. We had many setbacks mostly caused by the record rainfall we experienced at that time. The site had very few days where everything was not a muddy mess or standing water. We completed a 30′ x60′ high tunnel that we are going to use to grow the vast majority of our vegetables for 2019 and have room for expansion in 2020 with our plans to start selling at local farmers markets.
As an extension of the high tunnel we also started prepping our permanent bed area for 2020 by grading it and sowing a cover crop.
Water
Since we started considering expanding our garden we knew water would become an issue we needed to address. We were unsure of what our well could handle and not very optimistic that our well could provide the water needed. We considered building a small ~1/4 acre pond on our property that could provide the irrigation water needed for the gardens. Lucky for us, we did not need to spend that money on a pond. After doing a test on the recovery rate of our well we were able to compare that to our irrigation needs and know that we would be okay for now, even with household use. A BIG RELIEF!
Dining Room Light Fixture
We built a new dining room light fixture from a a slab of local pecan.
Deer Fence
As of writing this update we have not had problems with deer yet, however a few deer do bed down in our woods frequently as we have seen them frequent our front yard. We have many plants that deer would no doubt love to eat (apples, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries,..) in addition to our future plans to have a market garden. Being proactive by building a fence before most of our fruit and vegetables develop we are hoping will deter them. Treated posts just were not something we were interested in using on our property and metal deer fences are very expensive. We were lucky in finding a local contact that was able to cut black locust posts to length. This was a big deal, we needed longer posts to support the 8 foot tall fence we were going to be building. Black locust is the best choice for fence material in this area as it lasts very long in the ground.
Our plan with the fence is to run a 48″ tall field fence around the bottom to keep out dogs and other small animals and run a single wire every foot above that.
Soap Making
Since living on this property we have always made our own personal care products (soap, deodorant, toothpaste, laundry detergent, lotion, beard balm,..) and have always thought about selling the soap to others. We have experimented with the recipe to make a bar that doesn’t turn to goo after a few uses and uses the best ingredients available, because we use it ourselves we are not cutting corners. We love the soap so much we are going to start making more of it (still small batches) and open a store on this site to sell it! We may even start adding some of the other products we make for ourselves in the future. Let us know what you might like to see!
Chickens
We have always considered getting egg birds for ourselves and we even have gone so far as to gather some plans to build a mobile coop. However, in the list of projects we needed to complete before chickens, they came down the line a bit. Figuring out our water situation was definitely at the forefront before we could look at getting chickens. Now that we have settled the problem of water and have freed up some time, we started building a coop!
Irrigation
Our irrigation system will be a modified version of our Solar Irrigation setup we built last year. We will add a few more zones to accommodate the additional watering needs of the market garden but the same basic setup will remain. This will be one of the future projects this spring.
Food Forest
We’ve been slowly working on developing a food forest in our front and back yard. We had to move all of our 10 apple trees to make room for the future market garden to a better area out of the way. In our last update we went through all of the mulch we moved, this included taking over about half the grass in the front yard we were mowing and turning that into a food forest. This area is where we planted 6 of the apples, the varieties that are not susceptible to cedar-rust. The remaining rust susceptible trees we planted off to the side of the driveway out of the future fence line, these trees will not be protected from animals and are on the homestead to provide pollination to the other varieties. We had purchased these trees before we knew what cedar rust was, but am glad they are here as they provide beneficial pollination.
The front yard now contains: Apples, Raspberries, Blueberries, Strawberries, Chokeberries, Elderberries, Goji berries and Asparagus. The back yard contains: Elderberries, Mint, Sage, Blueberries, Raspberries, Chokeberries, Cherries, Hazelnuts, Paw Paws and a Nectarine. We hope to add Pecan/Chestnut/Walnuts to the back yard this spring to round out the area. Both areas are fairly new and have not produced much food yet, but we are hopeful that this year we can start to see some fruit!
Starting Seeds
We started seeds this year just like the past years, just a bit more expecting to plant more. We had a fail for sure this year. We had a problem with dampening off and the culprit was old seed starting mix we had in the shed. We first started noticing it in our swiss chard, bad germination and seedlings dying. We chose to let the seedlings go and see what we get, then reseeded new trays in the mean time with our new soil. Luckily we only had a few trays with the old soil so we were not out too much time. This year, we picked up our seed from Sow True Seed and new soil from Dirtcraft Organics. You can tell by the picture how much better seeds grew in Dirtcraft Organic soil!
Thanks for reading,
