I took a look at the calendar and noticed that it is about 12 weeks from my area’s average first frost date. Actually, it’s probably 14 weeks since I try to err on the side of caution when it comes to frost. But it got me thinking about my Fall plantings.
In a typical year, I will just plant some greens for Fall harvesting. But this year I want to step up the production and grow some other crops to eat this Fall and Winter. Continue reading
Welcome to this week’s update.
First of the peppers
Here’s a shot of one day’s harvest. There’s a bunch of Amish paste tomatoes in there. I’ll make them into tomato paste late in the week or over the weekend. I’m not sure of the zucchini, we will probably cook it up for dinner. I was excited to harvest some peppers. These are the first of my bell peppers of the year. There are a couple of smaller peppers, but I’m happy with the size of them. Normally I end up with tiny peppers, these are a little bigger but nowhere near as large as store bought peppers. Continue reading
I was listening to the latest episode of You Bet your Garden and the question of the week was about the dirty dozen. This is a list compiled each year by the Environmental Working Group. They use the USDA’s findings about pesticide residues on conventionally grown produce. The EWG says that avoiding these foods, pesticide consumption will be drastically reduced.
The order of the food on the list changes from year to year, but for the most part, the same food is on the list every year. Like most people, we want to avoid consuming pesticides. Today I’m going to talk about how I will try to avoid these pesticides in the future.
Apples - Apples will be among the fruit trees that we plan on planting in the Spring. They will take several years to start producing. So until that time, we will either stick to organic apples or reduce the number of apples we eat.
Celery – We don’t use all that much celery, but celery is necessary for things like roasted chickens and in soups. So we do end up using some of it. Unfortunately, celery is difficult to grow for the home gardener. So this year I’m going to try growing some celery substitutes. Unfortunately I haven’t tried either of these.
Celeriac is the first I may try. This is mainly grown for the ugly root bulb under ground. However, I’ve heard that the stalks can also be used as a substitute for celery. But I’m having trouble confirming this online. Celeriac is a very long season vegetable and isn’t harvested until after the first frost in the Fall. But the root has a very long storage life.
Cutting celery
The next one I may try is cutting celery. This looks like flat leaf parsley but tastes like celery. The information that I’ve found on this is that it is easy to grow and doesn’t require all that much care to keep it growing. But it enjoys cooler temperatures, so needs partial shade during the Summer. I understand that the celery taste is much stronger with cutting celery, so I will not use as much when cooking.
Strawberry tower
Strawberries – I started a strawberry pyramid last year. It came with 50 crowns, but I didn’t plant them in times. When I finally did plant them, only 8 of them grew. But this year, they came back with a vengeance. We got probably 2 quarts of strawberries out of this bed. This year we should probably do even better.
Peaches – Like the apples, we will plant some peach trees in the Spring. Luckily we have several peach orchards in the area that grow organically. These are more expensive, but really good.
Spinach – We only eat spinach raw in salads. So we grow all of our own spinach. We just make sure we eat it in season. Once it stops producing, we stop eating spinach.
Imported Nectarines – This is an easy one, we don’t eat nectarines.
Imported grapes – We don’t go through many grapes, but we are planning on planting several vines in the Spring. I asked my wife to pick out some types to plant and she just suggested standard Concord grapes. I plan on planting 6 vines, so I’ll have to choose the other 5.
Sweet bell peppers – We grow our own peppers, but usually don’t have great production. This year, one of my goals is to grow my tomatoes and peppers from seed. So hopefully we will increase our production.
Potatoes – My wife wants to plant some potatoes this year. We have never grown potatoes, but they should be fairly easy to grow. I plan on using the above ground method. Basically, you put the seed potatoes on the ground and cover them with good soil and compost. Then as the plant grows, you cover the plant with straw up to the top leaves. Each leaf junction will form roots, which in turn will form the potatoes.
Blueberries – We have a single blueberry plant. The birds get all of the berries. We like blueberries, but there are so many other things that we want to do at the homestead, blueberries get pushed aside. Eventually, we will plant additional blueberry bushes, but for now we just don’t eat them.
Mixed salad greens
Lettuce – From about April until November, we grow all of our lettuce. It is so simple to do the cut and come again method. I plant 1/3 of a 4×8 garden bed at a time with a mesclun mix. Two weeks later I plant the next 1/3, and 2 weeks after that I plant the final 1/3. This staggers the growth out. Then I cut what is big enough. The plants will just keep producing until it gets too hot for them.
Kale & collard greens – Another easy one that we don’t eat.
That’s my plan to avoid some of the pesticides that are on supermarket produce.
I was reading the Trace My Preps blog this morning and decided that I should also do a look back at what I have accomplished on the homestead over the past year.
I think that my first real accomplishment is that I was able to get my wife on board with building the homestead. Up until this year, she has just humored me with my homesteading aspirations. But in the Spring, she noticed how prices were steadily increasing. We also talked about the increase in salmonella outbreaks. She is now very supportive of my homesteading goals and will help me reach the goals.
Another big accomplishment is that in mid-September, I made my first post to my blog. By launching my blog, I feel that I was adding legitimacy to my homestead. I was finally sitting down and putting in print what I intended this homestead to become. It also makes me accountable for making or missing any goals that I set forth.
I think those are my 2 biggest accomplishments of the year. Without those two, there would probably not be any Homestead Fritz. Some of the other accomplishments are bigger and some smaller, but all have helped me build the homestead. Here are some of the other accomplishments in no particular order.
Started the asparagus bed by planting ~30 crowns. Asparagus is a very long-term crop. We may be able to harvest a couple of spears this Spring, but maybe not. But it will produce for 20 or 30 years.
Increased the garden area from 12 beds to 20 beds.
Paid off one of our vehicles. This frees up some money that we have been able to use for other expenses. I feel that moving towards being debt free is critical to any homestead.
Began making cheese. So far I have only made cheese curds, cottage cheese and yogurt successfully. But I have learned from my less successful cheese making experiments.
Harvested all the garlic that we will use for the entire year. This is in addition to the seed garlic that I planted. I also discovered that we will always plant hardneck garlic because it produces scapes.
Built up my seed stock of potato onions. Hopefully these will allow me to continue growing onions forever.
Harvested enough onions to last from August 1 until January. These were mostly yellow onions planted from sets.
Preserved enough green beans and pumpkins to last us the entire year.
Processed some black walnuts from the trees along homestead border. It was an experience and I discovered that they don’t taste good enough to make them worth while. But it gives us another fat and protein source if we would need to make use of them.
Identified several types of weeds in the yard. Some of these are edible. Next year some of them will find their way into our salads.
Built a 3 bin compost bin system.
Built a low tunnel over one of the garden beds. This allowed me to harvest salad greens until the end of the year. I also learned that while draping plastic over the hoops works okay, I need to develop a better way of attaching the plastic.
Saved seed from my garlic chives, French breakfast radish and from my okra. This allows me to save money on the seed. But it also helps to develop varieties of these plants that are acclimated to my micro-climate. It also helps me develop my knowledge of how to save seeds, and I believe it makes me a better gardener.
Began baking bread again. I used to do this fairly regularly, but I drifted away from it. After finding the bread in 5 minutes a day, this allows me to not use time as an excuse for not baking bread.
Finally, I have been able to make use of the produce that we produced on the homestead. We have made pumpkin rolls and pumpkin bread for dessert. I have made beer bread from the beer that I brewed myself. I have made use of the zucchini that I froze to make zucchini bread. I have even made use of scraps that I would normally throw away by roasting pumpkin seeds.
I wasn’t going to do this wrap up of the year post. But I’m certainly glad that I did. This really shows me how far we have gone with the homestead. We still have a long way to go, but by seeing these accomplishments, it will really help keep us motivated. I’m hoping to have an even more productive 2012.
I really don’t like this time of year. The days seem so short. I get home at about 4 from work. I pick my daughter up from the bus. We finish making dinner and it is dark. There’s very little that can be done on the homestead. About all there’s time to do during the week is look at the status of the garden and maybe take a picture. I guess a lot of my posts during the week will have some information about planning and research.
Compost piles
In my post about what may be found in compost, I showed that I moved my compost around and bin number 3 was completely empty. That’s no longer the case. Over the weekend I used my new blower/vacuum to shred a bunch of leaves. This filled up that compost bin. Those bins in the picture are about 4′x4′x4′. That’s a lot of shredded leaves.
I’m considering which cheese I’m going to make next time. I want something a little more advanced than the cottage cheese. I think that the next batch is going to be something like cheese curds, or squeaky cheese. This is basically just cheddar cheese without being compressed and aged. It is eaten “young” so there is immediate gratification. I’m still too early in my cheese making career to have to wait for a couple of months.
It won’t be long before I move on to making more advanced cheeses. These will be Monterrey Jack, Cheddar and the like. When I make these, I will have to figure out how to compress them. I briefly looked into homemade cheese presses. I will build my own, and I am pretty sure of the style that I will make. Of course, I’ll share that process with you guys.
Some of you know from the comments on my potato onion post that my friend Cohutt in Georgia is sending me shallots in exchange for the potato onions I sent him. Once they come in, I’ll get them planted. From what I’ve read, they are planted the same way as the potato onions. I’ll post about planting them, but it probably won’t be in depth like the potato onion post.
On final item for today. I looked on the Adams County Nursery page and noticed that a couple of types of their apples are in limited supply this year. This means that we need to get our order placed so we can get the ones that we want to grow. So over the next couple weeks, we will be determining what we will order.
Today I planted my potato onions, but that’s another post. But the bed I was planting into had settled a little. One of my compost bins looked like it was finished, so I decided to take care of all the compost bins today.
Finished compost
First step was to pull out the finished compost. This stuff has been cooking in one of the bins for about 2 years. You’ll notice that there is some green in there, that’s some weeds that started to sprout. They will just add to the nutrients in the bed. This wheelbarrow topped off the garden bed just fine.
Unfinished compost
Next I had to pull the unfinished compost out of the other 2 bins. While it isn’t rocket science, there’s a technique that helps get it all mixed up. I pulled half of the compost that was finished the most and put that in the wheelbarrow. On top of this goes half of the compost from the bin that is least finished. This all goes into bin 3. Repeat this with the rest of the compost in the first 2 bins. This batch goes into bin 2. That leaves bin 1 empty. This will be filled mainly with shredded leaves that get mowed over and raked up.
Compost all moved
While moving the compost around, I found a couple of items that was interesting. In the top left of the below picture are the bottom of sunflower stalks. I put these in the bin at the end of last year. They have hardly composted at all. These are now at the bottom of bin 3.
What I found in the compost bin
The other 3 parts of the picture show some onions that I found growing in the bin. The right top is the only one that I will be eating at this time. One of the bigger onions was growing, but rotting. All the rest appeared to be potato onions. I planted them in the potato onion bed.
These onions were put into the compost bin because they were not good when they were harvested. I guess it shows that anyone can grow onions. If nothing else, just put them in the ground (or the compost bin) and ignore them.
Like every Friday, today was pretty busy. Even though I was off work today, it was still a lot of running around. I had to take my car in for an oil change. My son had his karate class. The phone company repair guy came by to fix our phone. It was just kind of busy.
Leaf compost pile
Since I was home, I decided to cut the lawn and pick up some leaves. It was extremely windy, but the leaves didn’t blow all over the place. I mowed over the leaves to shred them up a little and to get them into a pile. The family went out to pick them up and put them in the leaf compost cage. Each year I put all the shredded leaves into this cage, it is 5′ tall and about 4′ across. By spring, there is some compost on the bottom, but mostly it has just started to compost. What’s left will go into bin 1 of the 3 stage compost bin.
Seedlings in the cold frame
While out there taking the picture of the leaf compost cage, I decided to take a picture of the lettuce seedlings in the cold frame. They are starting very slowly, but they are growing. I’m hoping that it keeps growing and we can harvest some salads.
Daughter with dolls
My wife has been on a sewing kick lately. She has made pajamas for the entire family. This week she has been making doll clothes for my daughter’s American Girl doll and for one other doll. I think that most of us are working to decrease our expenses, she decided to make some of these doll clothes for Christmas. These are basically free except for her time. She is using fabric that her mother has given her. I think my daughter is going to love the doll clothes.
If anyone that knows her reads this, Santa is bringing the doll clothes. They aren’t from us. So, please keep the secret.
