Tag Archives: point of view

How about a flower garden

Posted on February 8, 2012 by | 2 Comments

I like to take pictures.  I take a lot of pictures of bugs, and of flowers.  I take the pictures of bugs because they can help make me a better gardener.  I like taking pictures of flowers because they are pretty, it is just as simple as that.

Even though I take a lot of pictures of flowers, I’m not a big flower guy.  I’d rather put my time and effort into growing something that will feed me.  So practically everything I plant is either food or plants to bring in beneficial insects.

But we have a section of the yard that is in shade and is just a pain to care for.  There are shrubs growing there, so it is hard to get to it to mow.  So it goes un-mowed for most of the Summer.  But that’s brought my neighbors over to cut that section.  My wife decided that she wants to tear it up and plant a flower garden.  That’s what today’s post is about, her flower garden plan.

Flower garden plan

Here’s here garden plan for that area.  This entire area is outside the fenced portion of the yard.  The 15′ side is against the yard, the top side is against our neighbor’s property.  The other sides are where the driveway curves around this big of yard.  There is a very large pine tree that keeps this in shade for the majority of the day.  But she went through some catalogs and picked out plants that love full to partial shade, so it should work.

Astilbe

Those little circles in the upper right corner are an Astilbe mix.  These are the tallest of the plants at about 2′ tall.  She chose this mix so there is a lot of color to draw the eye.  When they are not in bloom, they have a bronze colored leaf.  It should look really nice.

 

 

Lady Fern

Along the back and side edge are Lady Ferns.  What can really be said about ferns?  They do really well in dense shade.  They bring a lot of bright green to the show.  These should get between 10″ and 3′ tall, but we will attempt to keep them on the smaller side of that spread.

 

 

Widow's Tears

Next on the map are the boxes with WT in them.  These are Widow’s Tears.  These are between 18″ and 2′ tall.  These have a velvet like flower on them and bloom for the entire summer.  I really like the purple and blue flowers.

 

 

 

Fernleaf Bleeding Heart

The circle with BH in them are Fernleaf Bleeding Hearts.  These are only 15″ to 18″ tall.  The leaves are a lot like fern fronds and the flowers are a pink heart-shaped pendant flower.  They bloom from late Spring until first frost.

 

 

 

Lily of the Valley

Last but not least are the little X near the bottom of the garden map.  These are Lily of the Valley.  They don’t get taller than about 10″.  The little white flowers cover the plant every spring.

I think this will look great.  She layered the plants so the smaller plants are not hidden behind the larger plants.  They are all shade loving plants, so should get plenty of light under that tree.  I’m really happy that she went with all perennial plants.  All married men know that when their wife says that she if going to plant a garden that it really means that she is going to do the directing and the husband will do a lot of the manual labor.  Since she went with perennials, that means I won’t need to plant this area every year.  We will need to keep it sculpted as we like it, but that is less work than planting it again.  If it turns out as well as I think it will, I’m going to put her to work planning another corner of the yard that is under a large maple tree.

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Homestead? What is it?

Posted on September 22, 2011 by | 2 Comments

The whole idea of my blog is to document my attempt to build a homestead.  But what does that really mean?  I think that before I get too far along on my blog that I should define what I consider a homestead.

Wikipedia defines a homesteader is defined as “anyone who follows the back-to-the-land movement by adopting a sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyle.”  I am kind of on board with this, but I’m not 100%.

This definition seems to indicate that people building a homestead are working towards self sufficiency.  Self-sufficiency is defined as needing no outside help in satisfying one’s basic needs.  To me, this means that the people building their homesteads are working towards growing all their own food.  If they are doing this, they must believe that they can attain this goal.  I don’t fool myself into thinking that I will be able to do this.  I know that I will never be able to provide 100% of my family’s food.

I do not think I will ever provide all my protein.  While we will likely have chickens on the homestead, they will be for egg production.  I don’t think I’ll ever raise chickens for their meat.  I would need to have a huge flock, in order to be able to eat a chicken any more than once a month or so.  Plus I don’t know that I can eat something that I raised from a baby.  If I can’t kill a chicken for food, there’s little chance that I’d raise cattle or hogs for food.  Milk is another thing that I don’t see myself producing.  I think that we’d be able to raise a dairy cow or a couple goats, but they require daily milking.  If not they could die from it.  I’m into building the homestead, but that’s just too much dedication to the process.  We wouldn’t be able to take vacations or even go on a long weekend camping trip.

Instead, each year I work towards the goal of providing more of our food than I did the previous year.  For instance, let’s talk about our green beans.  My family loves green beans.  So I grow a lot of them. Last year, I canned 18 quarts of green beans.  We also had some meals along the way where we ate them fresh.  This year, the first planting gave us 18 quarts of green beans.  I still have the fall harvest to get through.  Even if I just get 1 meal of green beans off these plants, I’ll have produced more than last year.  But I should end up canning more of them this fall.  The plants look good, I’m staying ahead of the bean beetles and there are lots of little beans on the plants.

Onions are another crop where I produced more this year than last.  Last year I ended up with a handful of onions.  We used them, but they were gone after 1 or 2 meals.  This year, I have a huge basket that’s full of them.  I don’t have a weight or measure of how many, but there are a lot of them.  We will probably not need to buy onions until after New Years.

This is the first year I’ve grown garlic.  But already I’ve grown enough to provide all the garlic we use in a year.  I have enough that I’m giving it away at work.  This spring we discovered the magic of the garlic scape.  They are awesome, but only hardneck produces the scape, so I won’t be doing softneck at all this year.  This Fall I’m planting about the same amount, but it will all be hardneck.  Hardneck also produces fewer cloves on a bulb, so more hardneck needs grown to produce the same number of cloves.

I’m not sure what I’m going to try to produce more of next year.  I think that tomatoes could be a good one to try.  Last year we didn’t can any.  This year I have a bunch of quart jars of crushed tomatoes.  We use a lot of tomatoes, but tomatoes are one of the plants that give me fits.  My biggest problem is I can’t seem to get them growing well from seed.  In the Spring I’m going to concentrate on that.

Green peppers are another vegetable that I may try to produce more.  We froze some peppers last year, but this year we only had 2 plants and they didn’t produce that well.  I think that I crowded them.  Next year I’d like to get some of peppers into the freezer.  While you can’t eat frozen peppers in a salad or any other way raw, they are still great cooked into foods.

So that’s my take on homesteading.  I’d love to hear other views on what it is to build a homestead?

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The stink bugs are back

Posted on September 21, 2011 by | Leave a comment

When I got home from work today, 2 stink bugs were on the screen to the back door.  I came in and counted 8 of them on various windows around the house.  That got me thinking about the stink bugs from last year.

Last Fall the stink bugs were horrible.  From about mid-September until Christmas, I don’t think a single day went by where I didn’t kill at least 1 stink bug in the house.  Then in the Spring I was cleaning up their dried up carcasses every time I opened anything that was outside.

I figured that Summer was going to be horrible.  But all Summer long, I would occasionally see a stink bug in the garden.  I’d kill any I saw.  But they were not anywhere near as bad as I thought they would be.

But this Fall, they are making themselves seen.  I’m seeing evidence of them in the garden.  They don’t eat the plants, but they stick their proboscis into the fruit and that leaves a scar.  Here’s an example of what they do, the okra pod on top has lots of scars on it.  The one on the bottom only has 1 or 2 scars.

This isn’t terrible for someone who is growing for his own consumption.  But the market gardeners have a tough choice to make.  Either hand pick and use organic treatments or spray with chemical pesticides.  After all that okra on top wouldn’t sell at market.

I’ll use this as a segue to my views on chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.  While they are not a self sufficient solution, I feel that chemicals do have a place in the modern homestead.  They just should not be the first choice to deal with a problem.

For instance, I have problems with Mexican bean beetles.  They were all over my lima beans, so much so that they were a wash since I couldn’t get ahead of them.  But on my green beans, they are there but not to the point of completely destroying the crop.  What I do is hand pick the adults and I mash the eggs, larvae and pupa.  This keeps them down to a manageable level and hopefully helps reduce their populations in future years.  But the big benefit is that while hand picking, I can keep track of how the plants are doing and look for beneficial bugs.  If I went in there and sprayed pesticides, I would kill off all the predators and when the bean beetles returned, there would be no predators to help me keep them in check.  But if it meant the difference between eating and not eating, I would likely spray.

Fertilizers are the same way.  I mostly use compost for feedings.  I do add in blood meal or bone meal, but if I needed to, I would use chemical fertilizer.

Herbicides and fungicides are an entirely different story.  I feel that chemical herbicides and fungicides have no place on a homestead.  These are hormone blockers and can cause all kinds of problems.  I feel that the only reason that anyone really uses these is out of laziness.  They don’t want to put the time and effort into pulling a weed or fix the condition that allows the fungus to take hold.

Avoiding chemicals does take some extra work.  But I believe that by keeping them out of the garden, it allows your property to develop into its own mini ecosystem.  The beneficial bugs and predators come in and help to keep the pests in check.

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