Category Archives: Micro Homesteading

Busy in the garden

Gardening

On Friday and then again this morning, I was able to get out into the yard for a solid chunk of time and do some gardening!  I really enjoy gardening – I find it very relaxing (even though often it’s a lot of work), centering, and just enjoyable.  My husband came out and saw me working in the yard, and he said he loved seeing me outside.  I asked why, and he said that I seem very happy then, and it’s true – I’m not walking around with a big smile on my face, but it’s more like an inner enjoyment that I guess is reflected out.

Last week I did my monthly shopping and succumbed to purchasing some vegetable starts for planting – even though the price was fairly good, I have plenty of seeds already so I considered this a splurge.  But I used part of my grocery budget for the plants, figuring that it fits best into that category since I’m buying them with the intent to grow food.

Right now I have a variety of tomatoes – 6 Early Girl, 6 grape tomatoes, 4 yellow tomatoes, 2 roma, 1 beefsteak, 4 cherry, and I’ve started seeds for three (four?) more heirloom varieties.  I have seeds for two more varieties, and I saw the first volunteer tomato plant (ie coming up on its own from tomatoes that fell on the ground last year), and am expecting a LOT more – last year I had about 50 volunteers.  They were seriously like weeds, except that I was happy to have them!  I have several kinds of peppers that I already mentioned putting in, and seeds for another couple of kinds that I want to try.

I planted 8 green beans in a couple of pots on the front porch (4 in each); they had each had a tropical plant that I left outside over the winter, and all that’s left of them are the sturdy stems.  I thought it would be a good use of the space to plant the green beans around them so they can grow up the stems.  I also planted five green bean plants into the yard, and started another packet of seeds – yardlong asparagus beans.  I guess that was about 40 seeds so hopefully a good number of them will sprout. I have to look at the dried beans I have in the house and see what else I want to plant – did you know that you can just use any dried beans for planting?  Pretty cheap to do it like that – instead of paying $1 -2 for a small packet of seeds, you can get a pound for under a dollar.

Thanks to the inspiration of my littles (opening my seed packets and getting them wet while I was transplanting), I decided to plant the package of purple carrots and really need to do the solar yellow carrots since they opened that as well, but haven’t yet – at least those aren’t wet.  🙂  Generally I don’t think carrots are worth the effort because they’re so inexpensive, but I got three types that looked interesting, so it’s worth it to me for the novelty (the third type is called Parisian Market carrots, like small round balls).

I casually planted basil, Italian flat leaf parsley, thyme, lettuce leaf basil, and garlic chives along the front walkway.  Casually planted means that I loosened the soil, then sprinkled the seeds in a haphazard way and stirred a little dirt around.  I’m not the most systematic gardener in the world when it comes to tiny seeds!  It will be interesting to see what will come up.  I figured that herbs look attractive and are almost all perennials, so they’ll grow back year after year and will be a nice addition to the front yard walkway next to some other perennials (non-edible) that I planted last month, instead of taking up space in the raised garden beds.  I have a few other herbs still waiting to be planted – Forest Green parsley (the curly kind), marjoram, Greek oregano, cinnamon basil, sage, Italian large leaf basil, Finocchio fennel, and catnip (to make my cat happy).

Ds2 planted the remaining lavender plant I bought last month – it’s not really quite enjoyable yet planting with him, since he throws the plants in the holes, or manages to lose all the dirt around the roots before it gets into the hole. When gardening with my littles, I have to remember to shift gears from getting something done to making it fun for them, and putting my energy into helping them learn what to do.  When I do, we all enjoy it; otherwise, they feel like a nuisance!

I also planted 7 gold zucchini, 7 regular zucchini, 8 delicata squash, 7 watermelon (the big red ones), 4 small yellow watermelon, 7 spaghetti squash.  I have seeds for yellow summer squash that I plan to plant soon, in the next few days, and a few other winter squash – butternut, Gold Nugget, and Sweet Meat.  Squash are easy because the seeds are big and you can plant them directly into your yard.  Also I moved a bunch of squash seeds that sprouted in the compost – not sure what kind they are, but I’ll see when they fruit!

While I was in the garden I met a neighbor who lives across the alley when her dog escaped into my house!  She’s been living here for three years and I’ve been here for four but you don’t really see neighbors across the alley much except at a distance.  She just started a garden and we got to talking about lots of interesting things – she also had a pet box turtle that she brought out for the kids to watch while we were talking, and we had the three ducklings in the back yard while we were working there that she asked about and held.  I offered her some volunteer squash starts with the caveat that I didn’t know what kind they were, and she was happy to take some for her yard – she got about ten, I guess.

Oh, and I can’t forget about the cucumbers; I planted maybe 7 of those, too.  I have three more kinds that I want to plant from seed (Armenian cucumbers, Tendergreen, and Sumter), plus one kind that I started in mini pots that I’ll transplant when they’re ready – I think they’re called Meditteranean.  I like those best – they’re the very thin skinned ones that are crisp and delicious, with very small seeds.

The ducklings are being kept inside in a large plastic container covered with straw that we change daily.  I’m putting the straw around the plants that are in the garden, to discourage weeks.   We try to take them outside when we go out – I think everyone and everything is happier outside!  We have a grating that goes around a grill but we’ve never used it for that – it’s like a metal screening about two feet high connected all around.  We put the ducks and their water dish inside that on top of some grass, and then cover the top with a piece of metal screening left over from my composter (I saved it when I took the rest of it to the dump when it rusted through).  They’re very happy there and protected from prowling cats; I put them on a different patch each time we go out, though they’re so tiny it’s not like they eat up all the grass around them.

If you’re wondering where in the world I’m going to plant all of this in my not so big yard, the answer is that I’m planning to grow things vertically rather than taking up space on the ground to maximize the yield.  Gardening is an enjoyable hobby and part of the fun is that it’s so productive!

Avivah

Weekly menu plan

Gardening, menu plans

It’s been so busy around here that I haven’t posted my weekly menu plans for the last two or three weeks – generally I do my planning for the week on Saturday night but now that Shabbos is over so late, there’s not much time to do it and I have to get used to setting aside time on Sunday mornings.  I’ve said it before, but life runs so much more smoothly when I have the menus decided on in advance!

Sunday – breakfast – fruit, bread and cheese; lunch – split pea soup; dinner – squash apple bake, tomato salad, zucchini in sauce, and something else I still have to decide on 🙂

Monday – b – breakfast tacos; l – rice with pigeon peas; d – chicken chili

Tuesday – b – raisin walnut scones; l – lentil tomato pie; d – chili con carne

Wednesday – b – muesli; l – lima bean patties, salad; d – pizza, salad, fries

Thursday – b – almond muffin loaf; l – CORN (clean out refrigerator night/day); d – black bean tamale pie

Friday -b – polenta; l – leftovers

Breakfasts are supplemented with fruit and milk; lunch and dinners with some kind of fresh or cooked vegetables.  Now that the weather is turning hot, my kids have really been enjoying main dish salads for lunch – I make a huge amount of salad, and then we throw in eggs, nuts, chicken, or cheese, and top it with a nice dressing.  There are many variations to what you can put in and everyone likes how satisfying but still light it is.  Ironically, making a huge salad like this takes more work than things that seems much more complex – all that checking and chopping!  I may end up substituting a main dish salad for one or more of the planned lunches, depending on the weather this week.

I mentioned several weeks ago that I was seriously considering the GAPS program for my kids stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome, a dietary protocol that restores optimal digestive functioning), but dh felt that I shouldn’t do it.  Our diet is pretty good and most meals above actually fit according to the GAPS recommendations (GAPS doesn’t include grains and some beans, which I still use a bit, but most recipes above use nut flours); he has been doing GAPS for over two months and felt it was unnecessarily burdensome  to limit the food options for them when they’re all thank G-d healthy and not in need of it (though of course it would benefit everyone).

Something else that is different now that the weather is warm is that the beans need less time to sprout before being used in their respective dishes.  Today I’ll be soaking pigeon peas, lentils, and chickpeas so they’ll be available for the meals they’re called for on Monday and Tuesday, but I’ll be soaking the limas on Monday and the black beans on Wednesday – in the winter you need more time to think ahead but two days is enough for beans to sprout now that it’s so warm.

In my garden, I have kale, chard, spinach, and lettuce, which I’ll be using this week.  I’m also thinking of using the last of the turnip greens and pulling them up so I can plant something else in that spot.  When you use your garden space effectively, you can get three seasons worth of crops out of each planting space – that’s what I try to do.  When I did my monthly shopping I saw some small pepper and tomato plants at such a good price (.50 each) that I decided to get them even though it’s really too early to transplant them.  Yes, I did transplant them. 🙄  I cover each of the tomato plants on cold nights with a five gallon bucket and so far they’re looking great.  It will be nice to have tomatoes earlier in the season than in the past (usually I don’t transplant until the end of May, so this is a month in advance).  I got four kinds of peppers (4 banana peppers, 2 Big Bertha, 2 CA Wonder, 2 of something I can’t think of right now), and a couple different tomatoes – they only had grape tomatoes and First Ladies – I got four or five of each.  I included all of them in my grocery budget for last month. I also picked up a couple lavender starts and two sage for the same price (there wasn’t much of a selection beyond what I got) – I couldn’t remember if sage came back up on its own last year or not.

I also just sent off for an order of seeds on Friday, and am really looking forward to getting those.  I should get the tomato and cucumber seeds planted this week so they’ll be ready to transplant as soon as possible, but there seem to be so many things to do right now (particularly with graduation plans for dd and ds, their plans for next year, and the conference) that I can’t say with confidence that I’ll really do that this week.  I’m pretty relaxed about the garden piece  – you do what you can when you can, and if the plants go in later or not at all, it’s not the end of the world.  I also want to put up a fence this next week or two, which is a big project.  Got to keep in mind priorities!

My strawberry plants look amazing!  Last year I bought 25 of them and hardly got more than 10 strawberries, but this year they’ve spread, plus I got about another 20 plants for free from someone last year, and there are signs of lots of berries forming.  Now if I could just keep my two year old from picking them and telling me they’re dandelions.  🙂  When I bought blueberry bushes last year, I got three kinds that would bear fruit at different times, and this year the early bearers are showing signs of blueberries – we can’t yet eat them this year (have to check this with a rav) since they are only three years old, but it’s still nice to see them blooming.

Have a wonderful week!

(This post is part of Menu Plan Monday.)

Avivah

Amending the garden soil – yes, right now!

Gardening, Homemaking,

With Passover beginning later today, it’s been especially busy the last couple of days – well, the last couple of weeks, actually!  So when a landscaper friend of my dh called yesterday and said he had a load of sheep manure for me (for my garden – he told me he’d keep me in mind months ago when we were discussing gardening), my first thought wasn’t that this was something I had time for!  But it really was a favor to me since last year the kids and I drove 40 minutes in each direction to a horse farm, where we loaded up a bunch of buckets with composted horse manure to spread on our garden area.  I really wanted to continue to build up my soil this year with some more manure, in addition to all the composting I’ve been doing, and was thinking that we’d just have to do without since I have so many other things that need doing at this time of year – so his offer saved me time and energy.

He came by in the afternoon and it really wasn’t a large amount at all (less than 20 gallons).  I intended to just dump it on my lasagna beds and cover it with leaves and wood chips so there would be no smell.  But almost as soon as I got outside, I started feeling like I wanted to be out working in the yard!  I love being outside, and though my garden isn’t large, it’s become a satisfying and relaxing activity for me.  I had been thinking for the last couple of weeks that I needed to get outside and prepare the garden beds for spring planting (my goal is to maximize my garden space by doing succession planting and always have something growing in the available space), but as I already said, this is a busy time of year and I just couldn’t make it a priority.

I started shoveling by a little here, then a little more there.  Then started neatening up my lasagna beds by clearing a path between them (lasagna gardening basically means sheet composting, where the entire area is covered with layers of composting materials), since they don’t look neat like the raised beds we built do.  (If I come across free lumber, then I’d like to convert the area where the lasagna beds are to raised beds because it looks so organized and uniform.  Ds16 built the newest raised beds from the boards of the deck we pulled apart before we made the brick patio this past summer and stopped building when we ran out of wood.)

I put the manure on the newest beds, which never had soil amendments; the new beds were  filled with the dirt we excavated when we dug the area for the patio and nothing else.  I ended up planting seeds in them in the fall, not expecting much from them because the soil quality wasn’t anything special, and the plants in them did nicely.  In fact, some of them have rebounded beautifully once the snow that was covering them melted – right now I have kale, turnips, beets, spinach, mache, chives, leeks (two of them :)), oregano, fennel, and strawberry plants growing.  It’s so gratifying to look outside and see plants growing even though I didn’t have time to plant anything!

Since the new beds have pretty much been filled with plants since we built them in the beginning of the fall, I had to carefully put the manure and compost to the side so I didn’t disturb the plantings.  When we finish harvesting the spring greens and before I put in the summer seeds, I’ll add a big dose of compost.   We had some heavy rain after I worked outside, which was perfect, since I ended up adding compost and turning over the soil in all the raised beds after adding the manure and compost and the rain will help it all break down more.

I was delighted to see tons of earthworms in the lasagna beds!  I compost all of our food scraps by burying them there, and they’ve clearly been enriching our soil.  It was a noticeable difference between there and the raised beds where I hadn’t yet amended the soil and had significantly fewer worms.  It’s gratifying to visibly see the difference your efforts make.  Strong soil makes for much healthier plants, and healthier plants produce more nutrient dense vegetables.

As I was doing all this work outside, I kept thinking that I should probably be cooking and cleaning instead for the holiday.  But my littles were all napping and it felt like such a wholesome and soul-nourishing thing to be doing.  Though I wouldn’t have planned it, it was the perfect time for the delivery of natural soil enhancer to arrive – it was nice to shift gears a little and get out of my busy-busy headspace, and to feed my soul and body with some exercise, fresh air, and quiet time alone outdoors.

(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)

Avivah

Seeds vs. seedlings

Gardening, Intentional Spending,

>>have you ever figured out if it is better to plant (mostly i am talking about vegetables) from seeds or from seedlings? i am trying to decide if it pays to buy plants, or if it is a needless waste of money. i don’t exactly have a green thumb, in case that impacts your answer. also, what do you think about planting fruit trees? is it frugal?<<

I got my seed catalog a few weeks ago and have been enjoying poring over it and deciding what to plant for the coming spring/summer.  Before beginning to garden, I never would have understood the enjoyment to be found in looking through a seed catalog!

Seeds are always the most frugal; you can buy 2 -3 packets of open pollinated tomato seeds that will grow hundreds of plants for what you’ll pay for one tomato start.   When you buy a seedling, you’re paying for the foresight that the nursery has shown in starting the seeds indoors so you can get a jump on the planting season.

How much you’ll benefit from using seedlings or seeds will depend on the length of your planting season.  If you have a shorter season, then you’ll want to transplant your seedlings to maximize your time.  If you live in a warmer climate, then sometimes you aren’t gaining more than two weeks, since the seeds planted in the ground once it’s warm generally take off really fast.

But you can start your own seeds indoors and then have your own seedlings to transplant at a fraction of the cost – this is the direction I’d go in, if cost is an issue.  They’ll need warmth, moisture, and light after the seeds germinate.  Most seeds really aren’t a big deal to start yourself.  I’ll probably start some seeds indoors again this year, even though it didn’t make a huge difference to me in getting a start on my garden last year.  I’m going to try a different method this year that I think will be more effective.

Another potential concern is regarding the quality of the seedlings you buy from the big box stores, which is low.  They are poorly tended, low quality hybrids, and often don’t transplant well.  They were responsible in large part for spreading the tomato blight this past year.  So even if you decide to go the route of buying them, realize that while you’re paying much more, you’re not necessarily getting much more.  If you’re going to buy them, look for transplants from reputable nurseries.

Also, as far as seeds go, keep in mind that you often can save the seeds of the vegetables you eat and grow those.  And if you save the seeds of your open pollinated plants from year to year, you’ll never need to spend anything on seeds again.  That means buying any kind of open pollinated seed can be a one time purchase – super frugal!

As far as fruit trees, I don’t see them as frugal in the short term.  It will take years until you have fruit you can harvest (taking into account halachic concerns), and this is affecting my decisions about this.  I’d been planning to buy several young fruit trees to plant in my side yard this spring, and am now thinking I’d probably be better off converting the area to grow vegetables.  But there is the long term satisfaction in being able to grow your own fruit, and eventually it becomes frugal once you’re past the preliminary years.  So we’ll probably go with the fruit trees even if something else would be more efficient in the short term.

Avivah

Fall garden clean-up

Gardening

Despite me being out of things this week, the kids got a lot of yard work topped off!  It will be nice to go into the holidays having most of the signs of summer yard projects cleared away.

The 12,000 pound mountain of excavated dirt has finally all been moved – this is a major accomplishment!  Just today dd13 was talking to the daughter of one of you in a different city who mentioned seeing a picture of our yard (Google maps?) and commented on the huge pile of dirt.  Yes, that was our yard. 🙂  Once the dirt was moved, the fourth new raised garden box was put into place and filled.  Ds dumped the grass clippings from the three yards he mowed this week into these beds to boost the soil – grass clippings are high quality soil enhancers.  Since the grass that would have lined the paths was killed when the dirt was on top of it, the kids spread a thick layer of the wood chips we got for free last week around the beds.  It looks nice and neat now.

My plan is to build up the soil for the coming season by starting now and let the beds ‘cook’ over the next few months.  Soil strength/quality in large part determines the size of your crop, the nutritional value, and resistance to disease, and once I’m taking the time to garden, I want to get the most value out of it that I can.

As I write ds8 and ds10 are pulling up the summer garden plants in the lasagna beds. When they’re done, the last load of dirt will be spread on top, and then the rest of the wood chips will cover all of it.  The dirt and wood chips provide a lot of biological ‘brown’ and will need to be balanced with ‘greens’ to eficiently break down. I’ll be adding the usual kitchen vegetable/fruit scraps and whatever grass clippings and leaves I can get before winter.  I have about 3 – 4 gallons of ashes from our campfire that we’ll sprinkle over all the raised beds and the lasagna beds.  Then I’ll let the sun and rain and time do the rest of the work. 🙂

One thing that will remain of the garden will be some of its fruits – several of our simanim (symbolically eaten foods) for the Rosh Hashana dinners were freshly picked today and are being roasted together – butternut squash, leeks, and beets.  And the apples weren’t  ones we grew, but we did pick them yesterday afternoon.

Avivah

Gardening discoveries

Gardening, Intentional Spending

Remember a couple of days ago I mentioned that the pears we were planning to pick were picked when we went camping?  Yesterday I accidentally discovered the person who picked them!

It was so uncanny how this happened!  I had an errand to do and went to someone’s house I had never been to.  Walking up her front walk, I noticed vegetables growing.  So when she answered the door, I commented and told her I’d love it if she could tell me what she was growing since I didn’t recognize them all.  She responded by saying she had a lot in her back yard and offered to give me the whole tour – of course I agreed!  As we were walking in her side yard, she mentioned something about her plum tree, and I asked how they did this year, commenting that a number of the area apple and pear trees didn’t do well this year because of the late frost.  She said, there’s a tree they picked this year that had loads in the area – and I said, ‘was that in such and such a place?’.  And she said ‘yes’!  She couldn’t believe that we had gotten permission and planned to pick the very same pears. 

Towards the beginning of our discussion, I finished saying something and she said to me, “I feel like I’m listening to the other side of my brain speaking!”  We do a lot of things similarly, though she’s been gardening lots longer than me.  She used recycled lumber for her raised garden beds, is making large lasagna beds in back, and is using wood chips she got for free from the city for her beds and the paths.  This last thing was really funny, since just a few hours before I made arrangements with the tree service company taking down a neighbor’s tree to dump a half a truck load of wood chips/mulch behind my garage.  What for?  To use for my lasagna beds in back and to cover the paths between my new raised beds!  Unfortunately because of how my yard is situated, there’s not room for a dump truck to dump it directly in the yard, which means a lot of work shovelling from where they dump it into the yard.  So that was part of yesterday afternoon’s chores.  A few of the kids were swimming at a friend’s house and when I came to pick them up and their friends heard we were going home to shovel wood chips, they asked if they could come along and help.  Ane they did.  You see, fun and work don’t have to be entirely separate!  The guy who gave it to us was still working down the street and kept peeking over at us to see what we were going to do with so much mulch. 🙂

– Side comment – if you garden or use a wood stove, try contacting tree service companies to ask if they have wood mulch and/or firewood you can have.  When I asked if I could have the wood chips, he asked if I also wanted firewood – they would have given me as much as they had.  These companies are always chopping down trees and take what they have to the dump, if they don’t find anyone who wants it.  Clearly, they’re not going to spend lots of time and energy trying to find you to give it to you for free, but if you ask them and you’re close enough to the area they’re working in, chances are good they’ll be happy to give it to you for free.  Free firewood would make winter heating costs negligible, but we’re unfortunately not set up for it and when we had someone over a couple of days ago to assess what was involved in changing our heating unit, we learned that it would be expensive and complicated for us to switch to wood/coal heat. 

I also noticed she had something sprinkled on top of her lasagna beds, and asked about it – she said they were wood ashes (which is what I suspected).  Wouldn’t you know, I just brought back all the ashes from our campfire for my garden beds? 🙂

She dug up a clump of chives for me and that’s now in our garden bed, and also gave me a ground cherry for the seeds – I had never seen ground cherries growing before, though I had read about them in my catalogs and considered growing some.  So now I’ll be able to start one.  She also gave me some leek seeds.  She was growing a bunch of flowers, one of which was something that spontaneously grew in our yard that I wasn’t able to identify and ripped out because I didn’t know if it was an attractive weed or something someone would want there.  I didn’t want the seeds to fall into my lasagna beds and grow up next year without knowing what it was, so it was nice to learn what it was and I even brought some of those seeds home with me, too!

It was fun to meet  and chat with someone about these things -though I write about some of it here on my blog, I don’t usually meet people who have an active interest in it. 

Avivah

Weekly menu plan

Gardening, Intentional Spending, menu plans

Today ds10 asked me what we were having for lunch, and I suggested to that he start writing some ideas of what he’d like down for the week.  He ended up getting a call from a friend and going out with him, but dd13 decided to put her ideas down instead.  I asked her to make it slanted more towards non-meat meals since our camping trip was so high on the meat proteins (used 12 pounds of hamburgers, 5.5 lb beef hotdogs, and a couple of pounds of canned ground meat for chili – for three dinners).  After writing it all out, she told me now she appreciates the effort it takes for me to do it every week!  Here is what she decided on:

Shabbos – dinner – chicken breasts in coconut curry sauce; roasted root vegetables, rice, gravy, salad, pecan power bars, apples; lunch- meatballs, sweet potato pudding, marinated mushrooms, Japanese radish, sweet and sour carrots, fresh salad, hot cherry peppers, pear chutney, watermelon, pecan power bars

Sunday – b – oats and milk; l – apples and peanut butter; d – chicken coconut curry, rice, pickled veggies

Monday – b – banana bread; l – peanut butter popcorn; d – split pea soup, cornbread

Tues – b- polenta; l  – leftover split pea soup; d – pizza

Wed – b – Perfect pancakes (flour soaked overnight – not indicated in recipe); l – sweet potato fries, ricotta cheese; d – chicken noodle soup

Thurs – b- Amish oatmeal; l -to be determined; d – bean burritoes

The breakfasts will be supplemented with fruit.  Dinners and lunches are supplemented with vegetables – we’ve used a lot of our home grown veggies in the last weeks.   Almost all of the squash plants were hit by powdery mildew and are dying now, but we got a lot of nice winter squash before that hit that I’m putting in storage – mostly butternut squash, since that’s what we planted the most of, but we also have acorn squash and a couple of pumpkins.  So far our tomato plants are still doing well, despite the blight that has hit a huge number of gardeners across the country.

I really would like to put in our fall/winter garden right away, but haven’t yet done it because I don’t have compost to add to the soil.  Last Shabbos we had an organic landscaper and his family for Shabbos lunch, and he told me to speak to him since he sometimes comes across stuff that would be good for boosting soil quality for free that he’d be happy to pass on to me.  If I can get a truckload of stuff this week (not likely, but you never know!), then I’ll try to get the cold weather seeds in.  I specifically ordered a bunch of seeds that can flourish in the winter in my part of the country, mostly green leafy vegetables, to supplement our meals even when the summer is over.  I’ve never done that before and would love to see how it works out.  But it’s not worth trying to grow in clay soil that hasn’t been amended.

I also need to start saving seeds for the coming season – the autumn is already almost here!  That’s something I’ve never done before, but whatever seeds I can save from my heirlooms will save me the cost of needing to buy those seeds in the spring.

I’m planning to go fruit picking with the kids this week, pears and maybe figs, if the person I was in touch with a month ago still has them (they were unripe when we went).  Naturally, whatever we pick will end up in large part being eaten fresh this week!

Avivah

Free plants for the garden

Gardening, Intentional Spending

At the end of last week, I called someone who was offering gardening supplies for free on CL.  After a short conversation, we both agreed that none of what she had was what I needed.  Then she mentioned she had a lot of perennials that I was welcome to since she’s moving away, and told me to call her back in the beginning of this week when things quieted down.  So I did!

Today I went over with a couple of the kids, and we got a bunch of nice plants -free -to add to the garden.  The woman herself was so nice – you could tell she loves gardening and said she was glad to give her plants to people who would enjoy them. We got a lot of strawberry plants – we got home when it was dark so we haven’t transplanted them yet.  Anyway, I’ll count how many we have when we transplant them, but it’s a lot.  I also got lemon balm (smells amazing! and also good for tea), mint (I think it’s spearmint, but not sure – my mint in a pot is alive but hasn’t thrived this year – also good for tea and upset stomachs), St. John’s wort (chosen because I prefer plants that are dual purpose, and this is medicinal), and bee balm (I don’t know if it has a medicinal value or not, but it attracts bees and butterflies, which are beneficial to the garden).  There were many other plants I could have taken but I’m not interested in flowers that only look pretty.

In addition to that, I got a nice sized agave cactus/aloe plant, a few pots of columbine, and a huge amount of scarlet cockscomb.  I got these just because they were so pretty and thought they’d look nice in the yard, and put them in front of the front porch.  We had three blueberry bushes there, but I had ds10 move them to a different part of the yard a  week and a half ago (the area I’ve named ‘the orchard’ because of my plans for it – a little presumptuous for a small side yard, but the kids like the sound of it! :)).  I was planning to make a small raised garden bed in front and fill it with ornamental edible greens, but the space is now taken by ornamental non edible cockscomb instead.  I planted most of the cockscomb after I got home, thinking that it was easier to plant them in the coolness of the evening than do it in the heat tomorrow.  It was a lot of work, and they’re such beautiful plants -I hope they’ll transplant successfully. 

But I still have everything else to plant tomorrow morning!  When we took apart the platform deck to replace it with a brick patio, I saved the wood.  When we built that deck, I got all of the supporting boards free from someone who had taken his deck apart, and we used a high quality plywood for the top.  With the boards, we’ve so far built three new raised beds (each 9′ x 3′ 2″), and hopefully will make a fourth in the next day or two (I need to buy just one more board – I have one the right length, but it’s a little narrower than the others and I’d like them all to be identical and uniform).  I have more plans for repurposing the plywood – any guesses?? 🙂  But we have to finish this patio/garden work before starting another project.  Those four beds are going in my backyard, right where the mountain of dirt from digging the patio is, near where my first raised beds were built last summer. It’s fun to keep finding more and more way to fit more in – my ds16 was commenting that it seems strange, but even though our yard has so much more in it, it feels bigger now. 

It’s been a lot of work to fill the new raised beds with that dirt, since the mountain was in the way of being able to put the empty boxes in.  But three raised beds are full now.  I was planning to get composted manure to add to the soil in the new beds to boost the soil strength, but the person I got some from a few months ago said the new batch isn’t yet composted and to call him back in a month.  Of course I could go buy compost but that’s not going to happen. 🙂  We compost all of our kitchen scraps, sometimes putting them in the compost tumbler, but in the summer, we’ve been keeping it very simple.  We either bury it deep in an empty part of a raised bed or pile it on top of the area surrounding the garden plants.  In the latter case, what I did was cover the soil with a flattened cardboard box to act as a mulch, put the scraps on top, and take a couple of shovels of dirt from the mountain to cover it.  That’s pretty much my daily way to do it now that the weather is so warm.  I’m hoping that once we fill all the new raised beds, we can add the rest of the dirt to the soil of the lasagna beds in back.  Right now it’s a little challenging since the plants are in the way, though.  Once we can do that, they’ll be higher, more like raised beds, and we won’t have to make yet another trip to the dump to get rid of all the dirt!

Avivah

Rain barrels

Gardening, Intentional Spending

About a month ago I bought our first rain barrel for $50 from someone who had only used it twice, a heavy duty vinyl model that holds 100 gallons of water.  (A rain barrel, in case any one isn’t familiar with the term, is a large barrel that is set up to harvest the rain water runoff from your home’s gutters.) I got it with the intent to be more self sufficient with garden’s water needs.  It’s a shame to pay to water the garden when I can use the rain that falls for free!  This model collapses and can be stored compactly in the winter months, which I liked.  It’s also easily accessible to my darling toddler sons, one of whom turned it on this morning without us seeing him, and totally drained out all 100 gallons of water.  yikes2.gif  At least it wasn’t water we had to pay for. 

A couple of weeks ago, I bought three more rain barrels, this time the standard 55 gallon size.  They’re recycled drums made of heavy duty plastic, much better for a family with active kids since they wouldn’t be easily damaged.  I think I’ll resell the vinyl rain barrel before one of my children figures out how to make a hole in it. 🙂   I bought them from someone who made them himself.  They were $50 each but I asked for a discount since I was getting three, so I paid $125 for all of them.  I researched how to make rain barrels quite a while ago because I wanted to make one, so I know it’s not a hard thing to do.  But while theoretically we could have made some ourselves, I knew that there was no way that the barrels would get done in a timely way because we had just started the patio project.  I also knew (since I’ve been looking for months for cheap barrels to make my own rain barrels and every single time the $10 ones were sold before I could get them) that I’d have to pay $25 for the barrel, and after buying the parts, I’d hardly come out more cheaply than buying them ready made.  My time and labor is worth the $5 or less I would have saved, don’t you think?

I’d like to connect at least two of them, so when one is full the water is automatically diverted into the next one.  My ds10 connected a garden hose to the spigot at the bottom of it so we can water directly from the barrel, but it seems that hose has a blockage so I have to attach a different hose. 

We got a little rain last week and it filled a six of one barrel.  Then we got a good rain, and it was incredible to watch how quickly the barrel filled up!  Since we don’t yet have the barrels connected to receive the overflow, we manually redirected the flexible downspout over the empty barrel.  It’s amazing to note the difference between that one, which is receiving the directed run off from the gutter, and the one next to it, that only collected the rain that fell directly.  The one that wasn’t hooked up got only a few cups of water in it after a good sized rain, while we easily could have filled all three barrels in the same amount of time. 

It might not seem so frugal to buy rain barrels, since we pay about $160 every three months for our total water usage, and it will take a lot of collected water until we break even.  But that’s how a lot of money saving things are – you have to make the initial investment and it can take some time until you start to see the payoff.   If you look at the short term, it seems like a waste of money, but I look at it as a long term investment; since watering the garden would take a lot of water on a regular basis (and it’s something I plan to have each summer), I’m happy to have a way to cut the costs. 

Avivah

Strawberry plants

Gardening

Well, we’ve gotten probably 15 – 25 strawberries from our 25 strawberry plants this year, and the strawberry season has come to an end!  Looked at from the perspective of just this season, the plants weren’t a very frugal purchase.  However, I planted them with the long term in mind, and hope that these plants will produce for us for years to come!  (And my two littles enjoyed picking them and popping them right into their mouths!)

Strawberry plants send out long spidery looking tentacles that are called runners.  To expand your strawberry patch for free, it’s easy to replant these and they will grow into new plants.  You take the stem part of the runner, and halfway along the runner cover it with soil (if there’s room in your garden bed you can do this near the mother plant, if not, you can put it in a small potting container).  After about a week, the plant will have established itself and then you cut the runner that attaches it to the mother plant.  Voila – a new plant!

Since this is the first year I’ve had these plants, I chose to cut off the runners off most of the plants.  The reason for this is then the plant will use it’s energy to make more berries in the year to come, instead of spreading it’s growing energy more thinly along new plants. Next year when they are better established, I’ll plant all the runners to make new plants; this year I only did it with a few. 

Avivah