Front yard trellis project

Since we are nearly out of backyard, we have decided to move some things to the front. I already have a 30ft round herb bed plotted out and ready for planting, and we have the 2 drarf apples and 1 blueberry we put in last year. After spending some time with my friend Tammie playing cameraman for her blog and watching Rick Pratt make a garden oblesque/trellis, I've decided to make my own and incorperate them in the front yard to plant Lisa's gourds on, along with cucumbers and possibly cherry tomato's.

Anytime I make a new area or bed, I always edge it with something for weed control, usually stones, timbers, or plastic edging. This time, since the area didn't need to be very big, I chose something I had on hand to use. I used a plastic 55 gallon drum.

First I marked the drum (top already cut off) into 6 inch rings and used a sawzall with a wood blade to cut them. A metal blade tends to hang up more with plastic.

Then I used my grinder to take the burrs off the edges of the cuts, which you can see on the left side of the grinder. (clean on the right)

I set the rings where I wanted them, cut the edges with the shovel and removed the ring.

I took out the soil, putting the sod on the compost pile,and mixed the soil with fresh compost.

After mixing the soil and compost, I filled the holes and covered them with 8" or so of leaves as a mulch until we can put in seed or plants.


This is the one I watched Rick Pratt make last weekend from all willow. I haven't found a source for willow yet, but I'll be making some from birch and doing the winding part with grape vines. Tammie and I went on a search for willow earlier this week, and though we didn't have any luck finding any, we found an area being logged that was laying full of birch branches and grapevines as far as the eye can see. We gathered enough for her to start some of her own, so I'll have to make another trek to get some for myself. I'm hoping to start them this week so they're out of the way, but the weather is supposed to get cold and rain again...ugh. Ah well, plenty of time since we won't be frost-free until mid-end May. I'll probably make some for the tomatos and cucumbers in the main garden too. Hopefully this isn't a really boring post, but I'm going to start posting more things I do as a sort-of tutorial/picture log step by step. If I'm happy with the way these turn out, I'm going to make a few extra's and put them in the yard with a for sale sign and give it a shot. I'm hoping with us being on a busy road and a popular garden center less than 1/4 mile away, they'll get some attention. What the heck, it's worth a shot, and I can get all the materials I want for free. I have an idea to make one with large vines in a circle at the top and hang a small windchime from it.....can't wait to see how it turns out!!
If you are interested in these, go to my friend Tammie's blog and watch the video of the one in the picture being made...and admire my FINE camera work, LOL. She had to make it a 2 parter, so she should get the second half up soon. http://unusuallyunusualfarmchick.blogspot.com/2010/03/our-first-video-segment.html
To see what Rick REALLY makes, visit him at www.aroundthebendwillowfurniture.com His work is amazing....Lisa really really wants me to make the stars & moons bed...guess I better find that source for willow!!!

Someone's been a busy girl....

Ladies and Gentleman, meet EGGZILLA!!! LOL I found this one yesterday along with the other 15. Yea....umm......16 eggs a day, time to scale back a bit on the hens.





.

FINALLY!!!

Finally...........after over 4 months of reminding people and waiting, I have ONE picture of me from Halloween. YODARR the Barbarian lives!!!!!!
I loved the platform boots that I made. You can easily tell how big the things made me by realizing that Mike (on my left) is 6 feet tall. hahaha I stood over 6'8" with those things added to my normal 6'3". Hopefully I'll get more since they just now got around to uploading these on their computer. Mike's costume was awesome. That's not a mask, it's latex applied (glued) to his face! He won the best costume prize of a bottle of Vampire wine.
Enjoy...and laugh a bit.

Looking back

Today while looking through my blog, I realized that I have written 204 posts. When I started it, I never thought I would write that many or end up having 112 followers. It started as just something to do on the now gone Yahoo 360, but I brought it here when I realized that no one ever read it but a handfull of Yahoo friends. I transferred some here and started writing regularly. Sometimes I would post 3-4 a week, and sometimes I would miss a few weeks alltogether. I like looking back and seeing the accomplishments here at home, and reading the comments from all of you followers. It's been a lot of fun, and I am looking forward to writing more this year.
My subject matter tends to jump around quite a bit. I started off sticking with the garden/homestead idea, but that's not all what I am about. I want to write and share all the things I enjoy, read about, or am passionate about, which leaves some entries with 12 comments and some with none. I've considered going back to just the gardening and homesteading for this blog, but I have decided not to. It's not all I do, so it won't be all I write about. The only place I can write freely about all of my interests is here. I frequent several online forums, but never quite fit in. The typical "suburban homesteader" sites are all about being pretty, and I am not. The hunting places are all about that trophy deer, and I'm about putting food in the freezer. The eco-green places want to talk about small trendy things they do that they saw on tv, where I want to go off grid and live like it was 1884. I'm too homestead for the survival folks, and too survival for the homestead folks. My only outlet of openly talking and sharing my life is here, and here it will stay.

Today I'll start with something I have never really talked about in just one post, and thats why we garden. I've talked about gardening hundreds of times, how we do what we do, and what we do with the produce, but I have never really said WHY. Well, there are several reasons. The first and foremost is not having to go buy something I can simply grow myself. I dispise the thought of going to the store and buying cans of green beans when I can spend a little time planting seeds and have the ability, like last year, to can 60 quarts of them at home. I can't imagine not looking out this window at all that we have planted and at the vegetable garden space and remember what it was like to go have to buy everything, I just can't. The work isn't all that hard, and the end results are amazing. I will never not have a garden simply for this one reason.

Reason number two is I know what is in my plants or what has been sprayed on them. NOTHING. We use no fertilizers other than compost. We use no pesticides or herbicides. I know that my tomato's came from my own backyard and not from Mexico where they are sprayed with chemicals that are banned in the US. Most produce you see at the stores is picked and shipped unripened, and sprayed to make them ripen in transit. This why you see big red apples and tomatos that taste like nothing, they aren't ripe. In the past, I have bought tasteless tomotos, dyed apples, and green onions with a slimy god knows what in the center of the stalk. I don't want to eat that, or anything else I have listed.

Another reason is to simply live simpler and save money. With a few dollars in seeds, and my time (which i DON'T put a price on), I can grow and harvest for myself a large amount of food that I would normally have to buy. Someday I would love to add up everything we harvested last year and compare it to what it would cost at the grocery store. Besides the cost of the food itself, we are saving money on gasoline and wear & tear on the vehicles. I find it insane to spend $3 in gas to get $10 worth of groceries. I have no need to go to the store for potato's, I just walk out back and dig some up...just like everything else.

Along with our goals of living simpler, the garden helps us towards our goal of being as self sufficient as we possibly can. By not relying on the stores to buy fruit or vegetables, we're one step closer. We grow what we eat, and we can, freeze, dehydrate, and store everything we grow. Trips to the store are usually less frequent, and normally just for basic items. Each new thing we raise or plant in the ground is one less thing we are reliant on the grocer for. That alone is worth the effort we put into our garden and plants.

My last reason I wrote a bit about in a post a few days ago. With everything I grow and eat myself, I am sending a message to the big boys. I'm telling the grocery stores I don't need them. I'm telling big agriculture the same. And I am telling the chemical companies we won't buy their product or anything treated with it. With the population exploding, we rely on the grocer more and more since there are only a handfull of people who produce their own compared to the total population. This pushes the grocer to need more, which pushes the farmer to produce more, which pushes the chemical companies to make and market products which help the other two. Being out of this loop gives you freedom. It gives you independance, and it tells them we are not all going to fall into their trap. My garden is a big " * you" to all of them.

As I was proof reading this entry, I had another reason and wasn't going to add it, but decided that I will. I know it's far fetched for a lot of people, and sometimes even for me, but I'm going to include it anyway. While reading some of the preparadness and survival wesites I frequent, I see a lot of people talking about learning gardening for those big SHTF scenerio's they are all so fond of talking about. Many of them plan to have gardens after some giant disaster, and there are actually companies that sell garden seeds for long term storage, marketing them as basically a "survival garden in a bucket". While I don't think much about giant disasters or such things, I do know that I have the skills, the means, and the know how to have my own garden if one of their scenerio's would ever come true. Now I don't see anything like that happening, but in case it ever does, I'll trade ya some potatos and onions for that case of .223 ammo, LOL.

Staring out the window...

Today is the first whole day I get to spend at home in over a month. The side work and odd jobs have kept me fairly busy, and our weekends have been spent visiting family and buying the sale items to restock the pantry. I've already done the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, put away laundry and sat to take a break before I take some tools back out to the garage and run the sweeper in the living room.
It's a warm day again, maybe in the mid to upper 40's. I'm sitting at the kitchen table looking out over the backyard and the FINALLY receeding snow. We had a record snowfall this year for February, totalling 31.7 inches. Counting other accumulation and drifts, we had spots close to 4 feet deep by the garage, chickenhouse and the woodpile. I do love winter to a point. Watching a nice slow snowfall is beautiful and a wonder of nature, but I really have to say I'm sick of it. We haven't had this much snow in a long long time, and we haven't had this much snow on the ground consistantly in more years than I can remember. Yea...all fine and dandy, but I'm done. I'm sitting here looking at the garden area, and the snow is melted just enough that I can see the contours of the raised beds, when a week ago it was a flat area covered in 3 feet of snow. I want this snow GONE! lol I want to get outside, get my hands dirty, and start the garden for the year. Of course, I can't do very much since we aren't even close to being out of danger of frosts, and with all this snow melting and the impending spring rains, it's going to be a mudhole. But I don't care right now. I'll pop on the rubber boots and get something accomplished at the first sign of open soil warming in the sun.
We have lots of plans for the garden this year. We'll be adding things we don't normally grow and adding more of things we grow little of. We'll be cutting back on a few others, while doubling or tripling 1 or 2 basics. I plan to find more older railroad ties and make more seperate beds just for greens. I plan to make another one just for carrots and celery. We'll double the onions and potatos, and cut back on my hot peppers. We'll be taking another shot at growing brussel sprouts since we have been eating so many lately, and I want to grow larger amounts of spinach and other like greens to process and can or freeze. This year will be all about producing to store, whether that would be canning, freezing, dehydrating, or basement storage of root crops; but also about growing more healty vegetables to eat during the growing season.
I'm also taking another look at growing wild edibles like dandelions, lambs quarters, and some other greens that people normally see as greens. These I want to plant around some trees and other area's in the front yard. They may look like ornamental plantings, but they are actually something edible. I've grown far past the point of caring about growing flowers and such just because they look pretty. Pretty has no use to me unless it is edible, just the same as grass in the yard. I see no point in wasting space just to plant things that are attractive to the eye and not the stomach. There are hundreds of edible plants and flowers out there that look just as good, if not better, than things we all normally stick in the flowerbeds with no concern other than how they look. I'll be doing a lot of research between now and "official" spring, and planting things accordingly. Of course Lisa will have her few small areas for some flowers that she loves, but I want to slowly do away with a lot, replacing them with edibles and herbs.
Since I mentioned herbs, the plans for the 30 foot circular herb bed out front are still on. We'll plant edible herbs, herbs for using as spice, and some medicinal herbs in that area. I'll be adding a small (4 foot) pond to the center of the area, hoping to attract frogs and toads to take care of the insect problem for me. I want this area to be something special. It won't only be for growing and cultivating herbs, but an area that stands out as a beautiful example of how something useful can be planted rather than a flower that just sits there and looks pretty. The pond can attract frogs and toads, and the herbs themselves can attract honey bees and hummindbirds. I want to start another area to grow a fairly large quantity of stevia since we have been using it as a sweetener more and more, but I have to find the right spot and make a bed for them. Being the same as everything else; when the snow melts off I will walk around the yard and pick out the perfect spot. Arrghhhhhh melt already!!!!!
So once again, our little homestead will be growing in production. I love looking back over the past nearly 11 years at this place and seeing how we have grown from a small 20x20 vegetable garden to where we are now and what the new plans are. I love knowing that each year we rid ourselves of more useless grass and palnt another area for things that are edible. With everything we add, we have the need to buy less, we eat better, and we're sending that message to the grocery stores and big agriculture. We don't need you, we don't want you. We can do for ourselves!

Well...enough for now folks. I'm off to get these tools to the garage, so another egg check, run the sweeper and plan dinner. I sure hope I can find something in the freezer to make LOL.

My viewpoint on herbicides, pesticides, and what you can do. Please think about this one.

Today while reading yet another news story about the affects of pesticides and herbicides on our envoirnment and us, I started thinking about why such things are produced. As much as I want to follow the crowd and point my finger at the chemical companies and large scale farmers who use these products, I can't without thinking WHY these chemicals exist and are used. Yes I know, chemicals are evil, and yes I know, there are alternative ways to farming, but for now, I am going to look at the big picture.

As I have written in many previous posts, there was a time when EVERYONE produced some, if not all, of their own food. This could have been on a farm, on the prarie, or the man in the mountains eating elk and wild berries. Everyone was responsible for themselves. But as the population grew, towns grew into cities, and people moved away to have "jobs", they needed to buy their food rather than produce it. Imagine in todays standards, comparing the need for food outsourcing in 1810 as compared to today in 2010.

I did a little research, actually very little, to find the population of the US in 1810 compared to today.The figures I used were from the first website that popped up showing all 3 dates that I wanted, so they may be rough estimates and not totally correct, but no matter what, the numbers are still staggering in comparison. The US population in 1810 was 7,240,000. In 1910, it was 92,228,000, and now in 2010, it is a whopping 299,867,000 people.

I couldn't find any figures as to percentage of people growing their own food in 1810 as compared today, but I'll assume the ratio then was a LOT higher than it is today. If I was to even figure that 10% of our population now grows their own food, the number is still higher than the total population in 1810. Even as I sit here and type this, these figures still amaze me.

So what do all these figures have to do with chemicals like herbicides and pesticides? You have to figure how much food has to be produced to feed this gigantic number of people today, and factor in how many actual farms are left in the US. These farmers have to produce X amount of food to send out due to demand, but they also have to produce that same amount to even turn a profit. With the use of thse chemicals, their work load is reduced, cutting them down on labor costs and overhead. Imagine, really sit and think, about how much food it takes to feed nearly 300 MILLION people in comparison to the 7 million people 200 years ago. That's a LOT of food.
Don't think I am sitting here agreeing with the use of such chemicals with no thoughts of long term affects on our enviornment or ourselves. I care just as much as anyone else who is reading this. I will never agree with spraying fields with pesticides, or growing corn that is genetically modified to contain its own herbicide within itself. I disagree with ALL of these practices. But....I do understand WHY those things are used. We simply could not afford to produce food for 300 million people using all natural and organic methods, making them affordable, reliable, and capable of turning a profit for the farmer.
Now...with all this being said, it's time to take a stand. I don't mean send letters to the chemical companies, or refuse to buy a certain brand of canned corn, I mean produce your own. At this point in time folks, growing your own food is a revolution. With just one small tomato plant you stick in the ground yourself, you're not buying this one thing from the store, and you're raising that middle finger to the chemical companies. With a garden, you're doing even more, you're starting a battle with them. You're raising BOTH fingers, and telling them that you don't need them. With everything you produce for yourself, you're less reliant on the machine, eating one less chemical laden food, and telling the big guys you don't need them.
I'm not going to write on and on this time, I've done that enough in the past with previous posts. I just want each of you to think about a few things. If everyone with the means to do so grew just SOME of their own food, how would this hurt these companies? If 10% of us grew a garden, thats 10% of everyone with some kind of property, how would THAT affect them? It's time to take back our food folks. Time to take it back to ourselves. Time to make it safe. Time to put it back in our own hands instead of the chemical companies and commercial farms. Think about it.

And just to refer you all to the article I was referring to, go read this:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/03/02/common-weedkiller-chemically-castrates-frogs-turns-males-into-females/ It's some REALLY scary stuff to know that a hericide we are all ingesting has altered the sex in frogs. Just one more reason to think........

Today I stopped to visit my folks for a bit, and mom surprised me with copies of pictures. They were pictures of my grandma's old house, which my grandfather built in the early 30's, and after he passed away, grandma raised 3 kids in by herself. I have a lot of fond memories of this place. The hand pump in the kitchen, evenings of watching late night tv with grandma and having massinve amounts of hot chocolate covered in marshmallow whip, and many Christmas's.

The place was wide open, with just a half wall seperating the kitchen from the living room. The room on the side was a bedroom that my dad, uncle, and aunt all shared while grandma slept on a rollaway bed she kept behind the couch. That bedroom (that sits lower than the main house) was origionally a chicken coop. The house was heated with a woodburner, though later it was converted to a radiant oil burner.

When my uncle built her the new house that I posted pictures of 2 weeks ago, she stayed next door at my aunts. She watched the dozer push over that house and cried all day. She started her life with my grandfather there. He built the house with his own two hands. She raised 3 kids there by herself. That tiny house was her life. My uncle just wanted better for her and had the means to do so, but my dad has never forgiven him for tearing it down and making his mother cry. She didn't like the new bigger house at first, but after getting used to quilting by a woodburner in a sewing room the size of the old house, she got used to it and got more comfortable.

While I could live with ease in something like this by myself, I cannot imagine raising 3 children in it. While I like to shun modern conviences and gadgets, I think of this house and can only imagine how hard it was. All of us have memories of that tiny house, and now I have pictures to look at and bring back more.

Sorry about the picture quality. My scanner is down, so these are pictures of a picture.

This view is of the right (east) side of the house. That door was rarely used, and was boarded and sided over not far after these were taken. It's hard to tell on these pictures, but the house was not on the ground. It was on wooden stilts and cement blocks.

This is the back of the house. That room to the left is the bedroom made from a chicken coop. The place never had shingles, only tarpaper. That door opened into the kitchen, and the living room started roughly 8 feet to the left. The sink with hand water pump was right under that back window.

This is the other side by the driveway. Note the size of the car in comparison to the house. Yea, it was tiny. That mirror on the right of the picture was on an old GMC stakebody truck that belonged to my uncle. The back was enclosed with wood, and it was always our "fort" when we played at grandma's. That driveway was lined with tiny rubber cutouts about the size of a penny from molds where grandma worked her second job. (she was a school custodain in the day and worked in a rubber shop in the evenings) She brought them home in buckets and poured them onto the drive since she could never afford gravel. I wish I still had one as a momento, but I don't.