Jan26

Modern Pioneer Quiz

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Modern Pioneer Quiz

Like many girls, when I was young I loved the Little House books.  I was enamored with the pioneer life and wished I could be Laura.  I used to tell my mom that I was born in the wrong time.  I should have been a pioneer!  I’m pretty sure this is what led us to getting chickens.  Needless to say, I was very excited to share these books with my own children.

Last summer, Henry and I started reading Little House in the Big Woods out loud because he was curious about maple sugar and I remembered that there was a great description of maple sugar being made in that book.  What I had forgotten, however was all the other great things that the Ingalls family did.

For example, the book begins with the harvest and putting things away for the winter.  In the first chapter Laura describes how the family smoked venison in a hollow tree.  It was Laura’s job to run and fill the smoker with green wood chips.  The method of smoking described is pretty similar to one that Rick and I have worked towards doing ourselves in our yard using an old oak barrel.

Next the family butchers a pig and Ma carefully makes the sausage balls and head cheese while Pa smokes the hams and the children roast the pig tail on a stick.  The girls play in the attic on the pumpkins among all their vegetables that are stored for the winter.  Pa goes on to hunt and make bullets (which Henry loved reading about) and Ma has her house keeping (every day with its own proper work) to keep the girls busy through the winter.

The more we read, the more I realized I have made my life very Little House.  I wonder, just how many other people out there are like us?  So I made this quiz…

The Modern Pioneer Quiz

How Little House is Your Life?

1. Has anyone in your house ever used an axe to cut a Hubbard squash or frozen meat?

a. What is a Hubbard squash?
b. No, but we do have winter squash stored in the attic.
c. Yes, it’s the easiest way.

2. Have you used a pig’s bladder as a balloon or roasted a pig tail on a stick?

a. Eew!
b. No, but I would if given the chance.
c. Yes! Bladders make the best toys.

3. Do you butcher your own meat?

a. No, but my grocery store has a butcher.
b. Yes, we even have our own smoker.
c. Yes, we butcher every fall after killing the meat we hunted and raised ourselves. Then we smoke it in a hallow log.

4. Do you store food for the winter?

a. Sure do, my freezer is packed with deals from Costco.
b. Yes, I can and pickle and use my dehydrator.
c. Yep, I hang my smoked hams next to the hard cheeses and salt pork.

5. Have you made maple sugar candies in the snow?

a. What?! You can make candy in the snow?
b. Yes, and the kids loved it.
c. Yes. We tapped the trees ourselves, boiled the sap, and afterwards we had the whole family over for a dance to celebrate.

6. Have you ever harvested honey?

a. No, but we get honey from a local farm.
b. Yes, our beehive is so interesting.
c. Yes, from wild bees living in a hollow tree.

7. Do you churn your own butter?

a. I think we did that in school once.
b. Yes, once in a while it’s a fun thing to do.
c. All the time; in the winter we cook carrot sin milk to color it yellow.

8. Has your neighbor ever delivered gifts on behalf of Santa Claus or loaned you some nails?

a. Neighbor? Oh, we don’t really see our neighbors.
b. No, but he’s helped me with some DIY projects.
c. Yes, he’s like family now.

Add up the number of A’s, B’s and C’s you answered.  Results are not scientific.  So, just how Pioneer are YOU?

Mostly A’s: More modern than pioneer, you might try a little DIY if you have the right tools, but you are more likely to hire someone.  Though you enjoy cooking at home, those foodie extremists will have to pry your microwave from your cold, dead fingers.  You’re not sure what head cheese is and you don’t even want to think about a pig bladder.  Baking bread is for artisans, you don’t really have time for that.  You’ll support the local bakery and farmer’s market instead.  We didn’t spend the last 100 years making advances so you could haul water from the creek.

Mostly B’s:  A modern pioneer and proud!  You use today’s technology to do yesterday’s work. Smoking, preserving, sewing and hunting are not lost skills thanks to the likes of you.  When you read about the Ingalls family, you are inspired to experiment in your own life.  But you don’t go overboard either.  You’re not about to give up indoor plumbing in favor of a weekly bath on Saturday, whether you need it or not.  Keep blazing the trail and those pioneer skills will be around for future generations too.

Mostly C’s:  Grab your fiddle and don your bonnet!  The pioneer spirits of Pa, Ma, Mary and Laure run strong through your veins!  The Little House books are not historical fiction, they are a guide!  Your friends are probably fascinated by your lifestyle, but you’d never know it, since you don’t have the internet.  In fact, you can’t even read this quiz.  You are too busy weaving straw hats, greasing bear traps and making bullets.  You really were born in the wrong century.  Good for you for making yourself a pioneer life in these modern times.

Jan25

UH Bootcamp: Eating Well without Breaking the Bank

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UH Bootcamp: Eating Well without Breaking the Bank

Yesterday I talked about the basics of making a budget.  For today’s urban homestead boot camp, I wanted to give you my best tips for saving money on your food bill while still eating well. Some things, to really save money, do take some investment up front, but the pay off in the long run is well worth it.  Other things are simpler, they can be started right away.  But first let me share what I think eating well means.

By “eating well” what I mean is eating real food.  Food that doesn’t come out of a box, that was raised and prepared with care.  Top Ramen is not eating well.  To me, sustainability is important, as is cost.  Eating sustainably means different things to different people.  To some, it means eating all organic, even if your bananas came half way around the world.  To others, local is most important.  And I know what it’s like when you have really limited funds.  Sometimes whatever is cheapest starts to look appealing.  For me, the most sustainable means locally grown without chemicals and pesticides.  An organic certification is optional.

So, how to get those things while not breaking the bank?

Things that take some investment upfront:

A freezer.  This is a tool that can save your bacon.  And beans.  And everything else.  You can freeze most things.  If you find a really great deal on some chicken, it makes sense to buy a little extra and put what you’re not going to use right away into the deep freeze for another day.  Freezers are pretty inexpensive and run more efficiently than most refrigerators.  Check craigslist or freecycle.  You can get a great deal.  Even our chest freezer from the 80′s runs more efficiently than our fridge did.  We have two.  Both were given to us; hand me downs from relatives.

Joining a CSA.  Community Supported Agriculture, where you buy a “share” of a farm’s predicted crop before it is even planted.  You and the other CSA members front money for a farmer to plant and then, along with the farmer, share in the risks and rewards of the weather.  In my experience, this is an incredible investment.  The farm we’ve been with for the last five years has never had a bad year.  Of course you are betting on nature, a crop might be totally wrecked by hail.  But you are also sharing in the reward when things are good.  Some are bumper years for bell peppers or corn, while the beans didn’t make it.  But we always get WAY more than we paid for.  Local and organic.  Our CSA also sells optional shares of fruit, honey, eggs and meat.

Oh, and when you are getting way more than you can eat in a week, you can put the surplus in your freezer for the winter.  January is the time to call CSA farms.  Farms are filling memberships as I type this, so check around.  Some farmers will even work out a payment schedule with you if the fee is too much for you to pay all at once.

Hunting or buying meat in bulk.  Both of these methods do the same thing; receiving a whole animal at one time.  You better have a freezer first.  When we bought a hog a couple years ago we paid about $400 for the whole animal.  This worked out to about $1.33 a pound for bacon, hams, pork chops, shoulder roasts, pork loin, lard, everything.

Hunting requires a skill set, equipment, time and licenses.  It’s not complicated, but you will need to attend a hunter’s safety course and get access to land (and a gun) in the fall.  The cost is slightly harder to figure, but not counting the gun my husband already had to hunt with, we spent about $360 on licenses and gasoline for various hunting trips.  We have an entire elk in the freezer to show for it.  Roughly $1.44 per pound of lean red meat, said and done.  Some years, it’s much less expensive, depending on success rates.  And some years, we’ve gotten nothing.

For either meat option, now is a good time to look into it.  Local farmers and ranchers are taking orders, and you need to buy hunting licenses in advance (April here in Colorado).

While I’m talking about buying in bulk, I’d also like to mention that once a year we drive to an orchard to pick peaches.  It’s a far drive, to the western slope, so we make it count.  We spend about $400 on 300 pounds of peaches, including gas.  We race home with the A/C blasting and then spend the next week slicing and preserving peaches.  The majority of them get frozen, though we jam and can some too.  But these peaches last us a whole year.  So investigate local U-Pick farms.  We do the same on a smaller scale for berries and cherries.

Things that everyone can do now:

Make a meal plan for the week.  I used to plan a month’s worth of meals at a time, but that can be daunting, and over time I’ve realized that weekly works better for us.

Plan meals that are in season.  This is easy with a CSA.  Apples are least expensive in the fall, strawberries are cheapest in the spring.  If you want asparagus in August, you’re going to pay a lot for it at the market (and it won’t taste all that great).   This puts us eating things that are in season the majority of the time.  In season means relatively inexpensive.  We pretty much don’t eat bananas.

Use up what you have.  Until you get into the habit, it’s easy to keep ignoring the beans in the back of the pantry or the sausage in the bottom of the freezer.  Get into the habit of planning meals the use what you’ve already purchased.  You’ll spend less at the grocery if you aren’t buying what you already have.

Plan to eat less meat.  Meat costs more than other forms of protein.  Use meat more like a side dish.  Try adding one more vegetarian meal to your menu per week than you normally make.  Try making chili with black beans or stir fry with eggs.  Over the last few years we went from eating meat at dinner every night to eating meat only three – four times a week.

From your meal plan, make a grocery list.  And stick to it. This keeps me from impulse buying.  Also, it cuts down on incidental/emergency trips to the store which end up costing a lot more over time.

If the store that I’m going to has a double ad day, I’ll go on that day, but I don’t usually plan my meals around the ads.  I just figure if I go on that day I double my chances of finding things on sale.

I don’t use coupons at all.  There are never any coupons for bulk rice or apples or pork loin.  I can’t recall seeing one for milk.  Coupons usually make me feel compelled to buy things that I would not normally put on my list.  They are always for things in boxes or bags, things with weird ingredients.  Things that are processed and full of chemicals…

Buy whole foods. Processed foods are expensive.  Potato chips cost more than potatoes.  Rice-a-Roni costs more than rice.  Pasta and milk is cheaper than a package of noodles with a powdered sauce.  Not to mention a billion times better for you.

Buy foods from the bulk bins.  When you buy a pound of rice or oatmeal in a box or bag, guess what.  You care paying for that box.  And for the marketing of that box.  It’s much less expensive to buy oats from the bulk bin.  There is no packaging to pay for.  No labels, no marketing, and no weird ingredients.  And if you buy or make your own reusable bags, there is no waste either.

There you have it.  Those are my big tips for saving money on food.  Between the meat in the freezer, the vegetables from the garden and the CSA, and eggs from the chickens, there are times I can spend $30 at the store for the week.  All I’m buying at that point is dairy and grains.  But it takes time to get to that point.  And I’ve already invested money up front.

What does your family do?

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Jan24

UH Budgeting Boot Camp: Building a (Food) Budget

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UH Budgeting Boot Camp: Building a (Food) Budget

Seeds, plants and soil all cost money, building a coop does too and those canning jars don’t come cheap.  But we urban homesteaders feel it’s worth it.  We are in it for the food.  So we have to find a way to make it work.  How do we eat well without breaking the bank?

This week we’re going to talk about budgeting, particularly budgeting for food and how to eat sustainably.  It’s not the funnest skill for me, but it is an essential one.  We could not do the things we do around our urban homestead without it.

When Rick and I started this journey, we had just had a baby and I decided to stay home with him, cutting our income in half.  We thought we’d be ok financially, but I had to get my appendix removed three weeks after Henry was born and medical bills ate through our savings.  Soon we were using a credit card to make ends meet.  And then one month we couldn’t pay off the balance.  And the debt racked up faster than we could have imagined.

Eventually, we cancelled the credit cards and started trying to get it under control.  But there were months where we were looking at choosing between gas and groceries.  Now, when I hear people talk about being “broke,” I think about those times.  The only way we made it through, all the while feeding ourselves, was budgeting.

Budget is a four letter word for many people (often those four letters are D-E-B-T).  But I have really come to understand that a workable budget is the only way to survive.  I’m not a natural budgeter.  I’m much more of an instant gratification person.  And people like me often have a hard time sticking to a budget.  I have a really hard time keeping the willpower up for an entire month (or few months), and tend to want to reward myself for being so good all month long by blowing my money on something silly.  I know I’m not alone.  It really helps me to trick my brain into doing some sort of project or challenge that is a budget in disguise.

One things that really helped me during that dark time of choosing between food and fuel was Crunchy Chicken’s Sustainable Food Budget Challenge in 2009.  The idea was to see if it was possible to eat sustainably on a food stamp budget.  I was successful at the challenge, but at the end of it I noted that,

I don’t know if this would actually be possible on food stamps because the majority of our savings came from food saved from the CSA last summer, the hog we bought whole last fall, things we saved our money up for so that we could have a year of sustainable eating on our tight budget. That and two years of practice at cutting the grocery bill each week a bit more, while still making fresh meals for my family.  Things like eating out, coffee shops, and convenience foods have not been in the budget for a long time.

That’s right I had already been at it for two years, and I had some secret weapons up my sleeve; a whole hog and a CSA membership.  So in talking about budgets, I’m also going to tout the benefits of joining a community supported agriculture farm.  I am not exaggerating when I say that this one thing saved us.  Seriously.

More on that in soon, but first, how do you make a budget?  There’s a lot of places online you can learn to do this.  Just find something that works for you without too much brain damage.

I am NOT an expert, this is just what we do.  I start by writing down on a piece of paper our income and all of our expenses.  My husband gets paid weekly, so I do the math and figure his income for the month.  Then I list out each bill we have.  I know financial experty people tell you to save money and pay yourself first.  That’s all good and fine, if you can do it;  if you can, you should, but for about five years, we couldn’t.  Anyway, I deduct the expenses from the income.  The rest of the money that is not going to a bill is what we have left to split between food, gas and whatever else you like to spend your money on.  Hopefully, you can save a bit too.

I try to be realistic about what we need to spend for each category.  Using a computer program for this really helps (like Quicken or Quick Books or whatever) that allows you to see how you’ve been spending in the past.  I might try to trim down certain things, like eating out, but I’ve learned that I need to leave us a little wiggle room.  A budget is not a diet.  You can’t go into it thinking about what you are depriving yourself from or you surely won’t stick to it.  Also, it is not permanent.  It can change month-to-month until you figure out what works for you and your family.  Lately, I’ve been using Erica’s Budget Fun Cards, because I like checking boxes.

The savings is key for us.  We don’t have much cushion built up yet as we’re fresh off of paying off those rotten credit cards and still are working on knocking out Rick’s student loans.  But we try to set aside a little every month to pay for some seemingly big-ticket items, which in reality save us lots of money.  Once we have a number for what we want to spend on food every month, we have a starting point.  I don’t follow all the experts that say your food should only be 5% of your budget.  Honestly, that is ridiculous.

Our food is easily our largest expenditure after our mortgage.  But we have ways of keeping the month-to-month food bill manageable.  Things like buying meat in bulk, the CSA membership and buying 300 pounds of peaches are financially tough to swallow all at once, but saves big time in the long run.  Those bulk items pay off in spades, particularly in lean financial times.

Tomorrow, I’m talking money savings in the food budget department.  In the mean time, do you budget?  Do you buy in bulk or have tips for saving on the food bill?  What questions do you have about eating well on a budget?

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Jan23

What we are planting in 2012

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What we are planting in 2012

A few of you were curious about what we are planting this year in the garden.  SO, here is the plan for 2012…

In the four main garden beds we are planting seeds of both grey and yellow zucchini, Mexican Sour Gherkins and Long Anglais cucumbers, pole beans (purple ones), Australian brown onions, golden beets, red Russian kale, and arugula.  I’m hoping the kolhrabi that we have been trying to overwinter are still going strong, so we can possibly get seeds from them this year.  We will buy started tomato plants as well; not sure what varieties until we see what they have at our garden center.

The boys will have some Cosmic Purple carrots in their hugelkultur as well as some cherry tomato plants and possibly a bean or pumpkin teepee for fun (stay tuned).

We have a couple of other planting areas around the yard, and in those areas we are going to put some lettuces, some lemon yellow Habanero peppers, and lots and lots of spinach.   Plus I’ve planned a couple of giant variety sunflowers to screen out some neighbors and later feed to the chickens.

In the neighbor’s yard, we’ll do potatoes again, and his corn.  Plus he’s made room for watermelons and the giant pumpkin.  We can’t wait!

Any locals have tips on herbs (basil, parsley, cilantro…)?  I’ve had mixed success with them, but want to add more, inter-spaced in the flower beds out front.

What are you planting this year?  Also, did I miss anything in last week’s veggie garden basics that you were hoping for?

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Jan19

Boot Camp Bonus: When to Harvest

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Boot Camp Bonus: When to Harvest

This week’s boot camp focus was on vegetable gardens.  It turned out to be a bigger subject than I could cover in just one post.  Coincidentally, Erica at Northwest Edible also made a timely post covering some great tips on How to Plan Your Harvest Based on What You Eat.  Make sure to check it out.  I won’t repeat anything she posted here and I’m really grateful she put it up.

For me, one of the things that was hard to learn when we first started gardening was knowing when to harvest.  Some vegetables are easy to tell when they are ready to be picked; tomatoes turn red (or yellow or purple or what-have-you), but some things are a little harder to tell.  You can certainly count days, as implied on your seed packet: 60 days; 75 days; 53 days, two hours and thirteen minutes… where did I put those torn, empty paper envelopes again?  Right.

Here’s what I’ve learned for some of the trickier crops.

  1. Test green beans and peas early and often by picking one and eating it.  If it’s plump, sweet and good, they’re ready, if they are hard – too late.  When they are ready, pick them every day.
  2. Corn is ready when the silks turn brown and are dry.  If you want to check the kernels before picking, slice along the husk with your thumbnail about an inch instead of pulling it back.  Peek in and if it’s not ready yet, just close it back up.
  3. Watermelon is ready when the curly tendril nearest the melon shrivels up.
  4. Winter squashes (butternut, acorn, pumpkins, etc.) are ready when the vines fall to the ground.
  5. Pull your onions when the tops fall over.

What indicators do you use to know when your crops are ready?

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Jan18

SOPA/PIPA Blackout

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SOPA/PIPA Blackout

Because I love blogging, ███ ██████ ████████ ██████████ ██ ████ ██ ████ █████████ ██.  ██████ ███.  This has been found in violation of H.R. 3261, S.O.P.A and has been removed.

I’m showing support today to protect our freedom of speech on the internet.

I’m asking you to do the same.

http://americancensorship.org/

See you tomorrow.

Jan17

Vegetable Gardening Basic Training Part II

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Vegetable Gardening Basic Training Part II

Welcome to part two of your first week of Urban Homesteading Boot Camp.  Yesterday I talked about the basics of selecting and preparing a site for your vegetable garden.  Today, we’ll cover layout, crop rotation, and, the best parts: planting and maintaining.

If you are planting in pots, the scale on all of this will be much, much less.  ;)

Garden Layout
Once you have decided what to grow in your garden, you need to decide where in the garden to grow it.  One of the first things to consider is the height of the plants, at their maturity, that you intend to grow.  This is more important than companion planting because, as some friends of mine learned the hard way, while carrots do love tomatoes, carrots also love sunlight.  So first think about what grows high up and what stays low.  Tomatoes can get very tall, so can pole beans, corn, and cucumbers if you trellis them.  Summer squash can also shade out neighbors with their big leaves.  Most of the root crops  stay low, as well as the peppers and lettuces; even peas can be kept pretty compact. You will want to plant low growing things to the south of high growing things (here in North America, obviously).

You can see from my garden plan that I made in 2009, I did just that:  Tall tomatoes in the back along the north border, middle size squash next, and short onions, kohlrabi and beets at the bottom on the south edge.  It worked great.

But I bet if you read my post in October on crop rotation, you spotted the problem with the layout.  If not, here was my 2010 garden plan:

See the problem yet?  Tomatoes up top, squash and peppers in the middle, and onions and kohlrabi along the bottom.  I did this also in 2006 and 2007.  Yeah.  Some people are thicker than others.  It took me a while on this one.

Finally, finally, I wised up.  I had to turn my beds 90 degrees.  You can see this year’s plan is much better for crop rotation.

Crop Rotation
So yes, it took me years and years to find a way to rotate our crops.  But why is it so important?  Most of the veggies we like to grow in our gardens come from certain plant families.  There are about nine families for the main crops most people like to plant.

  1. Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and eggplant
  2. Peas and beans
  3. Cucumber, squash and melons
  4. Spinach, beets and chard
  5. Cabbages, kale, kohlrabi, turnips and broccoli (the brassicas – they only “real” family name I know)
  6. Onions, leeks and garlic (oh wait, I know two, these are alliums)
  7. Sunflowers, lettuce and other leafy greens
  8. Carrots, celery, parsley, parsnips
  9. Corn, rye, oats, wheat

The varieties in each family need similar nutrients to grow, and they are susceptible to the same diseases and pests.  So if you plant your tomatoes in the same place year after year, you can expect them to deplete their soil and/or die from a disease.  If you rotate things though, the nutrients that the tomatoes take from the soil in 2012 will get replaced by another plant, say beans, the next year.  And if a tomato disease came knocking at the end of 2012, the 2013 beans might not get it, since they aren’t necessarily open to the same sicknesses.  Make sense?

Clearly, it is pretty important to switch things up.  Your original layout needs to accommodate this, and you have to think a few years ahead.  Here is what I’ve done with our 2012 garden.

First I oriented the beds so the tall stuff didn’t always have to go in the same place (North is at the top of the page).  Then, the coup de grâce – sticky-notes.  Yep. Instead of writing in my plants, I put each thing we want in the garden on its own sticky-note.  You can tell, I love tomatoes.  The little circled letter corresponds to a plant family.  Now I can arrange and rearrange, and rotate. 

Yes, I know, I have more veggies than room in my garden for them.  Decisions are hard around here.  That’s why I’ve enlisted the neighbor’s yard.  ;)

When playing with your layout and rotation, don’t forget about plant height.  In 2008, I tried rotating things in that old layout by switching the tomatoes to the bottom (the southern edge).  Guess what – nothing grew because the tall plants shaded out everything else.  Learn from my mistakes, grasshopper.

Here’s where I want to take a minute to mention square foot gardening.  Square foot gardening is a very good way to get a lot of plants into a small space.  It would probably be a great way to keep things rotating as well.  I am not very good at it, I’ll be honest.  I lack the self control.  ;)   But if you have a very small space, you should consider it.  It looks like a great way to pack a lot into a small area.

So, to the planting.

Planting
First off, I’m totally skipping the starting seeds indoors thing.  I’m sorry if this is a big disappointment.  I only began gardening when Rick and I moved to this house 8 years ago, and we have no good place at all to start seeds indoors.  I’m thinking of getting some lights this year, but so far all my seed starts have failed.

Because of this, we buy seeds to sow directly in the ground for most things, but we buy already started tomato and pepper plants from the garden center.  The growing season in Colorado is a bit short to start these outside if you want much of a harvest.

To plant your seeds, read your seed packets.  Planting depth is important.  From the tip of your finger to your first knuckle is about one inch; the depth you would want to plant peas.  I am somewhat flexible with plant spacing, however.  If my packet says to plant seeds every six inches in rows 18 inches apart, I just go with six inches in any direction.  I know, I’m a rule breaker.  But it seems to work just the same for us, and I want to conserve space as much as possible.

Some seed packets tell you to plant in hills.  Squash like hills.  Tomatoes do too.  So, for the first timers, this is what a row is (notice Henry, spacing rows with a yardstick – it’s ok to measure if it helps you):

And this is a hill:

I use my fingers or the side of my hand to make rows for most seeds, but I use a hoe to make a row for things that should be planted deeper than an inch.  I just drag one corner of  the hoe in a straightish line where I want the row to be.  The line is sort of a valley with the extra soil piled up along the sides.  Drop the seeds into the valley and use the soil next to the line to cover them.  Don’t use all the extra soil, especially if your seeds should be planted shallowly.  Some of that soil will be used to make the sides of your row so that it will hold water.  Tap the soil down well with your hands, making a long trench that will retain water to feed your seeds.

To make a hill, I use the back of a rake.  And by I, I mean Rick.  Not that it’s hard, it just seems to be Rick’s job.  Anyway.  Rick pulls the soil with the rake into a mound, and then we use our hands to sort of flatten the top, and move the dirt until it’s sort of a crater.  You plant inside the crater, not around the sides.  This is a nice bowl to hold water for your seeds or little baby plants.  We usually plant one tomato per hill and we plant three summer squash in a (larger) hill.

Then what?  You guessed it – water your seeds.  Water them well.  Give everything a good soaking.  Then wait a couple of minutes and soak everything again.  Don’t use hard jets of water – sprinkle or use a soaker or drip hose.  You don’t want to wash your seeds away.

Now is the time to set your tomato cages and trellises around your plants.  As the plants grow, thread them up through the cage, so they don’t break off any vines, or so the tomato doesn’t shoot off to one side.

Maintenance
After planting, there are three things left to do to keep your garden on track: watering, thinning, and weeding.

Your baby seedlings and newly planted seeds need to stay moist.  We like to use a drip system for our garden, which basically consists of a back-flow preventor at the spigot, and a bunch of tubing with little plastic drip heads on the ends where each plant is for the hills and lengths of pre-drilled drip-tube for the rows.  The heads release so much water per hour.  We love it because it conserves water and only puts water at the plants so it cuts down on weeds.  And, I just have to step out the door, turn on the spigot, and it waters everything for me.  I have three kids, people.

The drip system is not complicated, but explaining it thoroughly could be a post in it of its self.  (Perhaps in the near future?)

Anyway, that is one method for watering.  We have also watered by hand with the hose many a season, and last year our neighbor put his corn and potatoes on a timer connected to his sprinkler system.  Bottom line is during the summer you need to water.  Here in Colorado, we need to water everyday.  Technically, it’s an arid climate here.  If you live in the rainforest, gauge your water accordingly.

All that water will make your seeds sprout into seedlings.  And you will have to thin them.  That means, heartlessly grabbing those tender green shoots and ripping them from the ground (gently – don’t kill the ones you want to leave).  You have to give your plants room to grow.  If you leave every carrot seedling growing, you’ll get lots of tops and no carrots.  So leave one strong-looking seedling every few inches for your root crops.  And for heaven sakes, thin your zucchini.  It’s really, really hard the first time.  But just do it.  Now is the time to nut up or shut up.  ;)

And weeding.  You have to rip ‘em out too.  They will grow fast and steal your veggie’s water, sunlight and room.  Take ‘em down.  Show no mercy, troops.  Defend your hills!  And your trenches!  If you do a little everyday, the enemy won’t gain any footing in your garden.

Questions?

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