Urban Homesteading

Thursday Tip: Tomato Tags

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Anisa

Every year, we try new varieties of tomatoes.  They are, by far, my favorite thing to grow in our garden.  But we’ve had a few problems over the last couple of years keeping everything straight as far as know which tomato is which.

I’ve tried sticking the little plant tag in the ground next to the plant, but inevitably the tag gets broken or lost over the summer, never to be seen again until we are tilling in the fall.  I’ve tried writing it down, so we can keep a record of the varieties we love and don’t love quite as much.  But sometimes I forget.

This year, we have fifteen tomato plants, in thirteen different varieties. I’ve decided to try something new.  I think it’s a good idea and wanted to share it with you.

I’ve taken all the tags that came with each little plant, punched a hole, and zip-tied it to the tomato cage of each plant.  I’m hoping we can keep better track of the tags this way (no getting stepped on and broken, or lost in the foliage).  Wish us luck!

Categories: Garden, Thrift | 5 Comments

Independence Update and A Weekend Off

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Anisa

So as tough as it was for me, I took a weekend off from garden and household projects.  It was good timing, since there was a lot of rain this weekend and we had some family obligations on Saturday.  But normally that would have been no obstacle and we would have squeezed out the time for another project or two anyway.

But really.  I needed rest.  And I think Rick did too.  We didn’t do any work on Sunday.  We had a lazy morning and then went to the museum to see the Pirate exhibit.  We ordered a pizza on Friday night, ate out for breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday (whoa!!!) and had left-overs Sunday.  That. Never. Happens.

The rest was good.  I know I needed it.  My back has been hurting more the last few weeks, and I feel surprised by it.  I never had any back pain with my other two pregnancies, and although Rick says it’s because I’m doing more, I’m not convinced.  I mean I was a month ahead of this with E and working on the farm. ??  Well, who knows?

Things have been going well with the big unplugging of the fridge.  Actually it doesn’t really seem that big at this point.  It’s been a fun topic of conversation though, and I’m keeping track of the lessons we’re learning in these weeks to share with you all.

I’ve also been thinking about some little changes on the blog.  Nothing major, but I added a “recipes” category and tried to find all my old posts with recipes to put in it.  It needs a better name though… not something that boring.  I’m thinking “Homegrown Grub” or “Fresh to the Feedbag” or some other thing that’s witty, but to the point. Any suggestions??

I know it’s also been a few weeks since I wrote up an Independence Days update.  Here’s the latest, and it covers the last few weeks, so it’s not really as big as it seems.  🙂

Plant something – leeks, onions, beets, kohlrabi, carrots, watermelon, corn, eggplant, basil, tomatoes, peppers, kale, chard, peas, cucumbers… can you tell the danger of frost finally passed here?  😉

Harvest something –  eggs and spinach galore, mint, radishes, lettuce, asparagus.

Preserve something – chicken soup, broth too, asparagus, quiche.

Waste Not – compost, scraps to chickens, recycling, still planning meals (18 weeks in a row!), used wood chips to mulch garden, built the hugelkultur, made some calls about getting the tree trunk milled into lumber when it comes down.  Realized the changing table has seen better days (after the known 4 kids it’s been through, plus some??), so I let it stay in the spare room as a shelf.  Will find a substitute to use for changing table.  Used up half a gallon of left over paint (an old living room wall color) on a wall in the spare room.  Donated a carload of stuff to the Goodwill, took a box of the boys’ clothes to be sold.

Want Not – tried to make yogurt.  It tasted good but was thin.  Going to keep trying though – it’s so easy and even the “mistake” was tasty – H loved it.  Got new shoes for both boys and new underwear for H – they are growing like weeds already.

Build Community Food Systems – some of that planting was in the neighbor’s garden.  Also helped a friend start their first garden.

Eat the Food – Well.  Lots.  We’re getting to the end of the stuff we saved over the winter.  It hurts buying some things, like tomatoes (canned) and onions.  We will definitely be working to save a lot more this year, if we can.

Categories: Hugelkultur, Independence Days | 3 Comments

Photo Friday: Putting in the Bees

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Anisa

Because I just can’t get over how much fun it was.  Sorry about the quality of some of the pics – we were facing into the sun.  😉

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Categories: Beekeeping | 5 Comments

Where’s the Meat?

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Anisa

Since my post last week when we unplugged the fridge I’ve gotten a lot of questions (mainly on my facebook page) about meat.  Are we vegetarian?  Are we switching to raw foods?  How do we plan to keep meat from going bad?  What about lunch meat?

Well, it’s pretty simple.  No we’re not vegetarian or switching to a raw food diet.  And we don’t store meat in the icebox (or the fridge).  Rick is a hunter.  The majority of our meat is some kind of game meat, mainly elk right now.  And we process his annual fall harvest (meaning we butcher and package the meat) ourselves.  That means all our meat is in vacuum-sealed packages, appropriately sized for our family.

When meat is on our menu, roughly three days a week in the summer time, I go out to the chest freezer in the garage, retrieve the prescribed package of protein and let it defrost on a plate on the counter, just in time to get cooked up for dinner.  If it’s a hot day in the summer and it defrosts quickly (we don’t have AC, I know you’re shocked), I put the plate in the fridge.  This is what I’ve always done in the past.  I plan to use the exact same method with the new icebox set up.

We generally don’t buy much in the way of meat from the grocery store.  It’s difficult to find humanely raised meat sources that don’t cost an arm and a leg.  That chicken we ate last week – regardless of it’s toughness, totally made Henry’s night – he loves chicken and we rarely eat it.  Lunch meat/deli meat is generally very processed and full of nitrates and preservatives.  Not very good for you in other words, and we basically never buy it.  The one meat we find ourselves bringing home periodically is bacon or bratwurst (the nitrite free kind on both counts).  But these are specific menu items that get used within a day or two of coming home from the store, and are a treat for us.  I don’t foresee a problem making half a pound of bacon last a day or two in the icebox.

When I announced this project, my mom, who really does think I’ve lost it completely, asked about the Thanksgiving turkey.  Well, luckily for the experiment, Thanksgiving isn’t in May.  But if it were and I were in charge of the turkey, I imagine I’d either buy it fresh a day or two ahead and keep it in the icebox (or a cooler with ice packs?) until T-day, use the cold water method to defrost it, or, as a last resort, ask the bachelor neighbor who runs a nearly empty fridge anyway to use his.

The other question a few people asked me (people who admitted they hadn’t been following along from the beginning) was where would we get the ice, since the fridge was unplugged and we were using the freezer compartment as a cooler?  The answer to that one is from the freezer in the garage.  We have two freezers in the garage, an upright and a chest freezer.  They are both full come September/October.  By the spring, we can usually consolidate to one and unplug the other.

Sadly, even the old 1980’s chest freezer is running more efficiently than our refrigerator was, and we would be running the freezer regardless of this experiment.  Our freezer contains a whole elk and countless pounds of frozen peaches and plums (around 200 pounds of fruit alone went in last September).  There are a handful of ducks from the winter, grouse from the fall, and a few fish from the summer time.  It holds all our excess farm and garden veggies that weren’t otherwise canned or dehydrated, though we’ve consumed nearly all of those by now.  In years past, when hunting’s been slim, we’ve bought whole pigs or a side of beef from local farmers.  Basically, we couldn’t eat sustainably on our budget without a freezer.  And, there’s room enough in the freezer for a couple of gallon-jugs of ice to use in our experiment.

So far, the switch hasn’t actually been too drastic.  I’ve found myself accidentally opening the refrigerator door to reach for the milk, only to find an empty cavern.  And I’ve made a conscience effort to collect and return items from the icebox all at once for recipes (let’s see, I need cheese, yogurt and the cucumber) in order to keep it as cool as possible in there.  It’s basically like using a cooler, or as CitySister said in the comments last week, it’s like camping!

Categories: Food, Simple Living, Unplugging the Fridge | Tags: , , | 7 Comments

Mother’s Day Big Brag

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Anisa

Wow!  Happy belated Mother’s Day!  Here’s my official brag about how great my family is and what a great weekend we had on the homestead.  This weekend I had requested to get the garden planted.  The plan was for me to spend Saturday with my mom and sister while Rick and the boys went with his mom to the botanic gardens, and for us to plant the garden on Friday after Rick was home from work and on Sunday.

On Friday, we planted corn, onions, and carrots with the neighbor and put in our tomatoes.  But Friday night, we got a call that our friend, Chris, had caught a swarm of bees for us, and another call that the CSA asparagus was ready to pick.

Some things just don’t wait.  So on Saturday morning, while the guys were at the botanic gardens with Grandma, my mom and sister came over here for bunch, and Chris brought us the swarm.

The bees we had last year left in the fall, we’re not sure why.  We think either the queen died or left since there were bees milling around aimlessly for a week or two before they were all gone.  There were no dead bees, just gone.  Last year’s swarm was also much smaller and our friend caught it later in the season while we were out of town.  He had installed them for us then, so this was the first time I got to experience putting bees into the hive, and Chris walked me through it.  My mom got to watch ME put the bees into the hive (and took pictures for us!).

These new bees were pretty cranky, they had been in the box for a couple days and were hungry and thirsty.  It took me three good tries to get the majority of them in the hive and get the bars on the top.  My initial trial of things, they sort of swarmed around my head and clung to the gloves I was wearing.  But they seemed to calm down significantly in a few minutes and I was able to knock the majority of the rest of them into the hive and get the bars on top without any trouble.  I was really surprised at how they clung to the box, and also how quickly they just took to the hive.

We put them in with the old comb that last year’s bees had left behind (we’re pretty certain there were no mites or diseases), and they settled down fairly quickly.  Many bees zoomed off to the water and sugar-water we had out for them, but others went to the entrance of the hive and started fanning their wings to spread the queen’s pheromones so the remaining bees in the box and the air (there were still quite a few) would come on in and start making the new hive their home.  It was really exciting and I’m sad Rick missed it again.

Then, it was back to brunch with the girls for me.  It was a really nice time (I made lavender pound cake and my sister made yummy pecan-dark chocolate scones).  When Rick and the boys got home, we headed up to the farm to pick asparagus.  It took us less than forty-five minutes to pick a good 25 pounds before we trimmed it all up.  It came out to about 14 pounds of asparagus, processed and frozen, plus some to eat fresh this week.

Sunday, for some unknown reason I woke up super early, before any of the guys rolled out of bed.  When they got up around 6:45, they gave me some sweet cards and kisses, and promised to build me a picnic table next week!  We got dressed and they took me out to Snooze (one of my favorite places) for breakfast.  Afterward, we came home and started up more planting work.

We did the boys’ hugelkultur bed first.  H planted watermelon, carrots (two kinds) and tomatoes (an heirloom red cherry and a “white” cherry that will actually be yellow).  The boys got a new real shovel and special, colored tomato cages.  My mom always said she wouldn’t be a mother without me, and I sort of feel the same about my boys, so they get treats on mother’s day too).  E ran around the hugelkultur while Rick scrambled to make barriers to keep him from trampling the seeds.

It was nap time before we knew it, and Rick and I spent the afternoon putting up asparagus (Rick did most the work), and planting out the rest of the main garden bed.  By the evening I had gotten plans for my new picnic table, an order placed for the grub hoe I’ve been lusting over, a [nearly] fully planted garden bed, four kinds of basil in my flower beds, a delicious sunburn on my shoulders, a home-made dinner with fresh asparagus, and a perfect day with my guys.  Lucky me!

I hope your Mother’s Day weekend was just as special as mine was!  What did you do?

Categories: Beekeeping, Food, Garden, Hugelkultur | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

The Hugelkultur Project

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Anisa

A while back, when we  decided to take on the project of cutting down our 70-foot tall (plus or minus) honey locust tree in the back yard, I began doing research on what in the world we’d do with all the wood.  As you may know, a lot of the smaller branches have become mulch for the garden.  But someone from the Take Back Urban-Homesteading(s) community on Facebook suggested to me to build a ‘hugelkultur.’  A hoogle-whater?  So, of course I Googled it.

I’ll try to save you some time.  A hugelkultur (pronounced “hoogle-culture” – I think), is basically a raised bed in which wood or other carbon-rich materials is buried.  Some people lay logs directly on the ground, use a tractor to dump a pile of dirt on it and then start planting on their new, hill-shaped bed.  (I like the info in this link).

The advantages of this method of gardening is that the wood, as it rots, acts as a sponge, making it so you don’t have to water much.  Additionally, it releases nutrients over time into the soil, making it so you don’t need to fertilize.  And, as it rots, it leaves plenty of air space in the soil, so you don’t need to till.  Basically, it is a no-maintenance, self-composting bed.  The first year or two, especially with green wood like ours, it will actually draw nitrogen from the soil in order to start decomposition.  But thereafter, it will supposedly do nothing but give back.

Sounds like a good plan to us!  So we decided to give it a try in the boys’ backyard garden bed.  We don’t have lots of spare topsoil just lying around everywhere, nor the desire to buy any, so we thought it would be a better use of what we do have to dig down into the ground and bury the wood with our own topsoil and subsoil.

We dug down a good 12-14 inches.  Then we laid in some of the branches that were too thick to go through the wood chipper.  Then we buried them.  This left us with basically an instant raised bed, as promised.  We used some of the bigger, straighter limbs from the tree to make an edging (not yet complete).  Otherwise the boys would truck that dirt all over the back yard before anything could be planted there.

After an afternoon of being (unnecessarily) compacted by a 22 month old in a Tonka truck pushed by a 4 year old.

Fortunately for us, we have plenty of nitrogen-rich compost, thanks to the chickens.  We mixed a bit of that in to compensate for the initial anticipated nitrogen loss/Tonka truck compaction.  Henry wants carrots, tomatoes and watermelon in his bed this year.  We’ll keep track and let you know how it goes!

Does anyone out there have experience with a hugelkultur?  What about deterrents for little boys and their ride-on toys?  😉

Categories: Garden, Hugelkultur, Simple Living, Sustainability, Urban Homesteading | Tags: , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

-Chipping Away at the To Do List

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Anisa

As you might have noticed, by my lack of blog posts last week, I have been busy around this place.  We’ve been working diligently at getting the tree in the back yard cut down, the branches chipped, and the gardens set up.  So much so that we’ve actually neglected a few other things around here.  Things like ordering a car seat for baby number three as well as our birth kit.  I’m in my third trimester now, and we have pretty much nothing set up for the baby yet.

Here’s what we have been doing though.  Rick and the neighbor, Doug, got the wood chipper working and made short work of nine of the eleven piles of branches in the yard.  The other two piles were too big to put through the chipper, so they’ll have to wait.

There’s still more of the tree to cut down, but the weather has been uncooperative (too windy) to take down the tallest parts.  Hopefully this week, before the tree leafs out!

After expressing how chicken wire works just fine to protect your flock from predators, we lost two hens to a fox.  Now to our… erm… credit?  shame?  it wasn’t a failure of the chicken wire, so much as a failure to close up the coop at night.  I confess to being a lazy chicken owner, and leaving the coop open much of the time.  The hens put themselves to bed, and Josie, our big mutt, used to really help in keeping predators away.  But this is the first spring we are without her, and I really wasn’t thinking much about it until I found a hen dead one morning last week.  She was headless and we’re pretty sure Rick scared the fox away when he was leaving for work.  Somehow, neither of us heard a commotion in the coop, but it was windy and Rick thought he had heard the kids’ tent blowing around.  Turns out it was probably a chicken scuffle.

We of course cleaned up the mess, and that evening, just around sunset, when Rick went out to close the coop, he found dead hen number two.  It had JUST happened.  The neighbor had scared the fox as they walked by.  We think that the fox might have been coming back for the first hen that it left, and since it was gone, it killed another.  Since we found this one fresh – very very fresh, Rick butchered her up (discarding the part where the fox bit her – just her back) and we made chicken and dumplings.  She was actually our oldest hen, and I don’t think any amount of stewing would have made her legs edible – think really tough chicken jerky.  But we tried at least, and her breast meat was ok, and she made tasty broth.

The good news on the chicken front is we’re pretty sure those were the two hens that were eating eggs, and the older hen really wasn’t laying much at all anymore, so the fox saved us some trouble of getting up the nerve to off them ourselves.  We’ve not had anymore broken or eaten eggs, and our egg numbers are still about what they were, since now we’re getting them all instead of racing to beat the hens.  AND the chicken wire is still doing it’s job, as long as we keep doing ours.

This weekend we spread the wood chips to mulch the garden paths.  Our neighbor watched over the fence.  I know he thinks we’re crazy for going to the effort to mulch the tree instead of just hauling it to the dump, but I’m happy it’s going to good use, and hopefully it’ll work at keeping weeds down between the beds.

Otherwise, we made a trip to the garden center to get our tomato and pepper plants.  I’m excited to try a couple varieties that we’ve not done before.  I spent some time spreading compost in my tomato bed and the plants are hardening off this week to get ready to go to the ground this weekend.  I’m chomping at t he bit to get the summer things in the ground.  Just waiting for the weather to get on board too.

So this week I plan to get a few more things outside organized, but I also am going to try to focus on a few inside projects as well.  Like laundry and getting the baby’s room emptied.  There needs to be a balance, I know. The to-do list seems never ending this spring.  But little by little we seem to be getting items crossed off.

What have you been up to?

Categories: Chickens, Food, Garden | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments

We Call it an Icebox

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Anisa

May 1st, we officially began our experiment.  We unplugged the fridge!  I was encouraged at how on-board Rick really was.  On Saturday night, he even made sure that we had jugs of water in the freezer, in order to be prepared for the first day using our freezer compartment as an icebox.

Yesterday was really only a half day with the new system.  I should have prepared better on Saturday by doing all the cleaning and stuff ahead of time, but I was distracted by trips to the garden center.  So, on Sunday morning, Rick cleaned out the freezer while I went to the grocery store.  When I got home, I cleaned out the fridge and we set up the new system in the former freezer compartment (what will from here on out be referred to as the icebox).  The actual unplugging took place around noon.

Here’s what the icebox looks like now.  This is our full week’s worth of refrigerated food, including two gallons of milk, a few condiments I wasn’t sure about leaving out, some leftover greens that we bought last week, and the eggs for my sister that were already in the fridge before.

I’ve done a little rearranging already, putting the less perishable items like carrots, in the door, and keeping the soft cheeses further back by the frozen water jugs.  Also, that container of left-overs on the very bottom left was promptly eaten by me after cleaning out the bottom of the fridge.  It was after lunch time and I was hungry!

I’ve actually had a hard time resisting the temptation to continually open the icebox to feel if things are cold in there, but I know keeping the door closed is crucial to the success of the experiment.  Rick has suggested getting a thermometer that we can keep in there so we won’t worry, and we’re going to experiment with different ice-jug configurations to make sure we’re making the best use of the space and coolness (is that a word??).  He also suggested that we keep the jugs on a towel or something, that way we won’t have to constantly be wiping down the interior of the icebox, since the jugs will probably sweat as they melt.  For someone who thinks I’m crazy, he seems awfully involved, huh?  I guess it’s not just me after all.

Categories: Food, Simple Living, Unplugging the Fridge | Tags: , , , , , , | 10 Comments

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