I started writing this post last summer and today am finally finishing it. The dream is still very much alive. Here it is.
.
We have a dream. To create an edible paradise homestead here.
.
We have a dream. To create an edible paradise homestead here.
(This was a little doodle I did one evening when I was thinking about it.) We’ve been working towards this dream for years, imagining walking out our front door and being surrounded by delicious food. Each year we grow a little more food and expand our garden space. We decide which vegetables and which varieties we liked growing best and do more of that the following growing season. This year it feels like, slowly, some things are falling into place. That is such a good feeling. As we expand this dream of ours, it demands more of us, but the hard work is so rewarding. We’re becoming a little more organized, a little more efficient, bit by bit. We tend to take on too much sometimes. You’ve probably noticed. We strive to keep the “big” projects to a few each year to keep it from getting too crazy. Last year it was clearing those trees (and cleaning up after) and getting the chicken coop built (including tearing down that old building to use the parts.) Once some more space was cleared, we started getting so many things in the ground that had been patiently waiting (the blueberries and grapes were so thankful.) We do our best with the time and money we have available and then keep dreaming for future years. It’s a balancing act since we need to focus our energy on our business and making a living so we can get the bills paid, and yet gardening and growing food which we so love allows us to require less money to live on in the long run. We love both our business and homesteading. They both require a lot and sometimes our homesteading dreams get put on the back burner so we don’t feel like we’re accomplishing as much as we’d like to, but as I stand back and look around these days I am filled with the knowing that we have already done so much. Year by year, bit by bit. One year, wanting to plant blueberries, but not having the money to invest in blueberry bushes, we traded some of our goats that we needed to find homes for (that blueberry miracle is where many of our blueberry bushes came from.) We took some cuttings from our favorite grape plant at our neighbor’s place years ago and this year it looks like me might be getting our own grapes here for the first time. Each year as we plant another herb, another plant, it adds up. And our dream begins to form. We’ve been building this dream little by little, one step at a time. Our favorite thing to spend our money on is good food. What a great feeling to come home with a basket of beautiful produce from the farmer’s market or boxes of goodness from harvesting at a local farm. Our favorite way to “invest” our money is in plants and seeds for the garden, for future food here. An abundance of good food makes us feel rich. It’s really satisfying to us to continue to produce more of our own food. We would like to raise our own animals for meat as well, but we don’t have pasture for that. We are on the side of a mountain, covered in forest, and have to use the clear spots (where we get sunlight) to the fullest. That’s why I enjoy urban homesteading books so much because we don’t have big, sunny grassy fields to work with like you’d think of a typical farm, even though we have more space to work with than urban settings, we still need to get creative in how to make the most of our space (for example: trellising things like cucumbers and growing vertically.) This year we’ve been turning some sunny hillside-space into growing space, which feels awesome. We are working with the space we’re in to grow and produce what thrives best here. It’s a constant learning process and it’s our passion.
Here’s what we want to produce here:
…Eggs…
We are so incredibly glad we started raising chickens here again last year! This spring we had fourteen hens and decided to add to the flock, with six chicks and two ducks. So that brings us up to twenty hens and two ducks. I must say, gathering eggs in your own backyard is such a blessing. Eggs are such an incredible food and chickens are so easy to care for (plus good quality eggs are so much more affordable when you raise chickens yourself.) I think chickens are really the ideal “pet.” Before, when we raised chickens, we had so many other animals to care for as well and felt stretched in many directions. Also, their coop was “down below” and even though it was not that far of a walk, it made it more inconvenient for letting them out in the morning, bringing them garden treats throughout the day, and closing them in at night. Having chickens as our only animals right now feels like such a good fit for us. We can give them so much more care and attention. And having the coop right up in our yard and so close to the house makes it easy to bring them treats all the time and has made us enjoy having chickens even more. Whenever we weed in the garden, they are so close by to bring the greens to. Letting them out in the morning and closing them in at night is no big deal now. They feel more a part of the family since we can be around them while we are working in the yard. It’s really wonderful. Chickens make such pleasant company, don’t they? We don’t have pasture for our chickens, which would be ideal. But we have a yard up “top” for them and another yard “down below” with fencing connecting the two yards. We cannot let them free range while our garden is growing because they would eat it all, but we let them clean up the garden in the fall. And we have plans to give them a larger yard once we save up for the t-posts (we already have quite a bit of recycled fencing.) My dad also told us about raising black soldier flies, which would be a sustainable way to be producing a great protein source for our chickens here and is in our future plans. With the extra layers this fall, our hens will give us plenty of eggs, plus extra to sell, trade, and gift to friends and neighbors.
…Vegetables…
We always plant more vegetables than we have room for and then try to make room for them all. We’re constantly wondering where we could squeeze in another raised bed. The vegetables we’ve planted this year are: cucumbers, green zucchini, yellow summer squash, chard, kale (several varieties), runner beans, lettuce, peas, butternut squash (and several other winter squash varieties), sugar pumpkin, arugula, beets, collards, broccoli, cauliflower, and radishes. We have celery, arugula, mustard, watercress, and kale that we are letting go to seed in the garden right now. We save a lot of our own seeds each year. We’ve established a prolific nettles patch that feeds us well. We grow many herbs: rosemary, mint, oregano, spearmint, parsley, cilantro, thyme, basil, lemonbalm, and chives. (We’re anxiously awaiting garlic harvesting time!) We love to grow flowers, but I won’t talk about those here since I’m focusing on the edibles. Other vegetables that we would like to grow are: cabbage and carrots. We also want to get a good established bed of asparagus going. We haven’t had luck growing it here so far, I don’t think the bed we had it planted in was getting enough drainage.
…Fruit…
This year has been an exciting fruit year for us! With Jeff’s birthday gift certificates, we were able to get a lot of new things planted. For fruit trees we now have five apple trees planted, one cherry tree, one plum tree, and one peach tree. We have two elderberry bushes in the ground, three grape plants, two raspberries, two currants (one black, one red) and a thornless blackberry. We’re now up to twenty seven blueberry bushes in the ground, which feels like a dream come true for us! (The blueberries are a mix of varieties, many are duke.) We want to keep the fruit trees and elderberries pruned for easy harvesting. We’ve chosen semi-dwarf fruit trees this year because the smaller size is a better fit for us and the space we have to work with. (We’ve been told that semi-dwarf root stalk is stronger than dwarf root stock, thus our choice.) Two of the apple trees we’ve planted are the variety: liberty, which is my favorite apple. The other apple tree we planted this year is an early variety, so we can space out our harvests. I’ve never tried currants before and am looking forward to trying them when our bushes start to produce. In addition to the fruit we’ve planted, we also really enjoy and appreciate the huckleberries in the surrounding woods (and we don’t have to water or care for them either, one of the wonderful things of wild foods.)
…Mushrooms…
Jeff has grown edible mushrooms before and we want to again. We’d love to grow mataike, oysters, lion’s mane, button mushrooms, and more. This in an area I don’t know that much about and would like to learn more. We love to go treasure hunting for chantrelles in the fall and want to enjoy mushrooms throughout the year. We want to make mushrooms a much larger part of our diet. In the meantime, we bring some home from the farmer’s market on occasion.
…Honey…
When I first moved in here with Jeff, there were some hives. The honey was the best I have ever had, it was like nectar of the gods. It was amazing. We had issues with bears destroying the hives and the bees leaving. Not having the money to get started back up with honeybees this spring, we discovered mason bees and are now raising them here. We have plans to add many more mason bees to our homestead next year. They are incredible pollinators (one mason bee can pollinate as much as one hundred honeybees) and will increase our fruit yields from all our fruit trees, blueberry bushes, huckleberry bushes, and more. We love learning more about the native mason bees. And we are really looking forward to having honeybees here again (with extensive bear proofing.) Harvesting our own honey would be amazing.
.
……………………………………………………..
Some things we’re already starting to enjoy, some things we’re still dreaming of. So there you go. That’s a bit of our dream for creating an edible paradise homestead here. What are you dreaming about these days?
.
……………………………………………………..
Some things we’re already starting to enjoy, some things we’re still dreaming of. So there you go. That’s a bit of our dream for creating an edible paradise homestead here. What are you dreaming about these days?
Leave a Reply