Homestead Happiness, June Week 1-ish

This post is actually a couple weeks late, but it's still a relevant tour of our June yard.  Nature is at peak biomass production this time of year both for weeds (boo...) and garden plants (yay!)  Fortunately, we've been more on top of the garden this year than last and most of the tree fruit survived the late snow storms, so things are looking good!

We got the garden in and mulched, and the drip irrigation set up.  It's crazy how much the tomatoes (left) and potatoes (right) have already grown since this photo was taken.

After two years of struggling, it looks like our rhubarb has finally turned the corner!  The likely culprit for its struggles: a quack grass root right through the center of the crown.  If you have a rhubarb plant that's inexplicably struggling, make sure it's not being assaulted by quack grass.

Some new neighbors put up a fence, and in the fervor of their construction, ended up tossing part of a rhubarb plant into our yard.  What else to do but plant it?  The leaves it already had died right away, but it was sprouting new leaves from the root within a week.  Jake's mom has another story about a piece of rhubarb root left out in a garden shed over the winter, and rediscovered in the spring, frozen and dried out.  She put it in the ground and it's growing now!  Respect.  May we all be as resilient as rhubarb!

We have our largest variety yet of pre-fruit this year--the black raspberries are finally bearing (they were fall-planted in 2013), while the peach tree bloomed for the first time and a few of the fruits survived the late snow storms.  The apples and crab apples survived, too!  We could have also added wild plums and sour cherries to this picture.  It's going to be a busy August/September around here!

On the other hand, the Nanking cherries are just about ripe.  More on that soon!

We've been mulching with aged chicken bedding, and it's sprouted almost as many volunteer garden plants as weeds because of all the kitchen and garden scraps we gave the chooks.  You can see Swiss chard and a potato plant in the photo, and just outside the photo is some borage.  We had an empty space where we relocated some strawberries to hedge our bets against marauding squirrels, so it's a nice surprise to see it fill in with edibles!

Speaking of volunteers, we were disappointed when the catnip plant we planted last year died.  But one of its offspring has taken its place!  Nature seems to be granting all our plant-related wishes this year.

What made your homestead happy this week?

Homestead Happiness April Week 1

Spring is definitely in the air here at the Lab, with our seven chickens laying normally at least five eggs per day, the grass in the yard shrugging off the latest snowfall and threatening to need mowing in the same day, and the sap season winding down (more on that on soon!).  Here are some other signs of spring that made us happy this week.

This was our root cellar over the winter. We used up the last of our winter squash this week, which means we made it through our whole stash and lost only one to spoilage.  It also means that we found a corner of our house that works as a root cellar for warm-storage crops with little modification.  The trade-off is that it's just a corner of our living room, with no additional isolation.  That is, it stayed at a steady 50-60 °F all winter while the thermostat was set to 67 °F, so our house is probably not very well insulated and our heating bills are probably higher than they could be.  But still, only spoiled squash!

Tulips and irises pushing through the mulch!

The first intrepid dandelions are blooming!

Our unknown mystery tree is almost certainly a decades-old apricot.  This is the first time it bloomed since we've been here.  Unfortunately, as soon as the flowers opened, we got a foot of snow and all the blossoms died.  But now we know that it would be worth trying to propagate this tree and give its offspring a more protected locale.

Meanwhile, the Bradford pears are just now looking ready to bloom, so they should do alright. (Unless we get another foot of snow...)

 Transplanted strawberries looking good.  We're going to get some before the squirrels do this year, just you watch!

And finally, Egyptian onions (left) and chives (right), ready to start adorning our morning eggs!  Time to start the harvest counter for this year's garden!

 What made your homestead happy this week?

HAP, November week 4: Happy Thanksgiving from THL!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  We wanted to make a slight variation on our normal homestead Happiness-and-Progress posts and give a quick rundown of some of the things we're thankful for.

First: you! THL broke the 50k all-time-pageview barrier this week.  While that's pretty small compared to most real blogs, it's still humbling (and motivating!) to realize we have an actual audience outside our immediate family.  So, thanks for reading!

Second: a yard in which to do all our goofy experiments, and which also looks nice and scenic while being coated in gently-falling snow.

Third: Craigslist, which not only lets us find great deals like this trailer, but also lets us meet lots of friendly and interesting people in the process.  It's easy to forget when watching and reading the news, but there's a lot of good people in this world.  There's also a lot of good free horse manure, and this little beauty will be hauling a significant portion of it to our yard.

Fourth: a not-empty freezer and pantry.  See also: item #2.

Fifth: the holiday season, with its abundant homemade treats.  Sugar high will be in effect from now through the new year.  Hooray for the holidays!

What are you thankful for?

Homestead Happiness, November Week 2

It's been a while since we posted a HAP post, but with our schedule finally settling back to normal after several crazy months, it's time to get back on track.  Here are a few things that made our week.

The chard and kale, protected by the row cover chicken tractor, survived the first couple snows of the winter.  The temps only dipped down into the upper 20s (°F), so the real test will come later.  But so far, so good!

Some of the unprotected dandelions survived, too, including this audacious specimen!  The last few days it's been warm enough for the bees to fly, too, and this little guy has very little competition for their pollination services.  Well played, dandelion.

We finally got the broilers their own setup in the shed, with some pasture space outside.  Better for them with more space, better for us because they're easier to take care of than when they're inside the brooder box.  This batch of broilers, although almost 20% had to be terminated early for various reasons, was a lot cleaner and more rambunctious than previous batches.  They even wandered away from the feeder to explore the pasture at times!  They all went in the freezer on Saturday, which means we're about ready to close the books on them and write up the stats.

Did you know that the bottom grate of a Smokey Joe grill fits perfectly inside a Lodge 12", 8-quart dutch oven?  That's an important discovery considering how many chickens we now have available to roast.

What made your homestead happy this week?

Homestead Happiness, June Week 4

Lots of developments on fruits, vegetables, and wildflowers this week made us happy.

The creeping bellflower, which is kindly filling in our less-maintained areas with purple June/July flowers, is in full bloom.

It's an invasive species, but other than being an aggressive spreader and difficult to eradicate, it's not as bad as some invasives.  For example, this patch s a hotspot for bee activity.

The squirrels won round two also, picking 90% of our strawberries while they were still green, even with the quick and dirty strawberry cage in place.  So either the woven wire fencing has too large of holes, or we're battling mice instead of squirrels.  (Or we're battling jedi squirrels that can pick the strawberries using The Force...we know they exist.)  We made our quick and dirty strawberry cage slightly less quick but even more dirty by covering it with 1/2" hardware cloth.

We've got an especially delicious-looking strawberry that no squirrel could possibly resist as a test probe.  If it gets picked, our problem is definitely mice.

It looks like we might actually get some raspberries in year two.  Only a handful, but hey!  You gotta start somewhere.

We were thinking we would get skunked on apples, plums, and sour cherries this year since there were only a few flowers on the plums (none on the apples and cherries) and we couldn't find fruit on anything.  But behold!  There are a few plums we had missed.  We're going to have four of them come September.  Quadruplets would normally be very exciting, but it's a good thing we made so much jam last year!

Similarly, the Nanking cherries seem to have survived the winter ok and will be ripening soon.  Our likely-bird-planted versions compete with other shrubs and weeds in the shady areas of our yard, so we don't usually get enough of these to do anything with but make a light snack.  But they're really good, so maybe we should do some plant propagation experiments to give them a chance to reach their full permaculture potential.

Finally, the corn is definitely going to be "knee high by the fourth of July" since it's already thigh-high now!  We're currently devising squirrel-deterring plans for when the ears start to ripen.

What made your homestead happy this week?

Homestead Happiness, June Week 1

Summer is really kickin' into gear around here, and although the spring was a struggle for garden prep and pollinators, there's some good news from the Lab on both fronts this week.

Our wildflowers (Erysimum, Wallflowers) from a few weeks ago were joined in bloom by some feral roses this week.

We haven't seen many bees on either of those, but the wallflowers are being worked by some hover flies.  We think this specimen is Eristalis arbustorum.

Meanwhile, the hawthorn a few feet away has its own ecosystem of insects pollinating it.  Another hover fly (probably a Drone fly), a blue bottle fly, some small feral bee (or small feral bee-imitating hover fly) we couldn't identify, and the honey bees we were hoping to see there.  There were at least two other species that we couldn't get good photos of.  But, in trying to identify these bugs, we learned that the larval stage of many hover flies (although not of these two) eat aphids, and some eat scale and other garden pests.  So, stick around, hover flies, we'll need you soon! (...and feel free to check out the scale on our Meyer lemon tree; we set it by the driveway for you.)

In the garden, our squash have sprouted!

The kale is also up, although it would have been nice to get this in the ground several weeks ago.

Meanwhile, our tomato plants seem to have largely survived (so far) the bi-daily hail storms we've been getting.  We did have to replace a couple pepper plants in what we're referring to as a 'jalapeno emergency.'

Strawberry season is so close we can taste it.

We also got a double-yolked egg from our Red Star hen that broke the 4-oz barrier.  We think there should be an additional category for eggs this large.

What made you happy this week?

Homestead Happiness May Week 3

We skipped a couple weeks of our HAP posts, in part because we were busy with non-homesteading-related stuff, and in part because we've been doing a bit of twiddling our thumbs waiting for the dirt to dry out enough to plant the garden.  But there's still plenty to be happy about!

First off, the wild greens in the yard are loving all the rain.  We haven't planted any greens in the garden yet, but we sure haven't had to leave the yard for our vegetables!  You may have guessed from the last couple posts that we've been eating a lot of dandelion greens and sorrel (and you'd be correct), but the mallow (in the picture) has also been a valuable addition to our plates.

The hops plant came back!  And it's already as big as it got last year!  Hopefully it will help the bees battle varroa, although we don't have too strong of hopes that the bees will self-treat.

One leaf on our rhubarb was almost completely eaten by slugs (we think), and the stalk had come partially disconnected.  So we picked it the rest of the way, making this little 4" morsel is the first rhubarb we've harvested from the plant.  It made one bowl of oatmeal very awesome.

Judging by the number of volunteer potatoes that came up this spring, we need to do a better job harvesting next year (although volunteer veggies that made it through the winter are always kind of fun) .  They got knocked back a bit by a Mothers Day snowstorm, but they're pushing on now.  We pulled out a couple that were in this year's garden beds, but the ones that came up in what are now aisles will get to do what they want for the summer.  For the ones we had to move, we dug the best specimens into the compost bin to see what they'd do, since last year we had a regular old russet potato from the store sprout in the compost and survive the summer to actually produce a pound or two of potatoes.  That was a nice surprise!

One nice thing about all this rain is that it's made it really easy to pull weeds.  The strawberries needed it bad, and we happily removed all the quack grass in there.

We did take the risk of turning over a couple beds to get the onions and sweet potatoes planted since they really needed to get in the ground.  Hope they do ok!

Some of the first wildflowers (not including dandelions) are also starting to bloom.  These guys are in with some roses that are looking a little deficient in iron or nitrogen.  We haven't seen any bees on these blooms yet...

...but they are working on the chives that got ahead of us!  This little gal was so into it, she started probing the next flower while she was still standing on the first one!  Good work, ladies.

What made you happy this week?

Homestead Happiness, April Week 4

Plenty of bee-related news has us kind of giddy this week.

Our new bee package arrived on Saturday.  The local distributor sold more than 1,500 packages, which meant it was a total zoo for picking them up, and that our bees will have some competition for the neighborhood flowers.  Still, it's nice to see such an interest in beekeeping, and they'll definitely have first dibs on the dandelions in our yard!

The new bees are already taking full advantage of the pollen in our dandy-filled yard.  Keep up the good work, ladies!

As a side note, in preparing the hive for the new package, we ended up finding the old queen.  Turns out she didn't die in the great yellow jacket war of 2014, and we can rule out that they absconded last fall.  That leaves either CCD, or too heavy of losses from the yellow jackets to make it through the winter.  Should we start a portrait collection of our queens for future colonies to look back on and remember their storied history?  This was Elizabeth I.  Right now we have Elizabeth II.

The bees came just in time, too, because our strawberries are starting to bloom!  We've got the squirrel cage set...now if we can just get all the mice trapped out of the adjacent shed before the berries ripen, we might actually get some to eat this year!  Also, to the fruit trees waiting to flower: ready, go!

We also realized that swarm season and hunting season are complementary.  So, if we put a ladder stand in one of our trees now as a support for a swarm trap, we can turn it back into a hunting stand later when we either catch a swarm, or when swarm season is over in July.  Either way, it will be ready in time for deer season! (Although we probably won't be able to hunt deer from the stand in its current location.)

What made your homestead happy this week?