Spring 2009

There is a lot of down time on a Farm. But not Spring.  Spring time is when you make your investment. Fall is when you cash it in. There is a rhythm to it that was completely foreign to me when I began this project. Now, I seem to hear it clearly - and I enjoy it in ways I cannot seem to explain. Nor do I guarantee that this will satisfy forever - maybe sailing around the world is next.  But at the moment...

The garden is 77 by 135 feet of planted space.  This is a view looking NE after it rained like the Dickens.  Not much to see at the moment - I wanted to show the "before" picture.  To the left at 6, 6 foot diameter hay mounds that will yield 50+ pounds of potatoes each.  In the foreground at right are my pole beans.  In the distance are 2, 35 X 4 foot raised beds.  We have planted: Roma tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, onions, garlic, artichoke, hot and sweet peppers, sweet potatoes, potatoes, sweet corn, broccoli, cabbage, egg plant...  I can't emphasize enough that there is no such thing as "gardening".  The garden will take care of itself.  There is only "weeding".  I am not a "gardener", I am a "weeder".  Raised beds are easier to weed than flat beds.

Here is a shot of the "potato circles".  I would not grow potatoes any other way.  2 to 3 pounds of seed potato per straw mound yields better than 50 lbs of perfectly clean, easy to harvest potatoes with absolutely NO digging.  I put down an inch of straw, place a piece of see potato every 1 foot, in 3 concentric circles.  Cover with 12 inches of loose straw, and over the next couple months ad another 12 inches of loose straw (don't worry, the rain will compact them down to about 6 inches, and your job is to keep it above 6 inches...total per circle is 1 bale per circle: at $3).  Make sure the sun never hits your potatoes and keep them watered.  I harvest what we need for the kitchen all through the summer and fall, and then in October I harvest the remainder and store them in my cellar in moist sand.  I save 35 lbs for see for the next year (which with evaporation condenses down to less than 20 lbs of seed potato for the next planting season.

We have a 150 egg capacity incubator.  Our 35 to 40 laying hens give us all of the eggs we could possibly eat, and then replace themselves every year. After 21 days the eggs hatch, and I move the day old chicks to the "brooder" - a 75 gallon cattle water tank with a heat bulb, water, feed, and some soft wood shaving bedding.  After 2 weeks, the chicks have "feathered out" enough to move them to the next growing station before I put them in the regular chicken run.  We have enough land so that most of our chickens food they forage on their own.  We have begun to eat our "excess roosters", harvesting them at 120 days.

We have 2, 5 acre pasture paddocks that, when you think about it, are really just very large solar panels that "charge" our livestock with meat, milk, and eggs.  This is a shot of our "backyard".  We move the horses around to harvest the grass so I won't have to break out the lawn mower, in between the backyard and our pasture is our chicken run, so any bugs, ticks or fleas that want to come and invade our home must first make it through a gauntlet of very hungry chickens.

This is my 4th spring on the farm, and I must say that those gardening books on the "doomer porn" web sites are not very realistic in providing any real insight into being "self-sufficient".  This is a LIFESTYLE.  Either you have the land, the good health and physical strength (mental health is no problem on a farm - depressives should be prescribed heavy farm labor), and the will to learn over a several year period... because going "Amish", as I jokingly refer to this, is much more of a commitment than anything I have done other than parenting.

I will post "During" and "After" pictures, along with data on actual food production for those of you so inclined to attempt this.

Greg