Our Backyard Homestead

Starting over

After investing five years in building an organic garden at our old house, I was quite sad to leave it behind this summer.  I am not in a season of life that will allow me to invest a great deal of time in building a new garden and starting over.  Between homeschooling, making all of our food from scratch and trying to keep up with three musical kids each playing two instruments, my plate is very full.  How ironic that we now have four times the land, but not much margin for gardening.  I previously wrote briefly about choices and right now I must choose to focus on creative gardening efforts rather than building a large garden space.

This spring I build two new cedar, raised bed garden boxes.  I added one to my garden at the old house, but hadn't yet filled the other when we made the decision to move.  I brought the box over to the new house and with a little good soil, I have an instant garden.  In my other space, the soil was double dug and amended, so the fact that the beds are only six inches tall was not an issue.  My new instant garden is less than optimal because I simply laid down several cardboard moving boxes, set the cedar frame on top and filled it with dirt.  Since I am filling it mainly with greens, hopefully the shallow depth will not be an issue and if I am lucky, the worms will get busy breaking up the cardboard and improving the soil below.

I "fenced" in the space to protect it from the cats, chickens and neighbors goat.  Unfortunately, I did not take into account the army of grasshoppers that decided to feast on the first round of kale and lettuce that I planted.  They ate every last bit, leaving only my hardy favorite, Swiss Chard.  Hopefully round two will be more successful since I planted it mostly from seed instead of transplants-by the time the seedlings start growing, maybe the cooler temps will have reduced the grasshopper population slightly.

I planted kale, cilantro, beets, spinach and collard seeds.  Additionally, I put in two Brussels spouts  and two romaine transplants.  I am also working on some plantings in my existing landscaping and using some pots on the back patio. 

I grew my first ever beets this spring.  I only planted a few and ended up with only one harvested, but it was delicious.  I have space for three rows of beets and have planted the first one.  I am trying my hand at succession planting so will put in row two next week.  Below are the beet seeds.  I am not sure why I find them so fascinating, but of anything I have planted from seed, I think these are just the coolest seeds ever!  And beets that look like a bullseye, how cool is that!

Maybe it is because we are studying ancient history right now, but I was especially fascinated with this seed that looks a little like a weathered ancient Greek statue to me.

Here is my replanted fall garden:

It seems I was quite distractible while planting.  Too many new things to photograph!  Here is the one of the three oaks out front. 

And the gorgeous view of the sky off to the west:

And the plane that few overhead:

It was a great day getting my hands dirty and knowing that with minimal effort, we will hopefully reap some nice rewards....if only the creatures great and small will be agreeable to share!

 

How to Build a Cedar Garden Box

I built two new raised beds this past weekend and took some pictures so I could share how I put mine together.  My first three raised beds have been in use for four seasons and the wood is holding up quite well.  Cedar is more expensive, but will pay off over time.  Whatever you do, do NOT use any form of treated wood as you do not want the chemicals in the wood potentially spoiling your soil.  I wrote another entry about building the raised beds, but took couple pictures and thought I would share a few more of the nitty gritty details.

The Cost - $39 per box

• Each 4x8 box consists of 3 2x6x8 cedar boards from Lowe's at a price of $10.24 per board.  I had the nice employee at Lowe's cut my third board exactly in half (free!).
• The only hardware I use is 3" corner braces, with screws included.  There are 4 in a package so 2 packages are required per box at a cost of $3.77 per package 

Tools Required

An electric screwdriver was my only tool.  The wood was soft enough that I didn't have to pre-drill, I just screwed the screws right in!  If you don't have an electric screwdriver, I think they could be screwed in by hand, but you might want a partner to help speed up the process or consider pre-drilling the holes.  I used 32 screws per box.

The Process

I simply laid the boards out on the most level spot in our cracked up driveway that I could find.  I held the brace in place while using the electric screwdriver to drive the screw in.  I used two braces per corner, though best I could dig up in a corner of one of my old beds, there are some I only used one brace on and they are still holding together beautifully.

The Time

I couldn't believe how quickly I managed to get the first box put together so I decided to time the second box.  Using the electric screwdriver did allow for this speedy work!

I was a little surprised at how fast it went.   Granted this is the fifth box I have now built, but even if you add on a little extra time for learning curve, they go together quickly!  The trick is to let the lumber store cut the wood.  That step alone would have stopped this little project in it's tracks until the hubby was home to help.  I now feel like I can conquer the world with the electric screw driver/drill, but I have not graduated to sawing skills yet!

Swiss chard ~ a plant everyone should grow

If there were only one thing I could plant, I have come to the conclusion that I think it should be swiss chard.  And you need not have a garden in order to grow it.  It is a beautiful and colorful addition to your landscaping.  My favorite kind of plants are, number one, easy to grow.  Swiss chard fits this bill amazingly well.  It requires next to no care and will grow year around in a warm winter like the one we are having now.  In past years when we actually had a winter, the chard died out after a few nights in the 20s, but sprang right back to life in the spring.

Here are two of my plants, picture taken in mid-January.  I have since cleaned out all of the dead leaves and it is much prettier and quite less full since we have been using the nutrition packed leaves for juicing the past few weeks.

My favorite kind of plants are, number two, pretty.  I know that I should consider nutritional value over aesthetics, however, I can't help it, I love to grow pretty things.  Pretty things that grow with little care are all the better.  And pretty things that grow with little care and are a nutritional powerhouse sound like just the perfect thing to grow! 

That brings me to reason number three for my favorite kind of plants, nutrition.  For my family this is a two fold deal, it could be the most nutritious food in the world but if it tastes terrible, we won't eat it.  Well, sadly I must admit that my first year or two of growing swiss chard this is exactly the category that swiss chard fell into.  Then one day I read an article of how to cook with swiss chard and decided that we should attempt to eat it.  Chopped and tossed into a soup in the last few minutes of cooking, it was delicious.

Suddenly we lost our swiss chard phobia.  The kids noticed that baby chard leaves were in the salad mix they were eating.  We started juicing this summer and it only seemed natural that we should include swiss chard.  At first, I was scared to add much to the juice for fear that it would be too strong, but just this week I went a little crazy with the amount of chard and yet the juice was delicious. 

It has taken me a while to mature into a well rounded swiss chard grower, but alas, if today you were to tell me I could only plant one thing in my garden, chard would be the one!

Build that soil

I have black clay soil in my yard.  It is so thick and sticky that it made raised beds a necessity in order to have a successful garden.  The first year I ordered a dump truck load of soil from a local company.  It was a mix of equal parts of topsoil/compost/sand.  We tilled the clay to about 6" below the raised beds and then filled the beds with about 6" of of the soil blend.  Every year since, I have added a new layer of compost and a little fertilizer  when I prepare the beds in the spring.  After reading about the benefits of no till methods, I am as gentle as possible when amending the soil in the spring.  At the end of the growing season, I try to cut plants out at the base rather than pull the entire root system.  The first year of "no till" I could tell a big difference!  Here is a good article about the benefits of the no till method.

Here is what I added to my beds this year:

I have no idea if this is the best choice, as a matter of fact, I may use Texas Tee in the future after talking to an employee at North Haven Gardens.  I believe this was slightly under $25 for a 40 pound bag at the feed store.  The Texas Tee was nearly $40 at North Haven.

I am quite liberal with dried molasses.  We try to spread some in the yard as well.  I believe it was about $20 for the 50 pound bag at my local feed store.

I choose this for compost this year.  This along with a bag of cotton burr compost has been, or will be, added to each of my raised beds.  This was considerably more expensive than the cotton burr compost at $6 per 1 cu ft so I am using it sparingly.  Hopefully it will prove to be a worthwhile investment.  Someday I hope to do better in the production of my own compost.  Right now my time is limited and I have to make choices of where I can cut some corners.  While it pains me to pay for bagged compost, until I can get a better composting set up going, it is what it is.

This is my staple compost.  I have used at least one 2 cu ft bag per bed per season over the past four years.  I get it for about $5 per bag at my local feed store.

This is the potting soil I have used for my growing bags.  I mixed in all of the above to the bag when planting.  The only place that I can find it is at L0we's for about $2.50 per bag.  It is a nice blend of topsoil, compost and sand.  I am quite happy with the row of soil that I dumped out of the bags I used last year.  The nice thing is that it is not full of weed seed like the dump truck load purchased locally was.  Crossing my fingers that it works as well as it did last year with my current tomato crop.

I truly believe that if you are going to be a successful Texas organic gardener, you must focus on your soil as a top priority.  I have an unbelievable amount of earthworms and I love letting them do all the work of tilling for me!  One of these days, I  will get around to having my soil tested, but so far what I am doing seems to be working so I haven't managed to make soil testing a priority.  The nerdy side of my brain would like to see that happen, but so far the right side of my brain seems to be running the show and with the right side in charge it is rather miraculous that anything in the garden has been accomplished!!

The tomato experiment

 After planting way too many tomatoes last year, I swore I wasn't planting any this year.  However, too many months with cardboard or no tomatoes made me weak when the kids started asking to pick out plants.  My compromise is to plant them in bags.  I had success with this method for some extra seedlings last year, so here is to hoping that it will work as my main growing method this year.

I decided to take a quasi scientific method with my little tomato experiment this year and set up a control plant.  I bought two Sapho plants from North Haven that come with promise of being a great choice for Texas.  One I planted in a raised bed that was tomato free last year and the other is in a bag of potting soil.  They both got a mix of fresh compost, organic fertilizer and dry molasses when planted.  The soil is covered with the same cedar mulch and they are both protected in a Texas Tomato cage covered with frost cloth right now, but soon to be replaced with floating row cover (as soon as it arrives).

Here is the control, in front of the large tomato tent that contains the experimental plants.

My control plant

My experiment plant

I mentioned in my previous entry that I consulted the 10 day forecast before planting the tomato plants on Saturday.  I am not sure what happened to the forecast in the short time since Saturday, but it was 32 degrees this morning!!  I am still rather fearful of going out to see how they fared, but hopefully with the frost cloth and the extra flannel sheet that we threw on top, they stayed warm enough for the few hours that dipped into the danger zone!

Starting small

For those interested in their building their first garden, I have two pieces of advice:

1.  Start small

2.  Make plans for irrigation from the very beginning

Start Small

Being a recovering perfectionist, I don't handle failure well.  I knew that in order to continue with the garden adventure, I needed to take it on in pieces.  The first year, we put in three raised beds, the blackberries and a bean pole tepee.  Every year since, we have added a little more.  I look back at this picture and amazed by how much the space has changed.  I certainly would have set myself up for failure if I had attempted more, as it was, this was a large first undertaking.  The learning curve was VERY steep that year as I learned about those cute little bunnies and how they will devour all of your labors overnight along with other various difficulties. 

If you are working with a yard smaller than mine, as most in North Texas likely will be, but you want a garden, I encourage you to use existing space or build a little bed in the corner of your yard.  Even with the most stringent of HOAs, there are several edible plants that you could work into  front yard landscaping.  Swiss chard is an obvious choice in my opinion.  I have even seen it used in municipal planters as a landscaping plant.  It will grow with little to no attention from spring until the coldest of cold.  This year mine survived well into January.  Last year, one of my plants from the previous year came back for another season.  Very small leaves can be harvested for salads or the larger leaves can be cooked in various ways.  I hope to incorporate it into our diet more this year.

Here are two swiss chard plants worked into my perennial and herb bed (with a tomato and a few annuals as well).  This work in progress bed runs along the side of the house and the driveway, clearly visible from the street.  I likely won't put tomatoes in there this year, but I love that I live in a neighborhood that I can if I want to!  But I digress, beyond the tomato plant, can you tell which is the edible plant in this picture?

Here is malibar spinach in the same garden garden with the swiss chard.  It has beautiful little berries on it and thrives even in the heat of summer.

Make Plans for Irrigation

If you live anywhere with rain patterns that can be erratic, do not plan a garden without making a plan for how you will water it.  I didn't put any thought into how I would water.  Standing out with a hose got tiring quickly and I knew without something in place, once the days really started warming up I would kill everything.  Walmart had reasonably priced drip irrigation and, while it took an investment of time to get it all installed in my beds, it was worth it once the heat of summer set in.  Last year we added an automated timer which allows me to schedule a time for the maze of hoses to run to all of the areas of the garden. 

On the to do list this spring is to re-assess my set up.  Last year I attempted to recycle some soaker hoses into my new spaces and it was fraught with complications, most commonly the soaker hoses springing yet another leak.  I took pictures of some of my watering, but evidently I have a corrupt disk and they didn't make it to my computer.  I plan to get out and work for a few hours today so hopefully I can get some new pics taken.

How I built my raised beds

My garden is far from fancy, but I do have a goal of keeping it as natural and pretty as possible.  We did not have anything to do with the fence that is behind it and someday if I can completely minimize the visual impact of the fence, I will be happy.  It is going to take a long time with that goal since it runs nearly the entire length of our acre.

The first year I started with three raised beds.  My kind neighbor volunteered to dig the area with his tractor, for which I was very grateful.  It made for a nice double dug raised bed.  Unfortunately, I didn't know about Johnson Grass back then and was not nearly as diligent as I should have been in pulling every bit of the roots and rhizomes that I could.  If you are putting in new beds, do yourself a favor and be sure to get all of the roots!

I choose cedar planks.  It was more expensive, but I knew I wanted nothing to do with any treated wood and cedar would weather better than a non-treated piece of lumber.  My boxes are made up of three 8' boards (2x6's maybe??).  I had Lowe's cut the third board exactly in half so that my bed would be 8'x4' minus an inch or two.  I simply bought some right angle shaped braces and put 2 braces in each corner.  I did all of the building myself and the kids and I transported them from the driveway to the garden.  The hardest part was moving in wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of dirt to fill them!

 

When I added the fourth raised bed the following year, I used my handy manure fork (similar to a pitch fork) to break up the heavy clay soil and help in removing the grass/weeds that were left.  The season prior I laid soil bags to help in killing the majority of turf that was in the space where the new bed would be.  The kids and I did all of the digging and then set the wooden frame in the space we had prepared.  You can see my manure fork in the this picture.  I have bent up and broken two of them, but I haven't found anything else that works as well in my clay soil.

Surrounding the raised frames, I laid layers of newspaper the first year to kill weeds and then mulched over the top.  I have found that I much prefer using cardboard under my mulch to keep the weeds away.  Over time it completely breaks down and has been much more effective in ridding weeds than the newspaper layers.  Last spring, I stopped by Ikea and managed to bring home a huge stack of large cardboard pieces for the area that I was adding to my mulched space.  I will likely do the same this year to help kill the last bit of grass/weeds in my space.

I love mulch for minimizing the amount of work I have to do pulling weeds in the heat of summer.  I prefer to use cedar mulch in my beds as that helps in deterring bugs.  A thick layer of mulch on your beds will also cut down on the need for watering as it helps retain the water and keeps the soil cooler when the 100 degree days are upon us.  I lay my drip irrigation around my plants before spreading the new layer of mulch for the season.  I noticed today that the price of bagged cedar mulch is significantly higher this year than last.  It has gone up more than $1  to over $5 for a 3 cubic foot bag.  I'll be checking out new sources or using the cedar sparingly this season!

All of my walkways are mulched with any old hardwood mulch.  If you can find a person with a tree service, you can likely get your mulch for free.  With a layer of cardboard underneath and mulch on top, it will make light work of weeding.

This is my fourth season working my garden and I can't believe how much it has changed from the first two pictures!  Besides adding a hideous, and anything but natural fence, around the perimeter last year, we did quite a bit to help with the prettiness factor.  This year's goal is to kill the grass on the outside of the fence and plant herbs and flowers around the fence.  We had to fence it to keep the dog and the chickens out, each of which is equally destructive.

Pictures of my automated watering system and information on my fabulous, worth every penny tomato cages should be posted later this week.

Want an instant garden?

Last year I read about using bags of potting soil to use as garden space.  Every year I have attempted to break up a little more of our clay soil, rid it of the crab grass hard to pull weeds and add new space to the garden.  I believe the specific weed I am battling is Johnson Grass and digging it out is a painful experience.  The new area that I added last year, I simply put a row of potting soil bags right on top of my weeds and the outcome was a row of crazy growing tomatoes.

Yesterday we tackled clean up and re-planting of my potting soil row.  I took some pics to show how my weed killing efforts have been converted into a lovely new permanent plot in the garden this year.

Here is the bed last summer:

Covered with mulch, you can't even tell that it's a bunch of potting soil bags under there.  Note also that I filled the holes in the cinder blocks with soil and grew marigolds, herbs and even peppers in each hole the entire length of our mini retaining wall.

Here is what the bags looked like before I removed them yesterday:

I gently flipped the bag over and removed the plastic:

It appeared that all weeds beneath the bag were dead.  I am hoping this to be true and that I will not find Johnson Grass taking hold as the soil begins to warm.  Once I had removed the bags from the entire length of the row, the kids worked in some organic fertilizer, expanded shale, dry molasses and some rich compost:

And now I have a row planted with peas, beets, kale and mustard greens:

I did not use a high quality potting soil.  But do not use the cheapest either as that is mostly sand and I am not sure what else, but it does not resemble soil!  I did amend the soil when I planted last year.  In the near future, a thick layer of cedar mulch will go on top of the soil.

You can read more about growing in bags on the Mother Earth News website.  I will be adding more bags this year to increase my garden space and to grow my tomatoes.  My main beds need a rest from any tomato plants this year.

One note if planting directly over weeds/grass, you might consider first putting down a layer of cardboard or newspaper.  I need to figure out how I am going to go about this because I don't want the cardboard to be directly under the bag and make it difficult for roots to grow out of the bags.  However, I know from my experience last year of placing the really cheap bags at the perimeter of my garden to kill weeds in that area, that the weeds found cracks between bags or pushed their way to grow around the outside of the bag.  I found a great place in the garden to hang my camera so that I can take pictures as I work.  When I put together my new tomato bed and work in the cardboard, I will be sure to take some pictures.

 

Learning Curves

I have a love/hate relationship with learning curves.  The perfectionist in me needs to study how to do something and do it right the.first.time.  Of course, the need know that I will succeed goes hand in hand with procrastination.  The garden almost didn’t happen because I was was so overwhelmed with all there was to learn about organic gardening in Texas.  Thanks to the flylady, for the first time I saw the light on how my perfectionism and procrastinating tendencies go hand in hand.  Therefore, I decided I would go for the garden this year instead of next even if it doesn’t turn out as I would hope. 

This does lead me to a point, I promise.  I attempted to finish the irrigation of the other two beds.  However, I found a perforated hose that I thought might work better.  After investing much time in planning out how to tie all three beds together, I was quite disappointed to conclude that the two different drip systems were not going to work together.  Thus, the learning curve.  The good news is that I learned something.  The bad news is that the beds are not finished as I had hoped they would be at the end of this most incredibly gorgeous day.  But there is always tomorrow.

My macro lens was returned and I had a little fun with it at sunset tonight: