Related News – Page 519

Vegetable Gardening for Profit – Grit

As gardeners, we all suspect that our efforts are saving us money. After all, the work, patience and worry that go into producing a vine-ripened tomato or a perfect zucchini must yield some monetary savings as well, right? Being a bit of a data nerd, I set out to prove the value proposition of vegetable gardening in my own backyard.

It’s important to note that mine is not the story of someone who achieved complete food independence after buying five acres in rural America. My husband and I live on a corner suburban lot that measures .71 acre, just south of Dayton, Ohio (growing Zone 5b); healthy for the suburbs, but certainly not what anyone would call a “farm.” In addition, most of that land is not able to be cultivated. Given what I know of the township’s rather zealous lawn-mowing regulations, I feel pretty confident that we would risk citation if we tried to plow up the sunny front yard or do much more than grow a few attractive herbs out there.

That leaves us with the well-fenced backyard, much of which is shaded by mature pines and oaks. Our total gardening space is 650 square feet of tillable ground, plus four raised beds that masquerade as flower beds. Our “micro-farm” is dotted with a couple of blueberry bushes and an assortment of container-sized fruit trees that are more entertaining than productive. We extend the season with a southwest-facing sunroom and a few sunny windowsills.

My process was simple: For a year, I would keep a running spreadsheet of my garden expenditures and harvests. In expenditures, I would tally things like seeds, plants and peat moss that get used up over the course of a season. I don’t tally expenditures for “capital improvements” like a new tool; after all, “no gear, no hobby.”

The income tallies record ounces of each vegetable or fruit harvested, plus a retail value based on the closest equivalent price I could find at one of the grocery stores I frequent. I always use the price for organic produce if I can find one, since my garden is grown without any chemical pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. Since I consider my garden my most pleasant part-time job, my purpose was to prove how much money I saved over buying the equivalent amount of produce at a grocery store.

January

Snow blanketed the ground, and nothing was growing when my project started in January. The makeshift cold frame we built over one of the more hidden raised beds was too cold to even shelter leeks, and the unheated sunroom was not warm enough to support the planter box in which we grow lettuces.

However, that doesn’t mean there was no gardening to be done in January. The post-Christmas mail always brings an influx of “garden swag” — the stacks of seed catalogs that allow a pleasant escape from the soul-crushing darkness and cold. I placed an order for approximately $164 worth of seeds and plants, and our garden business started the year as so many others do — in the red.

February

My annual Groundhog Day ritual is starting the pepper seeds. I love to trek out to the shed, dig out the plastic mini-greenhouses meant for seed-sprouting, and poke the little pepper seeds into the trays of soil. These trays take up residence on my kitchen counter over the dishwasher, where the periodic heat from that appliance makes a poor man’s heating mat. I supplement with an old desk lamp fitted with a grow bulb. Others may have far more expensive seed-starting equipment, but mine seems to do the job.

March

March is a month for waiting. The pepper seedlings I started in February filled the kitchen counter. I planted the cold-tolerant lettuces — like corn salad and a mesclun mix — that slowly grow in our large planter box. We supplement the natural light with a bank of basic fluorescent light fixtures intended for workshops; fitted with grow bulbs, these lights are enough to supplement the light coming in through our windowed sunroom walls.

March is also a month for continued investments. I ordered another $37 worth of seeds and plants.

April

Success! The garden is officially making money.

April brought our first harvests, and they were both literally and emotionally sweet after the long winter. We harvested a few ounces of young leeks that grew from seed in an outdoor bed, and a couple of ounces of potatoes from one of our small “trashcan potato” installations — a container in which sprouting potatoes from my pantry potato bin are allowed to grow, flower and die back, giving us new potatoes. The harvest was enough for a batch of potato-leek soup. We also harvested the first of our greens from the sunroom, always a wonderful feeling since store-bought organic greens in their plastic clamshells are so expensive and so flavorless. Although our harvest only amounts to about $4, we are moving in the right direction.

May

When I think of May gardening, I always think of strawberries and peas. I grow both in containers, with the strawberry plants in large urns flanking our back door, giving us a few handfuls of strawberries a year. Peas also grow in containers, which limits their productivity but allows me to completely enclose them in fencing to keep out the now-awake and hungry critters that love my garden as much as I do. With a few more ounces of lettuce, I added a few more retail dollars-worth to my harvest tallies.

May also brings a few more expenditures. Tradition here holds that the last possible frost day is May 15, so Mother’s Day weekend is always spent in the local greenhouse, buying any last-minute seeds and herb plants to replace those that are annual or that didn’t make it through the winter. It makes for a welcome celebration of the end of winter, with the sunroom full of seedlings hardening off and plants awaiting a garden home. The front doorstep is also regularly dotted with deliveries of tomato plants I ordered back in January.

June

June gardens are my favorite gardens, filled with possibilities and with the opportunities for a short break to enjoy. With all of the broadforking, soil amendment (that is, compost sifting and application) and planting done, I can enjoy watching the little plants grow up their trellises and supports, and across the ground. I brought in another harvest of container potatoes and the first of the zucchini. The cucumbers also start to ripen this month, meaning I served sliced cucumbers at every meal and started to put up what would eventually become more than five gallons of bread and butter pickles.

My big surprise in June was the blueberry bushes, which are still young. I’d hoped to get 10 to 12 ounces of berries, but I was surprised by more than a pound and a half of homegrown fruit. Most didn’t make it into the house, as my husband and I shared each handful while we worked. It offset the disappointment at the failure-to-thrive of my radishes and carrots, my first clue that I’d let my soil get too dense.

July

July brought a continued abundance of zucchini, which went into almost everything I cooked, and cucumbers, which threatened to overtake the house some days. We also saw our first basil harvests, which were real treats — although some stores now sell organically grown basil leaves in clamshell containers flown in from California, they compare poorly to fresh basil from the garden. We save a great deal of money by growing our own basil and freezing the extra as pesto.

The first of the tomatoes come in during July as well, which really added to the retail value tally. Organic tomatoes on the vine are quite expensive in the store, so a plant doesn’t have to do much to pull its weight. With no more garden expenditures being tallied, and more than 80 pounds of vegetables harvested year-to-date, we were close to profitability.

August

If retail stores have “Black Friday,” then maybe Midwestern gardeners have “Green August.” The garden vaulted into profitability this month, led by zucchini and cucumbers, which finally quit producing toward the end of the month. With 76 pounds of cucumbers and 37 pounds of zucchini, my garden would have been profitable with these crops alone.

August is a month for abundance. More than 9 pounds of butternut squash went downstairs into storage for winter, and we continued to enjoy tomatoes, peppers and basil. We even harvested two of our first-ever apples from our dwarf apple trees. All in all, we ended the month with a tally of more than 182 pounds of vegetables harvested year-to-date, and we were in the black by $316.

September

September was all about squash and tomatoes. More than 12 pounds of assorted squashes joined the butternut squash already stored away, while every one of my eight varieties of tomatoes earned their keep by reaching a profitable production tally. However, I learned that I stunted my tomato production by letting my soil become too dense; we would purchase peat moss in the fall to start working into the soil to improve things for next year.

October, November, December

The end of the summer garden makes me sad. I brought in the last of the tomatoes, peppers and basil, and we had our first hard frosts. The potatoes continue to produce until the last container is empty. Plants that can over-winter in the sunroom came inside, and our dwarf fruit trees in the “micro-orchard” also came into the house, filling the south-facing window in the dining room and the east-facing window in the living room that gets brilliant morning sun. I looked forward to small harvests like a few ounces of greens and a sprig of rosemary in my pot roast. The harvest ended on Christmas Eve, as we shared an ounce of lettuce, tender and sweet.

Grand totals

The year’s experiment was a success. We grew more than 229 pounds of fruits and vegetables on our property with a retail value of $774.44. Subtract our $303.88 in expenditures, and we cut a healthy $470.56 from our food bill for the year.

Overall, the garden demonstrates that suburban gardeners can achieve a respectable level of savings on the yearly food bill with a modest garden and without any special gardening resources. Although I try to grow as much produce as possible from seed to keep the costs down, I bought tomato plants, herbs and a few cucumber plants to supplement those grown from seed. My seed came from sources that ranged from organic, non-GMO producers to the grocery store, where a lonely envelope or two of hybrid seed begged to come home with me. I fertilized exclusively with compost from a small and well-groomed pile, and I enjoyed the exercise I got from tilling the soil with a broadfork and weeding by hand.

Obviously, savings depends heavily on retail price. I opt to grow a great deal of the crops that are expensive to buy retail, especially those that see a significant price differential for the organic varieties: tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers and basil.

My experiment also proves that a gardener can have more than one failure and still save a lot of money. I lost crops of radishes and carrots in the dense soil, I planted a few pepper plants in a too-shady locale, and some of my squash vines grew impressively but failed to produce. Diversification is key.

Also important is starting small. I didn’t start out with a garden this big; every year, we add another strip of tilled land, another perennial fruit bush or tree, or another decorative raised bed or container. Every year brings a lesson or two, but we have proven that all you need is a bit of space and a desire to garden to save significant money and eat healthier food.

Read more: Another writer explores the idea of profits from gardening.

Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti is an independent writer, speaker, and owner of Hilltop Communications. Follow her gardening ventures and sustainable living projects at Fast, Cheap, and Good.

Source: grit.com

Homesteading 101: Getting Started – Mother Earth News

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A year and a half ago, my husband and I hastily bought five acres of neglected woodland on a hillside in New Hampshire without much of a vision for what we were going to do with it. As an avid gardener, my only stipulation for our new home was that there was space for a vegetable garden. Indeed, there were five small raised beds and a tiny clearing in the forest that let the sun in for a handful of hours each day during the warmer months, which we agreed was a good enough start. For months, we lived simply in our new home, largely ignoring the dark, encroaching forest and our home, which was rife with inefficiencies and rotting from the outside in due to a handful of painfully obvious building miscalculations.

But as the seasons passed, we felt increasingly inspired by our friends, the people we had met through our

travels (my husband was often on the road for work) and the community we had become part of to settle down and homestead. The spinach and carrots we pulled from our tiny raised beds paled in comparison to what we could be doing. Yet, we struggled to see how our newly found vision of a homestead could fit on the landscape that we already owned: The entire property has a 15 to 25 percent slope with little exposure to the south — a poor choice for subsistence farming. The house would need major renovations to make it livable for our growing family, and we felt constrained by money and time to do it right. We also knew we’d have to clear land—lots of it—to do much of anything.

This past May, as the last frosts passed through the valley below us, we agreed to make a go of it — despite the seemingly impossible challenges we faced — and committed to turn our home into a homestead. As I look back on the past three months, I wish that we had made the decision sooner (like last fall when we had all winter to plan) and that we had more guidance in those crucial first weeks about what it would really be like to hurl ourselves into the lives of homesteaders. So for those of you looking to make the leap and start homesteading, here are the top three things we’ve quickly learned:

1. Start somewhere, anywhere. We started by clearing half-an-acre of land and replacing our five raised beds with a fenced in garden plot that spans 28 x 40 feet. We’ve learned more in the last two months interacting with the landscape than we had observing it for the last eighteen months. For example, we knew that the drainage on the property was poor, at best, and that we would need to address them before the next growing season. But after watching the water rush down the mountain behind our house and flood our new garden several times a week, every week through the first months of summer, we were able to really understand the scope of the issue and how best to address it.

2. Get skilled. Our second task was to split enough firewood to get us through the winter ahead. It was
the first time I had ever swung an axe, and I quickly learned that with my tall but petite frame, I had to find another way to do it if I was going to help get through the pile of wood next to our garden without hurting myself. My husband handed me a maul and a sledgehammer and taught me the proper way to swing, wedging the maul into the log until it split. Log by log, I helped him split and stack nearly four cords of wood. Without learning some basic skills, like knowing how to split wood, our path to self-reliance would have stopped right there. We’ve also learned not to dismiss any skills we may have, regardless of how inapplicable they seem. For example, I used my web design knowledge to build a website for a local farm in exchange for a farm cooked meal every Friday night—a welcome relief after a hard week of work.

3. Aim for interdependence, not just independence. When our tomato seedlings suddenly turned yellow and stopped growing before we were able to transplant them outside, a friend offered us two flats of extra seedlings from his greenhouse, saving us the time and disappointment of having to buy them from a local nursery. Likewise, when I mentioned that we were having some fertility concerns in our garden, another farmer offered to fill up as many 5-gallon buckets as we could carry from her best compost pile on the farm. Engaging in our community—whether it’s through trading skills or creating friendships—has both saved us and inspired us to keep going. It’s proved particularly critical in these early stages of creating a homestead since we haven’t had the time to build up our own resources and are just beginning to learn all the skills we need to be more independent.

Are you a homesteader? If so, we’d love to hear the lessons you’ve learned along the way that have proven indispensible.

Photos by Larissa Reznek

Source: motherearthnews.com

An idiot’s guide to vegetable gardening – The Martha’s Vineyard Times

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People look at my tennis court-sized vegetable garden and think I know what I’m doing. I don’t. My mother is a real vegetable gardener. She’s been fully organic since long before the word was in vogue. She makes her own compost. She soil tests.

I don’t do any of that. I wing it. Sometimes I fail spectacularly, like when I neglected to contain my strawberry patch and it pretty much ate my garden. But I’ve learned a few things over the years, and I do well enough now to make it generally unnecessary to visit the grocery’s produce section for several months running.

Google “vegetable gardening for dummies,” and a number of useful sites pop right up like beans in a bed. I’m going to visit a few of them, after I get this article in. But first, allow me to offer a few pieces of vegetable gardening wisdom that I learned myself, mostly the hard way.

Good fences make good neighbors. Out here in the wilds of West Tisbury, my nearest neighbors are varmints. Deer, raccoons, skunks, rabbits, and woodland rats are all eager to share my garden’s bounty. My first garden fence was composed of tall posts and chicken wire. Something tunneled under the wire into the garden and took bites out of my tomatoes, nibbled the bottoms off my beans, and ate seedlings right down to the soil. After a few years, the chicken wire got rusty and weak, and a pack of intrepid deer burst through it one late fall day and devoured all the kale I still had growing. So I removed the chicken wire and replaced it with stronger, rust-proof green plastic-coated chicken wire, and I trenched all the way around the periphery and buried the wire about a foot underground. Nothing gets into my garden now, unless I forget and leave the door open.

Give your plants a raise. Raised beds (mine are hummocks a few inches higher than ground level) allow for proper drainage so your plants don’t drown in a big rain. But more importantly, they allow for easier weed control. One year, before I started using raised beds, a guest looked out at my garden and said, “Wow! It’s so lush and green in there; what are you growing?” I was growing weeds. Weeds get out of hand in no time flat. That summer, they were waist-high.

Now, I lay down thick layers of straw between my raised beds, and while the straw’s own seeds sometimes sprout, I just pull up the grass and lay it on top, and soon enough, it becomes more straw itself. Other things can be used as mulch between the beds (I’ve even heard of people using newspaper), but I like straw because worms like straw. Worm castings (yes, I’m talking about worm poop) are a gardener’s gold. And by tunneling around underground, worms aerate the soil, making it looser and more amenable to root growth.

Another note on weed control: A couple of years ago, I began using black planter’s paper mulch on some of my raised beds themselves. With plants spaced at least several inches apart, you simply lay the paper (it comes in a roll) over your raised bed and cut holes in it where you want to place your seedlings. Water gets through, but weeds don’t. The paper is biodegradable and can be tilled into the soil when spent. One note of caution: because the paper is black, it warms the soil, so it’s best not used in the full heat of summer around tender plants like lettuces.

“The only way to win is cheat,” says the theme song from “M*A*S*H”. Gardening purists plant everything from seed, starting things indoors in flats. But I’ve learned that cheating — i.e., buying seedlings from local nurseries — is easy, reliable, and time-saving. And you can buy exactly the number of seedlings you want, whereas when you buy a packet of, say, fennel seeds, there are maybe 100 seeds in the packet, and who can possibly fit 100 fennel plants in their garden? Leftover seeds rarely germinate the following year, so you just have to throw out your extras, which always feels wasteful and vaguely murderous to me.

Don’t take tender seedlings straight from the greenhouse to your garden; they’re not yet hardy enough to withstand a cold night. To harden off greenhouse seedlings (i.e., acclimate them to real temperatures), leave them outside during the day and bring them inside for the night. After three or four days, you can put them in the garden.

See to your soil. Plants feed on the nutrients in your soil, so you need to replenish those nutrients every year. In the spring, I dig a few inches of compost into my whole garden, and this year I’ve vowed to finally take a soil tester kit to my dirt. My friend Debby Farber, of Blackwater Farm in West Tisbury, says that soil on the Island tends to be overly acidic, so she spreads lime on her garden annually to up the Ph. (Note: there are two kinds of lime — fast-acting and regular. If you add regular lime to your garden now, it won’t make a difference in your soil until next year. But the fast-acting stuff is caustic and to me a bit scary, since you’re warned not to let it come into contact with your skin.) As for fertilizers, Debby believes you really need only two kinds, Pro-Gro and Pro-Start, both of which are made by North Country Organics. Toss a little Pro-Start into the hole into which you’re putting a seedling to help with root development. As plants grow, sprinkle a little Pro-Gro around seedlings for further feeding.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Starting with a tennis court-sized garden can lead to waist-level weeds. Gardening is time-consuming. Some days, it takes me an hour just to pick what’s ripe. So unless you have unlimited time on your hands, start small, until you gain some confidence and know-how, and then expand.

And finally, don’t be afraid to ask for directions. When you encounter problems with mildew, bugs, and blights, (which I’m sorry to say you will, sooner or later), go to your favorite nursery and get advice (and products to remedy the situation.) I sought help a couple of years ago when I had a serious slug infestation; I was directed to a wonderfully effective, organic slug demolisher called “Sluggo.” I don’t want to know how it kills the slugs, or where those disgusting critters go to die, but suffice it to say that a few granules sprinkled around my seedlings seemed to do the trick last summer. No doubt any nursery on the Island could have told me about Sluggo, but I didn’t ask them. I asked my mother.

Source: mvtimes.com

U.S. Homesteading Versus U.K. Smallholding – Mother Earth News

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Since joining MOTHER EARTH NEWS blogging community as one of the ‘Happy Homesteaders’ I have been musing about the term Homesteader as it is not one that is in use here in the UK.

I love the term hugely as it feels so accurate in describing the lifestyle we have decided upon which strives to make home the heart of everything we do and therefore is a place we long to spend time and energy in rather than wanting to escape from it when we have spare time.

Here in the UK I think the closest term to describe a similar way of life to that of a homesteader is ‘smallholder’ but to me this has quite different connotations.

A smallholder is officially a farmer with a small agricultural holding in order to raise animals and/or vegetables and fruit but for me, the word doesn’t evoke the associations of home spun crafts, cottage industries, food preservation, thriftiness that ‘homesteading’ does.

For some reason also in my mind the two terms have different gender associations. A smallholder is a quite a masculine term being one of pure animal husbandry and land management whereas a homesteader seems to be a more feminine label encompassing pursuits which in the past were traditionally the domain of the matriarch in a family.

In the UK when we refer to a smallholding or smallholder it will almost always mean a rural setting with enough space for at least a few diverse livestock (possibly pigs, sheep or cattle and usually always poultry) whereas I am beginning to understand that the modern homesteading movement in the US includes many people, like ourselves, who are creating more self-reliant havens in urban settings.

Here in the UK I wonder whether we have a more ingrained culture of the themes of homesteading and so in a way the term was possibly a little redundant until recently when so many modern folks have now shunned their heritage of providing for their families.

For normal people it has probably only been the last generation (my own parents’ generation) who have been able to opt out of raising their families’ fruit and vegetables at home – before that, my grandparents’ generation, were absolutely required to have their gardens dedicated to producing potatoes, onions, brassicas, legumes and so on due to the massive impact the Second World War had on Britain’s food supplies.

We are a tiny island which relied heavily on food imports by the 1940s and so when Germany started to block supply ships full of food to attempt to starve us the government decided to create a Dig For Victory campaign which was very successful. Even modest housing at that time were built on fairly sizable plots so that everyone could have some food growing space. Allotment gardens were created where large swathes of land were divided into many small parcels of land for people to travel to by foot or bike, tend to their vegetables and fruit and to bring some home to the table. Today all of the elderly rural people I am friends with have fruit bushes, vegetable gardens and either kept bees, chickens or rabbits. Making their own jams and chutneys seems to have been a standard way of life for them but one which my generation are just discovering for the first time as it was not how we were raised by our modern parents with their urban jobs.

In the UK we don’t have zoning and so keeping a few chickens and bees is almost part of our cultural heritage – certainly our rural heritage as it is what country people have always done but now is seeing a great resurgence in popularity. We have always dried laundry on the line outside despite the constant having to dash and collect it in when a frequent rain shower appears and tumble driers as we call them are generally used occasionally for finishing off clothes that have been on the line or on airers inside. laws

I don’t actually even know what these zoning laws are but gather they are controls against having housing areas looking unkempt and so restrict using homes for practical and possibly unsightly activities such as outside laundry drying and the keeping of poultry.

British folk do seem to be a nation of naturally thrift and so have always enjoyed having ‘charity shops’ a-plenty in the high street where people take their unwanted clothes and belongings only to come away with more stuff than we donated for under £10. Each High Street will typically have one or two such stores raising money for a particular hospice or children’s charity. Some High Streets will have more. They are great places to get cheap kids clothes, toys and kitchen equipment and also great for offloading such clutter when we are finished with it. Donations are always so gratefully received.

I think perhaps the experience of living through the incredible deprivation of both horrific world wars had such an impact on the population here in Europe and so ‘making do and mending’ is really quite ingrained in our collective psyche and therefore naturally leant towards homesteading without really knowing that we did it but in recent decades we have emulated so much of the States’ culture of shopping malls, fast food, big cars and daily glamour of sumptuous housing and pretty manicured lawned gardens which were always a visual status symbol to show off how much land did not need to be used for food growing in large stately homes and manor houses.

I really like the term homesteader and it sums up what this family are now about far more than the word smallholder.

Both my husband Darren and myself have been on several courses which introduced us to the basics of various rural crafts than simply the raising of food.

Although we do grow vegetables, fruit and have kept chickens for meat and eggs for the past few years Darren has also made some lovely chairs out of freshly felled Ash wood, I have made a basket out of willow, learned to make pretty rainbow blankets by crocheting and several other handicrafts have begun to be explored.

Having had these thoughts and written about them today I am now hoping to raise the profile of Happy Homesteading in the UK a little as it really is an improved description of this kind of lifestyle.

I wonder from people reading MOTHER EARTH NEWS Happy Homesteading blog posts what does the term mean to you? Are you from a part of the world where the term is in use and understood or do you too have a different word which describes a similar way of life? What makes a homesteader?

From Wikipedia

Homesteading Definition

Broadly defined, homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of foodstuffs, and it may or may not also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale. Pursued in different ways around the world — and in different historical eras — homesteading is generally differentiated from rural village or commune living by isolation (either socially or physically) of the homestead. Use of the term in the United States dates back to the Homestead Act (1862) and before. In sub-Sahara African, particularly in nations formerly controlled by the British Empire, a homestead is the household compound for a single extended family. In the UK, the term ‘smallholder’ is the rough equivalent of ‘homesteader’.

In homesteading, social and government support systems are frequently eschewed in favor of self-reliance and relative deprivation, in order to maximize independence and self-determination. The degree of independence occurs along a spectrum, with many homesteaders creating foodstuffs or crafts to appeal to high-end niche markets in order to meet financial needs. Other homesteaders come to the lifestyle following successful careers which provide the funding for land, housing, taxes, and specialized equipment such as solar panels, farm equipment and electricity generators.

Modern government regulation – in the form of building codes, food safety codes, zoning regulations, minimum wage and social security for occasional labor, and town council restrictions on landscaping and animal keeping – has increased the marginal cost of home production of food. This, combined with the delayed rewards of creating a viable agriculture site, increase the difficulty of establishing a self-sufficient homestead from scratch, particularly for those of limited income.

Actual financial savings from adopting a homesteading lifestyle appear most closely related to lower material living standards and conservation of purchased resources (such as electricity, fertilizer, water, and foodstuffs) rather than lower costs of living. Economies of scale in modern agriculture and opportunity cost of manual labor prevent home-raised food from being an economical choice. However, many homesteaders express deep satisfaction with their standard of living and feel that their lifestyle is healthier and more rewarding than more conventional patterns of living.

A smallholding is a farm of small size.

In third world countries, smallholdings are usually farms supporting a single family with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming. As a country becomes more affluent and farming practices become more efficient, smallholdings may persist as a legacy of historical land ownership practices[dubious – discuss]. In more affluent societies smallholdings may be valued primarily for the rural lifestyle that they provide. Often, the owners do not earn their livelihood from the farm. There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farms in the world, supporting almost 2 billion people.

In British English usage, a smallholding is a piece of land and its adjacent living quarters for the smallholder and stabling for farm animals, on a smaller scale than that of a farm but larger than an allotment, usually under 50 acres (0.20 km2). It is often established for the breeding of farm animals on an organic basis on free-range pastures. Alternatively, the smallholder may concentrate on the growing of vegetables by various traditional methods or in a more modern way using plastic covers, Polytunneling or cloches for quick growth.

Generally, a smallholding offers its owner a means of achieving self-sufficiency as to his and his family’s own needs which he may be able to supplement by selling surplus produce at a farmers market and/or temporary booths or more permanent shop facilities are often part of a smallholding.

Source: motherearthnews.com

What is ‘Modern Homesteading,’ Anyway? – Mother Earth News

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Homesteaders seek a return to land, food production, hard work, and natural seasons. They are interested in organic gardening, raising livestock, and alternative energy systems.

Including family members in the homestead helps teach them valuable life skills and makes chores more fun! Having the right tools is also important. For example, having a good proofing basket will help make bread rise the way it should.

A few weeks ago a particularly ornery guy called me a ‘poser’ on my Facebook page. And then he went on and on an on in post after post about how I wasn’t really ‘homesteading’ and I should call my page something else.

Sure Mr. Grumpy Pants. OK.

Thankfully, a bunch of awesome people came out of the woodwork and told him a thing or two about what it is we do there. Which is simply share our experiences with various aspects of living in the country. Thanks, guys!

Thing is, I’ve never put myself out there as an expert at this gig. I’m pretty ‘green’ around the collar myself (though I have researched the topic for years), which is why I started a page and blog for other rural living fans with even less experience than me. We’ve been incredibly lucky to have a whole lot of VERY experienced folk join us as well, which is an absolute honor. They jump in and answer questions, share their insights with those of us who have yet to dispatch a chicken or attend the birth of a calf, and in general enrich our lives every single day. Oh, and they defend l’il ol’ me when the odd grumpy pants goes on the attack. Thankfully, that’s been a rare occurrence.

But back to the question – what exactly is ‘modern homesteading’ anyway?

I asked the question on our Facebook page and here are some of the responses – I think you’ll find them illuminating:

• “It means “home”.

• “Each family is in a different place in their journey and has different homesteading goals. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all definition. Each family has to decide for themselves what’s right for them. We should be encouraging each other, not judging each other.”

• “Living a simple life and treading as lightly as I can on mother earth.”

• “It’s just a lifestyle – we all have our different path, but it does not mean we are lost. I use the tech end of it to spread the word and show folks what I’m interested in and maybe, just maybe they are interested too! Do what is important for you and your family to be sustainable and to pass that knowledge down to future generations!”

• “It is a journey, a process, not an event or a place. Homesteading to me indicates action. Trying and learning all the time… expanding what one knows how to do on your own. We are all headed the same direction. Some take different roads but we are all going the same direction.”

• “Homesteading to me means taking steps to be self sufficient. Doing as much (or as little) as you are willing or able to do. Grow your own food or buy it from farmers markets, go solar or just reduce your power usage… whatever your comfort level!”

• “Well, to me it means using the property around the home to produce items for the sustenance of the family. So having a garden and livestock for that end. It also can encompass anything that can be ‘homemade’ to provide for the needs of the family. Along with acquiring and using any and all skills necessary to reach that goal. Kinda technical but that about sums it up. Of course this can be done on many levels depending on circumstances.”

• “I think “modern homesteading” is using modern conveniences to augment your homesteading style – like using tractors, incubators, augers, et cetera to make everything work. Most people aren’t going to get to total self-sufficiency, and a lot of those don’t plan to. Using technology to help will hopefully encourage other people to try to be more conscious of their impact on their surroundings.”

• “All of life in any point in history is about balance. For me that balance is best described in the realm of hunting northeastern whitetail deer. I have pursued many craft, and have gone down the purist road in many of those. The question is how far will you go. In hunting, I will never be truly purist unless I take that game with a spear that I forged myself or a deadfall, or just ran it down like the Indians used to do. Or will I use the closest thing to ‘pure’ to take the game efficiently without waste. Likewise with how you homestead. Why would you not use the technology available to live self sufficiently as efficently as possible. There is value in doing things the old way so you know how, though it should be left up to the individual.”

• “Simplicity, being green, eating more healthy, and trying to get rid of some of the chemicals…”

• “Homesteading to me simply begins with living within your means, respecting the land, animals and people you come in contact with and learning how to do things as naturally as possible (like companion planting instead of chemical pesticides).”

• “Trying to learn (and remember) the ‘old’ ways that served our elders so well, so that we can perhaps taste a little more simplicity in our own lives. Living in the city, so love to support our local markets, etc…”

• “We live in a small town and I am striving for self sufficiency. I don’t really consider myself a homesteader, I just want a different kind of life. One that is still in contact with nature and the seasons, a way of providing some things for ourselves, finding some of the ‘lost and forgotten’ knowledge of our grandparents and great grandparents. I wanted more wind in the trees and less sirens and smaller class sizes for my kiddo. I’d like to live a little bit further out of town but it’s a good compromise with a young child seeking friends.”

• “I’ve thought about that a lot too. Do I have to be ‘pure’ to be a homesteader. Then it occurred to me…home…steader. Like the word ‘home-making’, it’s basic. Home-steading is making a home out of a stead (a piece of property). So homesteading is whatever you need it to be – if it means you make your bread from scratch, with the ground up wheat (that you of course hand processed) you grew yourself…or, if you went to town to buy your bread, and even some eggs, because you only have a rural house, a small garden in the backyard, and some herbs in the kitchen. Homesteading is turning your property into a home, using whatever means you deem necessary.”

• “For me a big part of our self reliant journey is learning skills that have been forgotten. Sometimes putting a modern technology twist on ancient practices.”

• “For me, living in a suburb, homesteading is anything that allows me to a) Provide for myself with my own efforts rather than running to the store. That can include sewing, cooking, carpentry, growing my food and herbs, etc. b) Teach my children a skill that will allow them to someday do those things for themselves as well.”

Interesting, isn’t it – the variety and breadth of definitions? That’s what makes it such an amazing topic to write about. And that’s why I love the people on our Facebook page so much. They’re simply (and I don’t use this word often, but it applies here) awesome.

For me and our specific situation, the definition of ‘modern homesteading’ is this:

“Modern homesteading is living consciously, using as few natural resources as is comfortably possible. It’s learning and using the ‘old ways’ of living that were almost lost from the days when everyone grew and preserved their own food because they had to – keeping chickens, dairy animals and other small farm livestock, growing produce, canning, fermenting, dehydrating – because these are things we should all know how to do. It’s being set up to be comfortable without electricity if you have to, even if you never need to. It’s learning the skills most of our ancestors took for granted, like fixing things instead of throwing them out, buying quality ‘pre-owned’ items instead of new where it makes sense, knitting and mending, fence building and repair, and basic construction. It’s being pro-active about your and your family’s health and knowing how to prevent and take care of minor illnesses and injuries without a doctor. It’s knowing you have enough food put away to last you at least 6 months, which is what all of our ancestors did or they’d have starved. It’s building community and asking for help when you need it. It’s being as free from debt as possible. And it’s about doing it all using the modern tools we have available today in ways that allow us to reach our own personal ‘self-reliance’ goals as efficiently as possible.”

Here’s what it’s NOT about, at least in my books:

• Modern homesteading is not about being self-reliant out of fear, but out of love, respect and responsibility to our families and communities.

• It’s not about living 100% like we did in the 1800s (though I’m in awe of those who have chosen that life!), but rather taking small steps towards being more independent of ‘the system’, whatever that looks like for your family.

• It’s not about ‘me first’ and hoarding supplies, neighbours be damned, but rather sharing and planning for caring for others.

I know this might be a controversial post, and that’s OK. I don’t mean to belittle anyone’s choices. The beauty of ‘modern homesteading’, as you read in the definitions above, is the wide variety possible ways to live it. What I can’t entertain here or on our Facebook page is judgement, fear porn, or disrespect in any form. I spent many years of my career designing community education programs for ‘living with less impact’ initiatives. I know from personal experience that the way to inspire long-term change is by making the process enjoyable, and dare I say ‘fun’. It’s not by scaring the crap out of people and belittling them. That might work for awhile, and for some, but it’s not the type of community or business I want to build.

We can live our rural living dreams with love and respect. We can provide for our families’ futures with wisdom and reverence. And we can prepare and be responsible for our families without denigrating anyone else’s choices. I invite you to join us on our Facebook page if you haven’t already and meet the amazing group of people who’ve assembled there. I learn something every single day. And for that I am grateful every single day.

What’s your definition of ‘modern homesteading’. Share it in the comments below!

Source: motherearthnews.com

Vegetable gardening the Colonial Williamsburg way

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Aesthetics take a back seat in vegetable gardens, but they can still be lovely. Choose a sunny spot with soil that drains well, is nutrient rich, and warm enough for vegetables to grow.

Vegetables can be grown from seed or purchased as seedlings. Starting from seeds is less expensive and often results in a longer harvest season.

Wesley Greene has been a gardener with Colonial Williamsburg for more than 30 years. In 1996, he helped start the Colonial Garden where he and fellow gardener, Don McKelvey, dress in colonial attire and grow plants appropriate to that time, using 18th-century tools and techniques.

They spend cool spring mornings and hot summer days sharing folklore and 18th-century gardening tips with visitors and locals.

They water by hand, filling buckets from an above-ground cistern located in the center of the garden, and use hoes to cultivate the compost-enriched soil. Cold frames and hot beds give transplants a good head start on the growing season.

“Here, try this purple sprouting broccoli,” he says, breaking a tender stem and handing it to visitors to taste.

“Isn’t it good, not at all like the broccoli we grow and eat today.”

What Wesley has learned and put to practical use is now compiled into the new 240-page, hardback book, “Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way.” He hopes the book will enlighten readers on the fact that many of yesterday’s gardening applications — like floating row covers to protect cabbage from caterpillars and collecting, storing and using pure seed — are useful for today’s gardening needs.

“All 18th-century gardens were organic gardens and worked almost exclusively with hand tools,” he says.

“Devices and techniques were developed for producing plants out of season that work as well today as they did 200 years ago.”

Nine of the book’s 11 chapters cover beans, peas, cabbages, salad greens, root crops, onion family, cucumbers, melons, squash, pumpkins, gourds, tomatoes and peppers. Chapter 10 is devoted to gardening under cover with cold frames, hot beds and bell jars.

The final chapter emphasizes the importance of growing and using long, slender, supple sticks in the garden. Carlin peas can be seen growing on a row of young beech branches, slightly bent and lightly woven together, at the Colonial Garden; at the end of the season, the sticks can be rolled up and put into a brush pile.

“I can’t over estimate the importance of sticks in the garden,” says Greene.

“Clematis is beautiful on a stick trellis, and sticks are great for growing sugar peas and English peas.”

Some vegetables common in the 21st-century are not seen in the Colonial Garden, and are therefore not included in the book. Most notable is sweet corn, which was not developed until the 19th century, according to Greene.

“Eggplant was known but very seldom grown and rocket, or arugula, was poplar in the 17th century, but fell entirely out of favor in the 18th century. Brussel sprouts, rutabaga and mustard greens are also vegetables not true to 18th-century gardening days.

“On the other hand, I grow some vegetables that the modern gardener seldom grows,” he says.

“The broad beans, or what Italians call fava beans, are just coming into flower. The corn salad is just going by as hot weather approaches and the cardoons are putting out their first spring leaves.

“Now is the time to plant salsify and divide the skirrets (both root vegetables). All of these unusual vegetables are included in the book with their histories and growing instructions.”

The book, printed on paper made to look aged, also features more than 700 quotations from 18th-century authorities such as Benjamin Townsend of “The Complete Seedsman” in 1726, and Stephen Switzer of “The Practical Kitchen Gardiner” in 1727.

The garden shop at the Colonial Garden sells $2.95 packs of 140 types of flower, herb and vegetable seeds, many of which are featured in the book. The shop also sells bell jars for decorative and practical purposes, clay thumbpots for watering and potted trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals.

When Greene leaves the Colonial Garden, he heads home to Gloucester where gardening is also part of household life. Greene and wife, Denise, met in 1982 at Colonial Williamsburg where she grew about 200 varieties of roses. Since 1992, she’s raised and sold native plants through the Sassafras Farm she operates at their home.

“Since that time, we have developed complimentary gardening skills,” he says.

“I never had to learn roses and she is my best reference for native plants.

“Gardening has always been a fascination and joy for me.”

Contact Kathy at kvanmullekom@aol.com

Online

See an online picture gallery of the Colonial Garden at http://www.roomandyard.com.

About the book

Printed on paper made to look aged, “Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Way” by Colonial Williamsburg gardener Wesley Greene shares the history and folklore associated with growing vegetables, along with practical advice on 50 vegetables and herbs, garden tools and cultivation techniques. Hundreds of full-color photos by Colonial Williamsburg photographer Barbara Lombardi draw you into the stories on each species.

Purchase a signed copy of “Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way” for $30 at the Colonial Garden on Duke of Gloucester Street, Colonial Williamsburg; the garden is open seven days a week. Wesley will personalize the book further when he’s in the garden 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Sunday-Thursday.

The book is also available at Williamsburg Booksellers in Colonial Williamsburg’s Visitor Center, 101 A Visitor Center Drive, and Everything Williamsburg in Merchant’s Square, Williamsburg. Purchase it by phone at 800-446-9240 or at http://www.williamsburgmarketplace.com or at http://www.amazon.com.

Meet the author

Wesley Greene discusses “Growing Under Cover” during the 66th annual Garden Symposium April 15-16 in Colonial Williamsburg. National and local writers, gardeners, photographers, beekeepers, chefs and floral arrangers are part of the programs. Greene and fellow gardener Don McKelvey also give an early morning wildflower walk. Get a detailed brochure and register for the two-day conference at http://www.history.org/conted or call 800-603-0948.

Source: dailypress.com