An Aha! Moment

Homesteading is equal parts experimentation, failure, and learning to actually see what's right in front of you.  At least, that's the definition I give you today.  Over this past year I've been eying the wooden fence that almost entirely encloses our small property.  It's old, and not in good shape.  I'd been thinking that next year we might have to scrape up some serious money to have it fixed or replaced.  In other words, I was thinking conventionally, and not at all like a homesteader.  It still happens.

The strong wind storm that visited much of the northeast this week toppled one of the panels of our fence.  It might well have toppled a few others at the same time, but the wind contented itself with making just one ten-foot gap in the fence line.  I sighed, and wondered whether I should call some fence guys right away, or just wait for spring.  Clearly, the wooden support posts on the entire fence are reaching the ends of their useful lives.  I expect to see them fail one by one in the coming years if nothing is done to remedy the situation.

Then my husband went out to take a look at it and came back inside with the obvious and fully brilliant idea of scrapping the fence entirely and replacing it with a hedgerow.  A hedgerow.  A hedgerow!  It hit me like a thunderbolt.  Why hadn't I seen it?  How could I have missed such a neat solution to so many problems?  All the years we've been on this property, I've looked at that fence and only seen it as demarcating space we can and can't turn to production.  It's not as though I'm unfamiliar with the amazing benefits of hedgerows.  They do enclose space, true enough.  But they're often more productive than the spaces they enclose.  They require little maintenance while providing abundant food and habitat for wildlife.  The wildlife, in turn, improve the fertility of the surrounding soil by adding their manure and their dynamic contributions to the immediate area.   They provide privacy and often are more attractive than fences.  Not least significantly, they cost less to establish than a new fence, have a much longer lifespan than any fence, and don't generate any waste or pollution in their construction.  Also, this section of the fence partly defines an underused space on our property that I've been wondering about.  Specifically wondering whether it might ever sustainably support a few miniature dairy goats.  It's a shady area with marginal soil, so it currently doesn't offer much food to livestock.  If it were bordered by a hedgerow instead of a fence however, that could change dramatically.

A hedgerow that replaces our fence could answer all the functions of that fence while dramatically increasing the amount of food that is produced here.  I've been coddling a pair of hazelnut plants in containers this year, because the open space I've been planning to put them into is significantly shaded.  Now I see that I could have a hedgerow with several hazels in it without sacrificing any open space.  We could have so many hazel plants that I could retire my concern about the squirrels robbing us of all of the nuts before they even ripen.  We could afford to be open handed with the bounty of our little piece of land, rather than fighting wildlife for every morsel.  It's hard to believe that I could have missed something so obvious and so awesome.

Now the challenge is to figure out how to do it.  This is where experimentation comes into homesteading.  There are no tidy guidelines for planting a hedgerow.  All sorts of factors conspire to force me to do my own research: our soil type and climate, the fact that I don't want the hedgerow to grow high enough to shade our garden, and our personal tastes as far as diet go.  The challenge is greater because I'm in Pennsylvania, not England.  I can't tap a local expert on hedgerows, or pick up amateur advice from the neighbors.  A hedgerow should be a densely grown mixture of shrubs and vines.  But we have to decide what those should consist of.  Of course, if you have no preferences and just want any old sort of hedgerow, there's an easy way to go about it.  String a line of barbed wire or other fencing where you want the hedgerow.  Wild birds will perch there, poop out the seeds of things that grow well in your area, and after a few years' benign neglect, you'll have your own hedgerow. 

Obviously, we're going to be a bit pickier when stocking our hedgerow.  I plan to start with just the section of fence which collapsed.  If I can establish a few suitable plants there in the near term, I'm guessing I'll be able to propagate from those plants as more gaps in the fence line appear over the coming years.  When the plants grow larger, we could remove the panels to either side of the existing gaps if they're hanging on, and encourage expansion to either side.

So, I'm now doing research to see what plants will meet our requirements.  We'll need plants that won't grow too tall, aren't fussy, and some that tolerate partial shade.  Those that provide food for livestock, fix nitrogen, or propagate easily are going to get extra points.  Candidate plants near the top of the list include hazels, elders, black raspberries, Siberian pea shrub, muscadines, and wild cucumber. If you know a perennial or reseeding annual productive plant that is hardy to zone 6, doesn't grow above 12 feet/4 meters, and is suitable for hedgerows, I'd love to hear about it.

State of the Homestead

Time for another jumbled update on various snippets of homestead life.

I've made a not very well informed start on a permaculture guild around our old apple tree.  Actually I started it way back in January by throwing down a bunch of cardboard during a thaw.  Putting the guild in place has taken a lot more material than I had imagined it would, so it's smaller than originally envisioned.  I used all the litter material that the chickens had been on over the winter months, plus a fair amount of compost and mulch.  I put it on the most badly degraded soil under the apple tree, where roof runoff from the back of the garage had stripped the soil bare.  So now the southern quadrant within the drip line of the apple tree is a guild in the making.  So far I've got one black currant bush, two New Jersey tea plants, a lead plant, one self heal, and a few nasturtiums as living mulch.  Our apple tree is still in need of work to thin its canopy.  (It was ignored for a good many years before we bought the property.)  But it got a good pruning this year, so that a little dappled light reaches the guild plants during most of the day.  They get a brief window of full sun in early morning, when the sun is low in the sky.  I don't really feel that I have a handle on how the guild is supposed to work, or whether it will.  But I've made a start, and that's something.  We'll see how it does.  Next year I'll again use the winter deep litter from the hens to expand the guild further away from the tree.  And I'll need another black currant bush to cross pollinate with the one I put in this year.  It's all part of the lawn eradication program.

Our passive solar heating system is crawling oh-so slowly towards functionality.  We should be able to heat with it, I would think, this coming winter.  Also, we should be able to get domestic hot water out of the deal too, eventually.  But here's the really exciting news.  The system requires a heat dump to get rid of unwanted and excessive heat in the warm months of the year.  That heat gets dissipated into the ground.  Yeah: I know you're thinking what I was thinking.  Heat in the ground is what you want in spring and fall.  Under a greenhouse.  The "shoulder months" of the year (April-May and September-October), when we don't really need to heat the house too much, but the sun is still strong, also happen to be months when warm earth and a protective cover could make a huge difference for season extension.  So yes, we're mulling this.  We think we've figured out a good spot to situate the shallowly buried heat dump, where the piping in a double U-loop configuration would be well suited to a modestly sized greenhouse or hoop house (maybe 12'x8').  A greenhouse is probably way beyond our budget at the moment.  But a hoop house we could knock together in a weekend, or two at most.  And it wouldn't cost very much.  Anyway, it's pretty exciting, even if we have to wait for next year to build anything.  Longer tomato season! Perennial rosemary!  Perennial lemon grass!  Parsley that overwinters!  Spinach all winter!  Early peas!  Will keep you posted.

I don't know what to report on the bees.  Both hives are still occupied, and the numbers seem strong.  Foligno looks to be doing great, and the marked queen has been easy to spot every time we've opened the hive.  But they're ignoring the feeder we put in there for them.  Izhevsk is a mystery.  They've built comb inside their frame feeder, which makes feeding them a challenge.  Plus, it gives the bees an easy place to hide.  We haven't seen the queen in a while.  They're building comb just fine, and there's lots of activity, but I haven't a clue what's really going on in there.  Is she in the feeder?  Or is the colony carrying on without a functional queen?  We gave them a frame with a little brood and a lot of honey in it from Foligno, to help them keep their numbers up.  Let's hope it works.  I've been very pleased to see that the honey bees have found the Tuscan kale plants that overwintered in the garden, and they've been all over the blooms as the plants go to seed in this, their second year.  Good to know about the springtime bee bonus with these plants, since I plan to keep saving seed and breed them to suit our location. 

The garlic plants are looking great. It'll be time to harvest them in just a couple months. 

The great perennial herb planting of 2010 is mostly done.  I've put in valerian, self heal, anise hyssop, lavender, spearmint, yarrow, Roman chamomile, echinacea, skullcap, and bee balm.  Now I get to see how they do, and how much they grow and spread.  Also, which ones the bees take to, if any of them get around to blooming this year.  After that, I just need to figure out how to use them medicinally.

My husband cleared and tilled a wide patch of soil that had been hideously landscaped when we bought our home.  It was so awful we just ignored it for the last few years.  We partly cleared it last fall and sowed a cover crop there, then he tilled under the cover crop and added compost this spring.  This is going to be our three sisters area this year, which will help get those pushy, obnoxious squash plants out of the rest of the garden.  The popcorn is already in the ground and starting to poke up.  The Cherokee Trail of Tears beans are soaking, and will go in the ground very soon.  (Other pole bean varieties are going to be planted elsewhere.  It's going to be a big bean year on the homestead, I hope.)  The third sister will be a few sugar pumpkins along with Lady Godiva, an oilseed pumpkin that yields a "naked" (i.e. nearly hull-less) seed.  If successful, the seed crop will be used to feed the chickens in winter, and possibly produce some oil for our own consumption.  The flesh is considered inedible, but I'd bet our vermicompost worms would disagree.

Our hens have been back on grass for a month or so now.  We put them in the three sisters bed for a little while after tilling, but before we were ready to plant.  They became escape artists, digging away the loosened soil so that they could slip under the bottom of their pen.  They enjoyed it so much that we let them get away with it for a few days.  It was nice to see them out and about.  But given the large hawk population, and our zoning codes, we can't make a habit of free-ranging them.

I've gotten interested in the craft of felting with natural dyes, though I don't know very much about it yet.  Sourcing free raw fleece took two emails to two local farmers.  Felting can be done with wool of fairly poor quality, which means you can get material from farmers raising lamb.  Fleeces from meat breeds aren't worth much for spinning, so there's little demand.  But I've already hit a snag.  While I can handle the effort and time to wash, clean of debris, and dye the wool, after that I bang up against the need for proper tools.  The wool has to be carded before felting.  Either it's done by hand with carding combs, which my right wrist could not handle, or I'd need a hand-cranked drum carder, which could get the job done much faster.  Problem is, drum carders run in the neighborhood of $400.  I may still take the free fleeces, see how far I get with cleaning and dying them, and then see what might be possible for carding.  Maybe I'll find someone willing to loan or rent out a drum carder.

Looks like we're going to get our first crops of grapes, elderflowers, and pears this year.  Maybe even a small handful of cherries and blueberries too.  Exciting stuff.  The grapes are wine varieties that my husband chose.  Maybe he'll get motivated by a good crop to do a little fermenting this year.  I'll definitely take all the elder blooms this year, rather than let the plants put too much energy into producing berries.  Besides, I'm dying to try making a syrup or cordial from the flowers.  Our Collette pear tree set a lot of fruit early this spring.  I thinned most of it off.  Then most of what I'd left got knocked off in a strong wind storm.  But now it's putting on a minor second flowering, apparently a habit of the Collette pear.  In any case, the little pears are already looking very tempting, with a lovely red color.  I know I can't count my fruit before it's picked, but I do have my hopes up.

The container plants are mostly looking very good.  Potatoes are up and will soon be ready for hilling.  The hazelberts are growing very well, which is a little surprising.  I'd been told to expect very little topgrowth in the first few years.  They look vigorous enough that it wouldn't surprise me if they tried for a small production of nuts this year.  There's something nasty looking on one of my figs though.  It looks bad, like a blight of some kind.  I've isolated that plant and am trying to figure out what's wrong, and what I might do to help it.

According to my own personal signs and indicators, it's getting very close to time to put in the heat slut tomatoes and basil.  This year it's Speckled Roman (gorgeous paste that resisted blight well last year), Sungold (finally caved and decided to try this hybrid cherry that everyone raves about), Brandywines and Cherokee Purples for beefsteaks.  And my favorite basil: purple ruffles.  This is the first time I've grown tomatoes without the super productive Peacevine cherry tomato in my lineup.  I've decided to just buy starts of eggplant and chili peppers this year.  It was better than making myself crazy with everything else that had to happen this spring.  Maybe I'll try okra again if I can find some starts.  Not a popular garden veg here in zone 6.

In blog news, I've added a Bookshelf page with a bunch of my favorite titles that help me homestead.  Links and mini-reviews there for your perusal.  Check it out, and let me know whether it's useful.

And that's all the news that's fit to print.