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.

Birdfeeding on the Cheap

It seems all the homesteading and gardening bloggers have seed orders much on their minds these days. It's also brass monkeys cold outside where I live. (Today's high will be 21F.) It's time to retrieve one of the sunflower seed heads I saved last summer for the birds that overwinter here. I thought I'd mention this now, while some folks are mulling their plans for this year's garden. Most sunflowers both provide abundant nectar to bees, and can be saved to provide a valuable food resource for birds in the harshest months of the year. Aside from that, I think they're the most cheerful flowers ever.

Not too pretty, is it? But believe me, the birds think it's gorgeous.

The seed heads from sunflowers are ready to save when the face of the flower points downward, the petals have dropped, and the green fringe around the outside begins to turn pale. If you leave them on the stalk too long, the squirrels and the birds will help themselves to the seeds in summer. I cut them with about 8" of stalk attached to the head, so that they're easy to handle and there's a good way of attaching them to the feeder. My method for drying the heads consists of nothing more than laying them on an open shelf in the garage and leaving them there until January. Food preservation for birds.

There are many types of sunflower, and the size and shape of the seeds that they produce will affect which types of birds can make use of the seeds. Beak shape determines a bird's ability to manipulate and crack the shells of various seeds. If there's a species that you are particularly interested in feeding, you'll need to know something about its diet, and then select an appropriate sunflower variety to match it.

I grow sunflowers that produce fat pale seed shells with gray stripes. In my area, this tends to attract mostly titmice, with a few chickadees, and the occasional finch. At least I think that's the lineup we get here. I'm far from an expert on birds. Some of them have to work quite a bit to open those large oily seeds. Other types of sunflower set very small black seeds that more species of birds can handle.

I simply use long twist ties to attach the dried seed heads to a trellis near the window of our living room. I enjoy watching the birds pick at the seed head. Some of them seem to keep regular hours each day, so that I see them during a particular half-hour in late morning and never else. When the seed head has been emptied I replace it with another. I like being able to help out the wildlife with little to no expense on my part, especially in the harshest months of the year.

If you enjoy feeding birds and haven't yet finalized your seed order for this year, you might think about including a sunflower or two in your 2009 garden.

Cheap Thrills

Part of frugality is learning to adapt to the opportunities and the resources all around you. There are various advantages and disadvantages available to rural, suburban, and urban dwellers, and to people of every age range. As someone living on the rural/suburban fringe, nature, or something quite like it, is one of the resources available to me. I can forage for wild greens and berries, and many friends and neighbors have sufficient space for fruit trees from which they may or may not harvest. There's enough wild game in my area that we could substantially supplement our diet with venison and rabbit if we chose to hunt.


But nature offers more than just the chance to feed myself cheaply. The natural world is an ongoing education too. We don't have children, but boy could we come up with some homeschooling lessons if we did. This lovely piece of insect architecture materialized on a branch directly over our driveway this summer. That's a bald-faced hornet's nest.

Bald-faced hornets are actually misnamed. They're really a species of North American wasp with a range that covers most of the US and parts of Canada. The salient facts to me though are that these creatures are aggressive defenders of their nests, and they can sting repeatedly (often on the face) without losing their stinger. It sure made us nervous for about five minutes. Then we reminded ourselves that the bald-faced hornets were busy - very busy, in fact - minding their own business, and so long as we did the same, our paths would never cross. We left them to it.

Then in mid-October, we had a large vehicle pull into our driveway. With alarm I watched it plow right into the branch holding that nest. I waited to see whether an angry swarm of hornets would emerge to unleash hot vengeance on anyone nearby. Fortunately, mercifully, the hive had departed. We picked up the fallen nest and brought it to the porch.

Eventually, after admiring the whole nest for several weeks, my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to cut it open and have a look inside. All my attempts to photograph it have been stymied by the infinite gradations of gray that are present in the fabric of the nest. Here's the best photo I was able to take.


This sort of construction just amazes me. I studied the layers and details of this hornet's nest for about an hour after I cut it open. I still occasionally look over it in amazement. I feel really lucky to have this sort of entertainment and education available to me at absolutely no cost. True, I don't know the scientific names of the materials and different parts, or exactly how the hornets formed their home. I could learn those things from a book, no doubt. But I now have some things that are better than book learning. I have a profound sense of wonder, the ability to actually handle this object, and direct contact with this impressive feat of construction by one of the "lower orders" of the animal kingdom.

Oftentimes I find that frugality is not about making more money or even saving more money. It's not about paying off debt, making the smartest investments, or finding the best deal on something I want to buy. It's about rediscovering the value of stuff that is already available to me, in many cases for free. In those moments when I immerse myself in the richness all around me, money becomes irrelevant. And those are moments worth cultivating.