Miller Homestead North

Its been quite some time since I have posted on here, but there has been a recent homesteading development that merits a few posts.  Miller homestead is expanding, and there is now a Miller homestead north!  Our family purchased a property in the Adirondacks in the 1940's, part of which was a very small scale dairy farm.  A homestead, if you will.  Since that time, much of the pasture land has been fallow.  Last spring several acres of the former pasture land was cleared of saplings and brush.  One area of it was set aside for a future orchard and soil preparations were begun.

The soil is very sandy and acidic (pH was approximately 4.5).  The area was fertilized, limed, tilled, and seeded with buckwheat as a cover crop.  The buckwheat grew quite well.  My mom was checking out the variety of insects attracted to the flowers.

In the fall, the area was again fertilized, tilled, and seeded, this time with oats.  The oats were seeded in mid-september, and that did not seem to give it enough time to really get going before winter hit, but at least the soil was in much better shape than it was in the spring.

Over the winter I spent quite a bit of time planning out what to plant in the new orchard area in the spring.  I ordered trees from several different different nurseries and planned to put them in the ground in late april.

Compostable bags?

We do quite a bit of composting here at the homestead.  Probably somewhere in the range of 100-200lbs of vegetables, lawn waste, and other stuff each year.  I thought it was interesting when Sun Chips came out with fully compostable bags a couple of years ago. (Strangely, they stopped selling them because people thought the bags were too noisy?!)  There were even pictures on the back showing different stages of a bag decomposing over 12 weeks.  After eating a bag of chips, I put a bag in a compost pile (this was 2 years ago).  This wasn't at home, it was at a cottage in the Adirondacks.  I was back there again last week and decided to check on the bag.  Here it is.  It doesn't look like there has been any decomposition at all in the last 2 years!  It was partially buried under a bunch of other stuff, so it had plenty of contact with the soil/compost.  False advertising!!

Garden Update

 Here is how the garden looked as of a couple days ago.

A few nice looking lettuce patches in serious need of thinning.

 The results of the thinning....1.5 lbs of good looking young lettuce plants.

 Unfortunately the next day after I did the thinning of the lettuce, some critter came in and ate a bunch of the remaining lettuce plants.  That seems to happen somewhat often for some reason.  No animal activity, but then I thin some plants and something comes along and eats some of the remaining plants.  Very frustrating.  Also frustrating is that the same animal mauled the two remaining broccoli plants that weren't previously attacked.  Clearly this is not a small animal, as it broke off 1/4" stems and ate 6-8" long leaves.  If we were out in the suburbs, I'd guess a woodchuck, but I have no idea what around here could/would do this.

 Up until the last couple days it has been hot and dry here.  I had to water the garden basically every day.  This was a bit of a problem last year as well.  I have noticed that the few areas of the garden that have a layer of last year's leaves as mulch stay moist much longer, have far more worm/insect activity going on under the soil, and have less weeds.  With that in mind, I figured that it would be a good idea to mulch the rest of the garden.  Newspapers and straw are two cheap mulches that I thought of.  I tried using newspapers last year, but they kept blowing away, even with small rocks as weights, so I'll try straw this year.

I calculated the volume of a standard sized bale of straw and assuming I wanted 1" thick, I calculated 4-5 bales of straw.  The lady at the garden/farm center said $5.50 for a bale of straw, but its a big bale of straw.  She showed me rough sizes with her arms, and it looked like standard size to me, so I got 4.  Turns out they really are pretty big, and quite compacted.  I would guess 40-50lbs per bale.

I started spreading it out about 2" deep.  Muffin was supervising.

Jaime also joined in on the supervision.

It turns out that there is a lot of straw in those bales!  One bale probably would have been perfectly fine.  I ended up using two bales and spreading it on the paths as well as putting thick layers on some weedy areas around the edges of the garden.

An Unispired Post

I don't have much to talk about, but I haven't posted in a while, so here are a couple pictures.  These Pak Choi plants were all planted at the same time and all sprouted at the same time.  Some haven't really grown at all since then.  I suspect there is a patch of clay under them or something like that, but I don't really know.

Some happy lettuce sproutlings.  This was actually a couple weeks ago.  They got thinned right after this picture and now need to be thinned again.  My garden seems to have way more slugs this year than in years past, but somehow the lettuce hasn't really been affected by them.

April Snow

I guess we're going to find out how cold hardy the stuff I planted actually is.  I'm more worried about the snow crushing the little sproutlings than I am about the cold.



Saving Seed

I didn't really plan on saving any seeds last year, but a couple of my plants bolted and went to seed, so I figured I might as well harvest them and see if I can get them to grow.  That happened with arugula and basil.  I also decided to keep some of the seeds from my dried cayenne peppers.  Similarly, I wasn't planning on saving any onions or potatoes, but with the bumper crop of potatoes, I still have a bunch that had started to sprout in my root cellar (basement).  There were also a few onions that I apparently had decided were too small to harvest last year, but had formed little onion sets in the ground, so I decided to replant those into my onion patch as well.

Surprisingly, all the seeds sprouted well and are growing quite well.  In fact, some are doing significantly better than their commercial counterparts.  The onion sets, which were no larger then the other onion sets I planted, have sprouted up significantly bigger and faster than the ones I bought.  I planted the harvested cayenne seeds next to some cayenne seeds that I purchased, and the harvested seedlings are bigger than the others (and the poblano and bell pepper seedlings, too).

I'm not sure how much genetic variation there is in seed packs, but it makes some sense to me that if I take seeds from the plants that grew best in my particular soil, light, and moisture conditions, the next generation could also be expected to do well in those same conditions the next year.

Of course another possibility is that I'd get some sort of whacky cross-pollination.  For instance, might my cayenne peppers be growing so well because they are in fact an F1 hybrid of cayenne and one of the other varieties that I grew last year?  I don't even know if pepper plants can cross pollinate across varieties or not.  I'd assume so, but I have no idea.  Just in case, I'll probably transplant one of the commercial cayenne seedlings and one of the harvested version.

My garden is so small that I don't really have the space to grow extra plants with the intention of saving seeds, but this year I might start to look for more opportunities to save what seeds I can, especially if something grew particularly well.  Some of my plants are F1 hybrids and therefore may not be good candidates for seed saving, but many of my plants are non-hybrid varieties.  Some, like the cayenne peppers, will be harvested when the fruit is ripe and the seeds are fully developed, so I could just keep some of the seeds.  Others, like the greens, would need to be allowed to bolt and go to seed.  I intend to plant other things in the areas where I am growing the spring greens now, but maybe there will be enough room to leave one or two plants to go to seed.

Seedling Progress

Here is my flat of seedlings that has been under a grow-light in the basement. I had it out in a semi-sunny area for an hour while I was working in the garden. The plants need to start building up a tolerance to actual sunlight. There are a lot of different things in there so I won't go through them all. Most are doing well and are on schedule. The broccoli and cauliflower (bottom right corner) will be the first things to be transplanted in a week or so. Many of the more tender things won't be transplanted for another month or so.

I finally put together the compost tumbler that Jaime got me for my birthday. My old system of throwing stuff in a garbage can with some holes in the bottom and periodically trying to turn it over with a shovel wasn't working very well. It was a pain to try to mix the stuff up, I never seemed to have the right moisture level in it (wet on the bottom, dry on top), and was just slow at turning the stuff to usable compost. Hopefully this sleek new composting machine will remedy all of those problems. It really is pretty amazing how much compostable material we generate.
Avid blog readers may remember that I planted the stem of one of last year's brussels sprouts plants with a few buds that not only survived the winter, but seemed to be growing. I wondered what would come from these buds. A regular brussels sprout plant that had a good head start? Alas, all three sprouts have flower buds, so it appears that they will just flower and go to seed. I guess brussels sprouts must be a bi-ennial plant. I guess that makes sense since they don't flower during the first year when you plant them.