As frustrating as it is to have so little time for homesteading during the week, it does shed light on how lucky I am for most of the rest of the year. A typical homesteader with a full time job works from 9 to 5, leaving very little time after work for farm chores. I generally work from 7 to 3, which gives me a few hours on all but the shortest days of the year. In the spring, my schedule shifts and I find myself tied up until closer to 5 or 6; what feels like a ‘loss’ is just more approximately ‘normal’ to most.
In any case, I need to make the most of one or two weekend days. This week, I was blessed with about a day and a half of an open schedule with decent weather for farm chores.
Food Production
I know that spring is officially here because this section of my weekly updates is getting longer. 🙂
Potatoes will need to be a significant crop for me; I don’t eat meat and can’t grow grains at scale, so potatoes are a nutritionally dense and calorific crop that, after surmounting the learning curve, should be easy to grow and easy to store. Most importantly, they are my favorite food – I’ll eat a potato in any form.
I’ve grown them before, but never enough to store for the long term. My best-ever potato crop was a few years ago, planted late-season in composted horse manure on a lark and largely ignored until harvest day. The nutrients in the soil must have expedited their growth, because the potatoes were enormous and plentiful.
I don’t have a formal garden space set up yet – I have put in some requests for fencing quotes, though I might need to rent the equipment and get the job done myself. Someday, when I do plant them in the ground, I will have to take precautions due to inadvertent mole damage (and subsequent intentional vole damage). So for now, I’m toying with some other methods and decided to try the potato tower idea that is making the rounds on social media.
It’s very simple – a round of wire fencing, layered with straw and compost. The potato foliage should grow out the sides and the top, and to harvest you just dismantle the wire contraption. I’m not certain that it will work, but since all of the materials were free (fencing from the side of the road, old hay from the hay loft, and composted horse manure) I figured it was worth a shot. My only cost was $8 per 4 pounds of seed potatoes; one tower has 4 pounds of Yukon Gold and the other has 4 pounds of Adirondack Blue.
Note: I could have maximized my yield and minimized my cost by chitting the seed potatoes – cutting them into pieces with one eye and/or sprout on each piece, giving me more potatoes to plant. I used all the fencing I had and wanted to get the potatoes planted before they started to rot, so I didn’t bother.
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I also spent some time using the scythe to expand my orchard space. The brambles, bittersweet, and rose thorns will be a battle that I will have to fight until the end of time, but I don’t mind. My Stark Bro’s order from Week 30 has been delayed a couple of weeks, which is fine because I need to put in the expansion work before I can plant new trees anyway. I was able to fully clear and mark out space for two more trees… unfortunately for me, I ordered six, so there’s plenty more work to be done.
The lettuce seedlings in my cold frames (old and new) are coming along nicely, as are the sweet potato slips that finally began to sprout last week.
I also started tomatoes and peppers. For tomatoes, I have a variety of cherry tomato that grew wild in my dad’s garden and a Polish variety that was passed down to me from the old country. I treasure these two varieties, being careful to save seeds each year. I planted 20 of each in soil blocks. For all other varieties of tomato as well as peppers, we are using seed snails. I’m not sure how the snails will hold up to such large plants, but it is a fun experiment regardless.
Resource Acquisition & Preparedness
I’m still running the wood stove in the evenings if the low temperature will be below 50, but such limited usage means I’m going through wood at a reduced pace. For the first time in months, it’s actually starting to stack up again – a relief that is beyond words.
I built two racks last summer – 10 ft by 4 ft, and 4 ft by 4 ft. Give or take, together they hold about 2-3 weeks worth of split firewood. Needless to say, I will need to figure out a storage system leading up to next winter; I can fit a lot in the barn, but I need to be more strategic about how and where I’m stacking it for both optimal drying and easy access.
Energy Independence
I am SO CLOSE to having my first “Net Export” day – when solar production exceeds energy usage. In just a few weeks, the panels will produce significantly more than usage nearly every day and it won’t warrant special celebration, but it’s been an awfully long winter with a lot of energy usage and very little production.
Because I’m on net metering, any excess is ‘banked’ and then deducted from my bill on days when I use more than I produce. If all goes to plan, this summer I will bank more than enough to outweigh what I use next winter. In theory, the first “Net Export” day symbolically marks the beginning of my Energy Independence.
Moving Forward
There is a lot on the horizon, but the top priority will be continuing to expand the orchard area for when the fruit tree order arrives.
Talk soon,
KC