Homestead Gardening Class Takeaways

“Starter homesteaders,” newly arrived in our county, made my recent community college workshop, “Grow a Homestead-Style Food Garden,” one of my most interesting classes yet! 

One woman, recently moved from California, was now living on 2 acres close to the city—and learning to care for the 100 blueberry shrubs that came with the property! 

A couple who also hailed from California had just purchased 14 acres of woods and brushy areas. Despite having to break ground to cultivate a workable garden, both were motivated to start growing food asap. 

Another husband and wife, who’d had a small but thriving garden in Maryland, were looking for a 5-10 acre parcel to start a small farm. Land is quite expensive in our area of the Pacific Northwest, but they were excited about their search for property.

My class centers around working with nature…and we discussed how incorporating native plants into your garden will encourage native wildlife species that will enhance your food-growing. 

“Good garden friends” as my husband John calls them: wild bees and butterflies, and other pollinators, insect eaters like spiders and toads (and wasps), and plenty of birds, just to start—all of which create a balanced habitat right in your food garden.

And help you raise food without pesticides! When I mentioned the natural balance the farmers had created in the film, “The Biggest Little Farm,” the Maryland couple broke into grins, and the wife shot her hand into the air. “I’ve seen it twice!” 

The farmers in the movie were plagued with a LOT of pests of all kinds, ruining their crops. Literally, plagues of them: starlings, gophers, snails, caterpillars, and aphids. 

But they were really smart about using nature to deal with nature! So, they added animals or created habitats that brought in all kinds of wildlife. 

This way, the bigger wild creatures could eat the smaller ones, right down the line: 1) Hawks eat the starlings spearing the fruit, 2) Owls and snakes eat gophers, 3) Ducks eat snails, 4) Spiders and wasps eat caterpillars, and Ladybugs eat aphids! 

As for voles—which have been very destructive in our food garden—the tried and true remedy is having a dog!

A balanced little ecosystem can help with lots of insect pests. Planting marigolds and aromatic herbs around your food garden can discourage a lot of destructive insects. I understand marigolds will scare off tomato cutworms. 

And though we have far too many paper wasps in our yard (see my previous post!), they do feed on a lot of destructive insects. 

Keep in mind that in your sustainably grown food garden, you’ll have some pests. Nature can be messy, but if you don’t interfere too much, things balance out in the end!

We also talked about using raised beds—I only wished John and I had started with them, instead of having to re-do most of our food garden. This year, we installed our first galvanized steel tub, and filled it with our own on-site soil. 

The potatoes we planted there have appeared to thrive—I’ll let you know if they actually did when I harvest them. 

 

Important: if you need to import garden soil/compost for your crops (as opposed to having spare piles of it for your raised beds!), make sure it’s good quality. Ask your gardening friends and neighbors for recommendations; ask the retailer/source where the soil comes from, and what’s in it! 

Using Mulch in your Food Garden

Now that it’s officially fall…it’s prime mulch time!

Ferns and leaves on the potato bed

Harvesting your summer crops, you may be looking bare, unprotected soil in your garden beds. And come springtime, those food-growing areas you cultivated all summer will quickly fill with weeds! 

That’s where mulch—organic material that you lay on top of your garden beds—comes in.

Mulch is one of the cornerstones of sustainable, chemical-free food gardening. 

In the growing season, mulching with leaves and other material from your garden will help suppress weeds, regulate soil temperatures, and keep more consistent moisture in your soil. 

Over the winter, mulch will protect your soil by reducing soil heaving from frost/thaw cycles…plus as the mulch breaks down, it builds your soil! 

Yesterday, I read a terrific article in the January ‘24 issue of Mother Earth News, “The Original World Wide Web”! It discussed the complex web of microbial life in the soil, and how organic material, applied to your soil, improves its fertility and in turn, crop production. 

The article was fairly technical, so a bit tricky to sum up. But long story short, as organic material breaks down, it feeds the microbes in your soil, which helps fertility in myriad ways.

One particularly fascinating aspect to this process was that these microbes aid in the “communication” plants do through a web of their root structures—which in turn helps your soil increase the nutrients for your crops! 

So…what to use for mulch?

Leaves: Hopefully you have a few deciduous trees around your yard, and in the fall, they’re on the ground for the taking! We have a beautiful small-leaved maple in our yard, which provides a large portion of leaves for mulch.

Other Foliage and Twigs: I also use a lot of brackenfern from the woods, which breaks down quickly. You can also use any foliage that doesn’t contain weed seeds. But…do not use fruit tree leaves or prunings, as they carry funguses. 

Crop Foliage: I’ve been using more of my harvested material as mulch, and it works great! Instead of doing the high maintenance chore of chopping up the material, I lay it on top of my beds. 

Besides leaves and ferns, here’s the crop material I’m using in the garden right now.

*Carrot tops

*Harvested pea pods

*Pea vines

*I’ve also saived my pea seeds, and just this week, planted as a sort of cover crop. The pea plants won’t grow much before the frost kills them, but they will provide some soil cover…plus their nitrogen-fixing roots will help the soil!

Empty pea pods to spread on top of the beds I just harvested

After the first frost:

*Squash foliage. After I harvest the squash, when the frost hits,  I let all those abundant squash and cucumber leaves melt into the soil.

Parsnip foliage. I wait until the first killing frost to harvest parsnips, after the cold sweetens them up. Then I lay the cut tops on top of the bed!

I also top dress my tomato, squash and asparagus beds with well-composted chicken manure (originally mixed with wood chips). I’ve been rewarded with lush, healthy plants!

**Caution: like fruit leaves, do not use your spent tomato plants or potato plants as mulch—the foliage carries blights and funguses. On a similar note, do not discard spoiled tomatoes or potatoes in your compost pile. 

If you’d like more details about mulch, here’s another post… And I hope you’ll stop in at my Little Farm Writer newsletter!

Wasps in Charge—AKA, Never Have I Ever

Look closely at the bottom of the middle grape cluster

Last fall, we had a bad paper wasp infestation. As you see in the photo, they hit our grapes hard. 

What wasps do: they pierce the grape skins, then suck out the insides. The decomposing fruit attracts even more wasps, and fruit flies too, and the aroma soon spreads throughout the area!

Insects weren’t the only critter to sample the fruit…

Along came our neighborhood bear! It not only wiped out what was left of the grapes, but in the process, destroyed our grape arbor! 

John’s sturdy hand-built arbor was no match for the bear!

Well. This summer, our paper wasp population was very reduced. We had our usual wasp’s nests under the eaves of the shop, but nothing too scary. Not like last year, when the wasps even built nests inside our heat pump!

I’ve noticed garden pests often go in cycles, where you’ll have a whole lot of certain bugs one season, and far fewer the next. Still, this summer, my husband John and I decided to nip this issue in the bud. 

Our grapes often don’t ripen before the first frost, so we figured we could just let go of the crop this year—and I clipped off every last grape cluster. Problem solved, right?

I wish. 

A couple of weeks ago, smack in the middle of blueberry season, our area had three days of chilly, heavy rain. Very unusual for this time of year. While the Foothills climate is rainy Fall, Winter and Spring, our summers are warm and sunny, and a two-month drought is not unusual, especially in August and September.

Now the rain and chill would turn ripe strawberries to mush; you might see some mold on tougher caneberry varieties like marionberries. But blueberries are resilient, and will be okay even if you have temps in the 40s one day, and 90s a few days later.

Checking the blueberry patch the last cold, rainy day, I did notice the ripe berries seemed a little swollen, like they’d absorbed some of the rain, and the skins seemed a bit soft. I couldn’t wait for the sun to return and I could get back to picking!

Which leads to my late summer Never Have I Ever:

*Never Have I Ever: Worn long johns to bed in late August

*Never Have I Ever: Dressed in heavy winter cycling gear for a summer bikeride

*Never Have I Ever: Picked blueberries by camp lantern.

Are you seeing where this is going? That first warm day, out came the wasps!

At night, wasps don’t feed, as they do in the cold, they retreat to their nests. But the sun brought them out in droves…and into our blueberry patch, full of ripe berries!

Like they do with the grapes, wasps pierce blueberry skins, then chomp a hole in the berry and suck out the insides until just a husk is left.

They were hitting one shrub so hard I knew in a few hours there wouldn’t be one decent berry left to harvest

I picked for 15 minutes or so, but it was way too stressful, having all those wasps flying around me. I decided, new strategy. It was 80 degrees, but I pulled on a hoodie and long pants, and tried to pick that way.

Still too stressful! I could get stung on my face and hands. So I waited until dark, went inside, and grabbed our rechargeable lantern we keep for power outages. 

I felt sort of foolish, or maybe, how compulsive can you get, doing garden chores at night?

But at least I was able to pick berries in peace. 

I only picked by lantern-light that one night. It’s funny, that over the next few days, picking berries as usual in the daylight, I got more comfortable around the wasps. I would just be v-e-r-y careful to not grab a berry cluster with a wasps attached to it!

Besides, the wasps were kind of slow, and dare I say, a bit inebriated, feeding on decomposing fruit.

But as life often goes, I ran out of luck. Last night, some impatient wasp, annoyed by the human hand messing with its food, stung me on the knuckle.

It was sort of a light sting, not the full-on needle in your skin sensation. But it reminded me that I get crazy itching with stings. And after one Benedryl pill and some topical anesthetic especially for stings, I did wise up. I officially let go of the rest of the blueberries.

Every other summer, the blueberry harvest has been over when I say it’s over. This year, the wasps were in charge!

My September newsletter, “An Irish Border Collie & a Small But Mighty Frenemy” includes a bit more about the wasps, plus some fun dog stories…I hope you’ll take a look!

Book Event this Saturday, August 24!

Two of my books for kiddos ages 7-11

Hello Everyone—I hope you’re enjoying these last few weeks of summer!

If you live or are vacationing in the far northwest of the Pacific Northwest, USA, I hope you’ll check out a fun book event at the Bellis Fair Mall in gorgeous Bellingham, Washington! 

Joining a couple dozen other authors, I’ll be signing all my paperback titles at this special “back-to-school” book event. 

I’ll be there from 11am - 3 pm, and would love it if you’d stop by and say hello!

Three of my homestead books

New chicken book!

In keeping with living the simpler life here on our little homestead, I’m having my own “Keep it Simple Sale,” with lots of special prices for all my titles: my uplifting homesteady memoirs, middle-grade books, and Ballydara novels. 

Homesteady bonus: My kids’ books are all family-friendly stories too!

Day of the Dead story

With Halloween and Halloween parties just a couple of months away, I have some extra fun pricing for my “Day of the Dead” paperback for kids, Curse of the Corpse Bride, perfect for party favors! 

Any questions? Just pop over to my website to contact me. And keep in mind all my books are available for free at your local public library…just put in a request! 

Blueberry Harvesting Tips + Easy Berry Dessert

Here’s 6 quarts of the 22 I picked last week!

It’s blueberry time at the Little Farm! 

My days are filled with berry picking, putting them up for the freezer…and trying to keep the rest of the food garden watered and weeded! 

And of course, baking yummy blueberry desserts with all this bounty.

At our place, with a wide variety of shrubs, the blueberry harvest goes from mid-July until the end of August. 

Depending on the weather, the harvest can extend into early September. It’s a rewarding time, for sure…

But each summer, as our shrubs get larger, and produce bigger harvests, blueberry season gets a bit more overwhelming!

A couple of days ago, I picked a several quarts, and got them rinsed and drying on the counter for freezing. At the same time, I decided to bake my go-to blueberry recipe, Blueberry Buckle!

Chaotic kitchen on our homestead!

Raising Blueberries

Given how busy things can get, with each season, I try to improve my harvesting/picking strategies. 

Keep in mind that the berries on each different variety of shrub ripen at different times. Some have an early harvest, some mid-season, and some don’t ripen much until mid-August. And remember: just because a berry is blue, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s sweet! 

I’ve gotten into a habit of closely observing my shrubs for ripening timeframes, and taste-testing too. A dark purple berry won’t be quite ripe; you want to see a deep blue before you pick. 

Some berries aren’t ripe until the entire berry cluster has turned that deep blue. But other varieties, like the large-berry “Chandler” will have a few very ripe berries, while the rest of the cluter is still white or pink.

For tips for finding the sweeter berries…

Basic picking technique is to curl your hand beneath a berry cluster, and sort of “tickle” the berries. The ripe ones will fall into your hand.

When it's early in the season, you're probably trying to select the ripe berries when there are still so many white ones on the shrubs. Here's what you do: just look for the clusters of berries where all but one or two berries are blue. Select the largest berries in the cluster, and you'll be sure to end up with more sweet ones!

Baking with Blueberries

The good news is, if you’ve inadvertently picked a lot of not-quite-sweet fruit, there’s always putting them into a dessert! Our go-to easy summer dessert is Blueberry Buckle—a kind of coffee-cake type recipe, adapted from the original recipe for huckleberries. This link includes the complete method. 

You can make it from basic baking ingredients you’ll probably have in your pantry, so there’s no extra trip to the store!

I’m always improving on the recipe, and last season, I got inspired by my “Downton Abbey” cookbook. I adapted their recipe for “Fairy Cakes” and ended up with a slightly richer Buckle. 

If you’d like to compare with the original, here’s a screenshot of the Buckle “cake” portion.

The struesel topping is super basic, just 1/4 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour, and a generous sprinkling of cinnamon. 

I’ve got several versions of the Buckle here on this blog… If you’d like to see them all, there’s a handy search bar on the top left corner!

Here are pics of the one I made this past weekend… I did get greedy with too many berries on the top. The middle was still goey after 1 hour of baking, so it took extra time. Next time I’ll stick with 2 cups of berries, like the recipe says!

Here’s the buckle before baking, topped with berries (too many, I learned!)

Here it is with the struesel/crumb topping before baking

And after baking! You’ll see it’s a little brown, from the extra baking time

For more on growing blueberries homestead-style, it’s all in my free ebook, Little Farm in the Garden… It’s available at all ebook retailers, and the #1 book in Amazon’s Pacific Northwest Gardening category! 

You’ll find additional free ebooks at SusanColleenBrowne.com…just click “Free to Read” for an Irish romance, a Halloween book for kids, and more!

Raising Strawberries—a New Breakthrough!

Speed-raising strawberries, see below!

Ever since we started our homestead garden, strawberries have been one of our main crops. And for years and years, I followed all the best practices for planting and cultivating: 

*Planted healthy, bare-root nursery starts in fertile soil

*Pinched off the first-year flowers for vibrant root-growth, 

*Watered and fertilized them regularly, and as growers recommend,

*Clipped the plants down to encourage new growth at the crown.

Plus I added one additional element into my berry-raising: I really put my heart into my strawberry babies!

Now keep in mind that strawberry plants aren’t like blueberry shrubs. They generally produce a good berry crop for about 3-5 years, while blueberries will bear for many decades. Before our own blueberry shrubs started to bear reliably, my husband John and I used to visit a blueberry U-pick that had 7-foot tall, 50-year old shrubs!

Now, any of you growing strawberries, you know about the 3-5 year issue—the virus that develops in cultivated strawberries. It’s not a condition you can fight with sprays or powders; it’s just one of those inevitably things that causes the plants to lose vigor.

In a few short years, a strawberry plant will go from producing large, plump, flavorful berries to tiny, seedy ones. However, the last few years here on our little homestead, I was running into a problem: my new strawberry plants were going downhill within 2 years.

I was getting frustrated—what was up with these plants? My best guess is that our cool, very rainy climate somehow encourages the virus. Still, who knows.

So I decided to mix things up—and raise my own starts! Here’s my post from two years ago detailing the process of speed-raising a strawberry crop. 

Last summer, when the plants matured, I had what looked like an amazing crop. Then along came…

The Bear. 

He broke into our fences, knocked up the strawberry nets, then tore up the plants—and gobbled every berry, white or red, within reach. I ended up stripping these vibrant new plants of every berry, so the bear wouldn’t smell the ripening fruit.

And be motivated to invade our yard for a 3rd time.

What was interesting was that all these plants I’d stripped of berries produced long, vigorous runners! It’s my guess that because they hadn’t put energy into producing fruit, the plants had extra growing oomph.

And instead of clipping them, as is recommended, I decided to just let the runners root, and start new plants all on their own. 

Well. It was the best decision I ever made!

For this year’s strawberry season, my expectations were low. After the bear stole our berries, I kind of lost my emotional investment in raising strawberries. I went with my previous homesteady mantra when I had a crop failure: “Que sera, sera.”

What will be, will be. So here’s what happened this summer. My original strawberry plants weren’t that productive. But the runners I’d let root produced large, healthy plants, and large, high-quality berries! 

The largest berries were from the runners I let grow wild!

We didn’t have a huge crop this year, but we did have nearly 4 weeks of a nice bowl of strawberries for our breakfast. 

And here’s what’s funny.

I hadn’t fertilized the runner-set plants, I only occasionally weeded around them—and basically left them to their own devices. So that’s my new strategy:

I’ll set the strawberry runners, water them, and pick whatever berries come along next year. And be happy with what I get!

As for our neighborhood bear this year, you can see what he’s been up to at Little Farm Writer, always free to read!

International Fairy Day and Garden Magic!

Photo by Pixabay

“A fairy’s heart beats fierce and free.”       — Oona the Fairy, from the movie “Legend” 

“Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said.” — C.S. Lewis

Irish Fairies

International Fairy Day inspires me to ponder a bit about nature, mystery and of course, fairies. In Ireland, June 24 coincides with the Feast Day of St. John, traditionally celebrated widely all over Ireland. 

Fairies in Ireland have long captured my imagination. Evidence abounds of this powerful fairy race, with fairy forts all over the Emerald Isle.

I saw a fairy fort (also known as a “rath”) in County Mayo, on our visit to Ireland a few years back. It was a simple circle of stones in the middle of a sheep pasture…but as the farmer showed it to us, he still gave the fort a wide berth.

Keep in mind, you disturb a fairy fort at your peril! There are many stories of Irish people struck by illnesses or other troubles who messed with fairies.

You might think this belief was back in the day—but as recently at 2011, the financial ruin of a land developer who bulldozed a fairy fort was attributed to fairy revenge.

Two of my fave fairy books

Irish fairies are reputed to be rich, beautiful, and that they do what they want. In fact, people live in fear of them. 

I’ve long wondered if the fairy mythology grew not only from the ancient Druids, but also from all the Norse and English invasions over centuries. 

My theory is that the belief in fairies may have helped the Irish people particularly the poor, powerless folks, to feel like they actually did have a little power. 

In other words, maybe fairy karma would get the landlord class in the end!

Oona the “Legend” fairy isn’t an Irish fairy…but her name is (the Irish spelling is “Una”), and with her fierce heart, she could be!

Are Fairies Really Imaginary?

The fairy stories C.S. Lewis refers to may not only be his Narnia series… Perhaps he’s paying a tribute to all the story spinners (creators) and story “spinees” (readers), and the gift of the writers’ and readers’ imaginations!

“I think [a child's imagination] comes from fairies,” said author Tom Robbins. “…Certain children are visited by a fairy in their cradle, and are tapped on their forehead with a small but luminous wand. After that, even all the forces in our culture, and there are many, are unable to totally subdue it.”

Here’s my favorite Fairy Day post from way back…

Personally, this time of year, I think a luminous sort of magic abounds in the garden. Here in the Foothills, there’s a softness to the air, before the weeks of dry weather set in. Sage, coral bells, and wild foxglove are in bloom. As the wild bees go about their business, the air is filled with a low, sweet little hum. 

Bee in the sage: the wee yellow blob at the middle-right

Asparagus, as it develops into a tall fern, is full of tiny yellow flowers, which the bees adore! My asparagus patch this time of year, I have to wade through the five-foot ferns, bees buzzing all around my head. 

But what’s lovely and miraculous about bees is if you don’t bother them, they seem perfectly content to simply keep you company while they do their magic. In my mind, they’re the good fairies of the garden!

And part of all nature’s wonders… May you be touched with that “luminous wand” on this day of celebrating fairies, and may you let your imagination run fierce and free!