I know the year is not over with yet but it seems like a good time to take a moment and get you caught up on what’s been going on here on our Western North Carolina half acre homestead.
After a really bitter January, February was delightfully mild so the warm temps got me out the door for a few tasks that made the growing a bit easier and/or a lot more productive this year.
The first major change was to put some stepping stones up the hill to the microgreens grow room. In the snow or after a heavy rain, the grass is really slippery. There were several times when, after a downpour, the grass actually separated from the slippery clay underneath and sent me flying bottom-first down the hill on a “grass sled.” Not fun.
Using some local rocks, I dug a few relatively flat places and put the stones down. Good thing too because a few days later we got a major snow storm and the steps saved me. Here’s what they looked like this past spring once the snows were long gone:
I still need to add 6 more at the very top but it’s less steep there –
Another project was to put landscape cloth and wood chips down on the same hillside to the left of the steps so I could put my larger grow bags there. It’s a great location since it’s south facing and gets a good seven hours of sun every day. As you can see in the photos above and below, the sweet potato slips are still young but at this point (September) they’ve spread nicely across the wood chips and I’m hoping to get some yummy sweet potatoes for both myself and The Innocent Bystander and maybe even a few for my Winter CSA customers. I’ve never grown sweet potatoes in grow bags before but I’ve got my fingers crossed. The bags are the large 15 gallon size so I hope they work.
Another major project this year was to get a bunch of trellising finished. I used Handy Panels from Tractor Supply. They’re eight feet by five feet and that’s about the largest size I can handle by myself. Cattle panels are also available at Tractor — those are four feet by sixteen feet — but that definitely requires two people to put in place. I simply drive three foot pieces of rebar or five foot tall fencing t-posts into the ground and either wire or zip tie the Handy Panels to them. Voila – instant vertical trellising!
Once I got all the handy panels up I had a total of nine garden beds with vertical growing space. Hhmmm….. about one hundred feet total? I think?
That allowed me to plant a LOT of snow peas in the spring and a LOT of Rattlesnake pole beans for the summer farmers’ markets. The two crops took almost no space from the actual garden beds and they also made the garden beds look very neat and tidy —
Growing vertically is a must when your total growing space is as limited as it is here on our little half acre. After the snow peas came out I grew cucumbers and winter squash vertically as well. Looking at the sales figures, especially for the Snow Peas and Rattlesnake beans, it was well worth the $14.99 investment for each panel and now The Happy Homesteader is looking about for likely places where she can stick even more handy panel trellising.
I also established two new strawberry beds. Now why would I do that? I had a perfectly lovely strawberry bed on top of the rock wall right out the back door!
I know you’ve read plenty of my blog posts about how it was the perfect spot, how it was going to look so cute, etc etc etc. Like the gift that keeps on giving, that “charming, picturesque” (and blasted-worst-thought-out-plan-EVER) strawberry bed has finally gotten the best of me. There’s just not enough room to maneuver around the strawberry patch and work the three raised beds a foot away and keep from falling off the rock wall. So, the strawberry bed — the one that I was determined to have no matter what– is now history and the new strawberry plants are thriving in a totally new (and safer) location. Yeah, well…. it sure doesn’t look as nice.
