If you find yourself with a lot of wood chips to get rid of, you can always compost them. Composting wood chips allows you to turn excess wood from your property into a rich, nutritious, organic growing medium for your gardens.
Tag: Frugal Homesteading
If you have several pine trees on your property, it can be really hard to figure out what to do with all of those pine needles as they are shed. Pine needles are known to be very acidic, as they compost into the soil around the trees. Therefore, it may not be ideal to use
If you have a nice little bed for greens on your homestead (like many of us!), you’re probably finding out that spinach can be a very finicky, hard to grow plant. I’m going to guess that you either lost your entire spinach harvest last year due to bolting, or you are currently dealing with bolting
Strawberry seeds can require a bit of work in order to get started. They aren’t as simple to grow as other seeds, such as tomatoes or squash. As a matter of fact, growing strawberries from seed is one of the more difficult tasks that a home gardener might tackle. Want to know what you’ve done
Beans are a must-have on the homesteader’s menu. They’re easy to grow, they produce a lot of food, and they are multipurpose. You can grow them for green beans, or for shelling/dry beans! There are dozens and dozens of bean varieties, both bushes and vines. For containers, I recommend vining varieties (also known as pole
Garlic is pretty delicious in… well, everything. Can you name many savory foods that don’t pair well with garlic? Probably not! Garlic tends to be a rather slow crop for homesteaders, especially the first time around. But, garlic plants will reward their loving, attentive owners with an incredible gift…. A secret, delicious harvest of scapes!
Growing a vegetable garden can be a heartbreaking process, because 501 things can go wrong all at once. Therefore, I present to you my MUST GROW list! These low maintenance garden vegetables will ensure that you have a successful harvest of SOME kind from your garden. If you are just starting out… Or if you
Seed Starting: It’s exciting. It’s liberating. It’s the best late winter tradition. When all else is cold, dead, or dormant, while the sun hangs behind the gloomy winter clouds, starting our seeds indoors or in the greenhouse gets us homesteaders pumped for the incoming growing season. But… What if I told you that sowing a
Putting up a fence is hard work. It’s also incredibly expensive the first time around. If you don’t plan your fence correctly, you could run into problems and breaches very quickly. It just doesn’t make for a very good time on the homestead, especially whenever you have a lot of animals to contain or animals
As the weather warms up and the fruits are gently harvested from our lush vegetable plants, we notice that the ants like to slip into our homes “unnoticed” in search of an easy, fresh meal. They know we’re doing all of the hard work, and that our counters are the perfect place to find a
It’s the middle of April, and spring is surging ahead here in our small southern piece of the pie. Strawberry pie, that is! Well, I wish anyways… I’m a bit impatient.
I know that I cannot possibly be the only person that gets this excited just because…. The gardening catalogs arrived!!! All of the berry bushes. The fruit and nut trees. The special seed deals. The exotic and fun fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Bulbs, galore! Does it just give you that warm, fuzzy feeling too? Doesn’t
Personally, I find the paper towel method to be the best way to encourage a high germination rate among strawberry seeds. If you only have a few seeds to work with, I highly advise using this method; it’s important to know that berry seeds need light to germinate, as I found out through trial and
To the new homesteader or gardener, preparing potting soil before reusing it might seem to be simply removing the old plant and putting the soil into the next pot to be used. For the experienced gardener, there are so many different reasons to squirm at that thought! Used potting soil could carry diseases or parasites,
Having a single dairy cow on a homestead can prove to be quite the challenge: how are you going to use up all of that spare milk?! Even a die-hard milk fan will have a hard time working through a gallon of milk on a daily basis. I cannot fathom drinking glasses and glasses of
Growing strawberries from seed is extremely exciting- I should know! While I didn’t exactly stratify my berries in my experiment, they did sit in the refrigerator for 2 weeks. This might have been all of the stratifying that they needed; so, chances are, your local grocer has already taken care of this. But to be
Throughout the mid and late 1900’s, many farmers found a way to reuse what they had on the farm, including motor oil. During hard times, especially when it came to farming families, sometimes “making due with what you have” was all the farmer could do to stretch his or her resources. They would up-cycle the
Container gardening makes gardening fun and easy in rental or urban properties. We LOVE container gardening, even with our 3 acres! However, you might notice that a mid-sized pot of at least 5 gallons will run you $10, $15, maybe even $20 or more. This ends up being an outrageous price tag in the end…