Tag Archives: sufficient

Garden

Sustainable, Efficient and Symbiotic Approach to Vegetable Selection (part 1)

My main goal beyond building soil quality is to be self-sufficient. Therefore I am going to focus on growing the staples in my diet and filling out the rest of the garden with vegetables that I enjoy. Maybe I will produce excess to sell but I am not planning on it in the first year. I would like to build an aquaponics system to further stretch waste products, have some fish protein on the menu and further promote soil fertility. Additionally, red wigler worms will be an integral part of composting and will provide winter protein for chickens as well as fish if the aquaponics plans are realized.

In terms of staples, sweet potatoes make up most of my carbohydrate intake so they will be the largest portion of my garden. According to the study “Effect of intercropping varieties of sweet potato and
okra in an ultisol of southeastern Nigeria”, Okra and sweet potato planted together potentially increases yields of both plants. I’m not much of an Okra eater, but they pickle well for preservation so I’m willing to give them a shot. I am going to space each plant out 18″ from its nearest neighbor of the same species which means each plant will alternate every 9 inches. Low vines of the sweet potatoes will act as a living mulch for the erect-growing okra.

Granted, 45 specimens of each plant shown below is more that I need. I will build the garden to its full extent as composting on the farm yields new soil. The plant locations were determined by the same “Construct Points” that I used in mapping fence posts.

Sweet Potato/Okra Symbiotic Planting

Okra_SweetPot_Plants

Next on my list is to get a perennial asparagus bed started. Asparagus will get the fresh veggies going early and are freezable post-harvest. For now I am planning to plant it on the rows closest to the barn where it can be left undisturbed year after year. Basil seems to drive away common pests of asparagus and also is an all around good companion plant in the garden. If basil attracts slugs or snails, I can capture them in a beer trap to give the chickens a treat!

Asparagus/Basil Symbiotic Planting

AsparagusBasilPlants

Thats it for tonight! Any recommendations for the rest of the garden?

Note: When beginning construction of the garden beds, I switched my plan by siting the beds parallel to the west boundary of the garden rather than the east. When I was on location It was easier to determine the best way to work with the gentle hill. I will update the maps soon!

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Back in the Middle East, Back to Posting

I have returned for a few more weeks on my current work project. I figured that there was not much I could do in December on the farmstead so I might as well earn enough to get some more animals, gutters, etc debt-free.

Over thanksgiving break I was able to top up my freezer by harvesting a whitetail off of the farm land. Now protein needs are taken care of for 6-7 months while I don’t have an income. The liver will serve as a multivitamin to supplement my diet!

In between the morning and evening hunts, I started laying out the vegetable garden. I used some nice scrap lumber milled right on the farm to level the beds. I covered the turf I want to kill with wet cardboard then backfilled with mature horse manure/bedding compost sourced from a farm I worked on all through high school and college. This is a shortcut I will not take in the future as my goal is to not import any biomass. But the barren soil needed help if I want to produce produce (how is that for confusing english wording?). Unfortunately, the snowstorm beat me to taking pictures! Vegetable garden siting and planning will be in a series of future posts.

Interestingly, I found myself in a totally different mindset that I have ever been while hunting. Due to my forestry minor, I kept mentally noting diseases, dead or otherwise harvestable trees. I’ll touch more on this in a future posts regarding the goals to build soil.

There are lots of stands of Persimmon Trees (Diospyros virginiana). Additionally, there is one massive lone-wolf white oak tree on the property that has a crown with of almost 100 feet and is still abundantly producing fruit. Both tree species are historically excellent feed stocks for pigs and turkeys. I will rearrange my paddock mapping to account for this.

For now, back to this:

PANO_20141009_211354

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Welcome and Introduction

Independent. If I could choose one word to describe myself, that would be it. Naturally I have accumulated intense dissatisfaction with the corporate world and the lifestyle it commands. Looking back on my life, I’m surprised no one saw this coming. As I aged, my literary tastes all but spelled out my future:

The Lorax, Jack London, Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, the rest of the works by Gary Paulsen, The Hobbit, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, Into the Wild, Walden, Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea specifically), Steinbeck, McCarthy and so on.

So here I am, writing from my employment abroad in the Middle East dreaming about being home in the Appalachian Mountains. Self-sufficiency and homesteading have always been a bit of a fantasy of mine. However, the difficulty of diving in debt-free has been intimidating enough to keep me out.

Luckily a plot of land, including a barn and pasture, has been in my family for some time. It has been unused except as a hunting ground. With the blessing of the landowners within my family, I have a chance to realize some of the concepts in my head without taking on substantial debt. My financial aspirations are somewhere in the middle: use what is available to me not to get rich but not to operate at a loss.

As for the agricultural operations, I hope to build soil and quality grazing pasture by using only biological means and earn income by harvesting byproducts of my land management practices. I will be adapting Managed Intensive Rotational Grazing (MIRG) and methods of Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms as well as multi species grazing to suit my needs. In addition to farming, Other side projects like bee keeping, soap making and brewing beer will be included.

These projects are steps to self-sufficiency. It is unfortunate that I missed living in an era where most goods were procured locally. Via my farm project, I hope to contribute to making this a reality once again so any excess goods I produce may eventually find its way to local markets. Providing beer at a local scale would be very satisfying!

So here is my blog. Hopefully when I get to the point of selling grass fed meat, pastured eggs and other products, this can serve to provide complete transparency for my customers. I will include all of the planning and analysis I have conducted to assure that this is a worthwhile endeavour and to gain the confidence of the landowners.

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