Starting a garden....or not?

Do you send vegetables from your garden to your neighbor?  I do. I also send them eggs. My neighbor loves the homegrown farm food experience. She has even taken an interest in our homegrown chicken meat. Asking if I would sell her some. Even though I think it is perfectly fine, the government not so much. There are a lot of regulations against selling meat raised in your backyard that has also be processed there.  We unfortunately do not have the setup necessary to pass an inspection and i do not plan on getting it for the moment.



 But with the interest there, I am curious what others would do if they had a neighbor that wanted a garden and chicken meat and had the land to do so, but would not work hard to do what needed to be done to upkeep a garden or feed their livestock. Is it a lost cause trying to help that type of person? The city slickers who love the farm stuff but get "sick" every time they go outside. Would you give them chicks to raise? Would you till them a garden?

I would love to help these people but unfortunately I do not believe they are ready for their own adventure in farming. Because of this I am going to invite the neighbor to help in my garden in exchange for veggies. This will help her gauge how ready for gardening she is. I think as people we tend to jump head first into things and wait for consequences later, when it comes to a garden the work can quickly overwhelm someone who is not used to the bending, kneeling and being in the
heat. Even me a person who loves to garden, can sometimes forget how long i have been in the sun, and get a good sunburn or a sore back from kneeling or hoeing rows.

Instead of jumping into a huge garden, i think the best starting point for most people is a raised bed garden. This can be as small as a five gallon bucket with a tomato plant or a plastic swimming pool with a variety of plants or even a permanent bed built from whatever material you see fit. One plastic swimming pool can actually fit quite a bit of plants, you can fit a few tomato plants a pepper plant and a squash plant in one easily. As long as you fill your garden bed with good soil and drill some holes in the bottom it is hard to go wrong. I like to purchase bags of compost and manure mix. The bags run 1.99 at our local tractor supply. Just because a bag of dirt is expensive does not necessarily mean that it is good. They also sell bags of "topsoil", but from what i found it is mostly clay
soil in most of the bags that i have purchased. For the same price i prefer the more nutrient dense choice.

With a raised bed garden you also do not need a lot of the tools that you need for a larger garden. For my large garden i use everything from a double action hoe to a digging fork. For my raised bed i really need nothing more than a shovel and hoe and that is really not  necessary. Hands are really the best and only tool you need to tend your garden. A deep longing for fresh vegetables doesn't hurt either.

So if you have been thinking about gardening but don't know if you are quite ready, whether it be an issue of time or duty, you can always start small and then go big later. Getting started and learning are the important parts. You carry knowledge with you all the time and it weighs nothing. We all learn more quickly by doing, so get out do, get your hands dirty. Grow something, anything. The only way to fail is by not doing anything. Happy HOMEsteading.

When do I plant?

They have a saying around here that you dont plant your plants until after easter to avoid the freeze. I say, I will trust the trees. Any old timer reading this will know exactly what i am talking about. When i say that i will trust the trees, i am referring to the blooming of trees. When my pear trees start to bloom, I plant my seeds. This is also about the time that you will notice bulb flowers blooming out as well. Then when my pecan trees bloom I know that it is officially spring and it is time to plant in the ground. You see no matter the date, the tree cannot be fooled. It can tell when to lose its leaves and for sap to draw toward the roots so that we can remove limbs for the health of the tree (although pecans are self pruning sometimes removing damaged limbs is necessary). It is merely a tree, but with its roots entertwined with the earth it has a better perception of time that we could ever imagine.

If you had no other way of telling what time of the year it is, the trees will tell you.Forget the calendar. With the weather as unpredictibable as ever we could all use a little help at deciphering when is the right time. And with the help of modern technology and
constant sharing on social networks it is easy to get confused when you see someone planting their tomatoes when you still have inches or feet of snow in your part of the country. This is especially confusing to the novice gardener. Big box stores are not making it easier for newbies either. It is not yet time to plant yet i see many stores already selling seedlings even though it hit 30 degrees here last night. When you are new to planting, trusting in the stores to tell you when it is time to
plant can hurt if you do not have a back up plan in place to keep your seedlings from freezing. On our homestead we save milk cartons and a relative saves soda bottles so that if we do need to cover our seedlings when we plant early they do not die.

If you can plant early and have the materials to protect your plants I would highly recomend planting early. You will be seeing the fruits of your labor sooner rather than later. Another mistake that you see a lot of new garders make is buying the single tomato plants in a pot because it already has fruit on it. These plants may already be producing but they are also stunted and more expensive. If you buy a six pack of tomatos it can cost you a few dollars where as if you purchase the single
tomato that is already producing it will cost you a whopping ten dollars. When i say that the plant is stunted i mean that if you purchase the six pack of plants, the plants could potentially grow taller than most people given the right conditions.Our tomato plants generally grow to about five to six feet tall. So i say save the money you would spend toward the single plant and use it to buy compost, manure, kelp meal, azomite. Whatever catches your gardening fancy. Gardening doesnt need to be some long thought out process where you pour your life savings into it. Dandelions in sidewaks are proof of that.


 In the mean time while you are waiting to grow you can have your soil tested by your local extension agent. Here we use LSU-ag for our soil testing needs. The charge can range from 10-45$ for soil testing but it help you to know what is in your soil so that you have ultimate growing conditions. For example if your nitrogen levels are too high it can inhibit flower bloom in your plants and therfore decrease your bounty. Dont confuse getting a soil sample testing with testing your ph. Although  they will tell you your ph, it is a much more extensive test and most offices are willing to work with you and help you get your optimal soil. Whether you want to go organic or not there are lots of options. I recently visited a place that sold many of the options here locally. The great thing too is that not only is this place local they also ship world wide.


I found this place through the azomite website. The name of this place is called Pure earth botanicals.
Really it is an old church turned business so it fits nicely in the neigbohood and doesnt bombard your eyesite with gravel parking lots like a big box nursery would. Not that i am against big nurseries but it would be nice to see them growing some of the things that they sell and teaching sustainable methods of doing so. Which is exactly what this business is doing.
From the road you can see the garden bed with edibles and a giant compost mixer. They have a facebook page you can follow at
www.facebook.com/pureearthbotanicals

They are located at 300 W. Lincoln Street Sulphur, Louisiana 70663
They also ship world wide and are the cheapest i have found
in the state for azomite (and if you do not know what azomite is, it is an omri certified addition for soil to help rebuild
trace minerals. check them out on facebook. https://www.facebook.com/AZOMITE) 
If you are not local you can find them at www.soilminerals.com where they sell everything from ammendments to an organic, mineral
balanced miracle grow. Check them out and get your soil ready. So when the time is right you can grow some of your own yummy
produce in your very own garden.

Deep bedding and our coop

On our homestead we have multiple housing units for our chickens, most of which are portable. One though is stationary. We have moved our stationary coop once before but it took us a whole day to move it around 100ft across the yard. We moved it so that we could fence in an area for our birds to forage on without worrying about predators. The large stationary coop is made of cross arms from highline poles. They are bolted together with some extremely long bolt so that it holds up to just about anything. The sides are covered in a small hole wire that most people would only consider using for the bottoms of a brooder, it is called hardware cloth and its holes are so small that when the pen is completely closed we do not have to worry about predators, not even snakes. The only thing we have ever had get in the pen is a mouse and it dug an extremely long tunnel to get in there. But once the chickens figured out that there was something to chase in there, its stay was very quickly ended.

Inside our coop there is no floor. Why you ask? I find that floors in a coop make for a hazard down the road. Even if you keep it thoroughly cleaned manure can be slick at times and if you step in it, well you get the picture. I did not want to fall inside our coop and end up covered in muck. Not having a floor in our coop also helps me build nitrogen rich compost for our garden in the spring. I do this by adding pine shavings, leaves, newspaper, and scraps really just about anything that I can get my hands on.
The chickens scratch and eat, and spread the manure through the shavings. As the manure decomposes it produces heat which helps keep the coop warm and break down the materials on the coop floor. When I see dirt on the floor I add more shavings. This is called deep litter method.
This method helps reduce the smell commonly associated with livestock. It also reduces the amount of labor needed on the day to day basis for coop management.  Instead of cleaning out manure and having to compost it you get a giant compost heap build into your chicken coop. We still have a compost pile though since our trees drop far too many leaves for the chickens to keep up with. We also have a poop shelf in the chicken coop. This is a board installed below the roost that is covered in scrap linoleum so that we can scrape the manure off of the board to put into our compost to build the heat up for proper decomposition. This shelf also helps so we can monitor the chicken’s health through their manure to make sure they are in tip top shape and not carrying any parasites.

In the spring I simple park the wheel barrow at the coop and shovel out the rich materials from the ground.  It is then mixed into our raised beds or used to fertilize our fruit trees. If you are building a coop you might like to take to heart how you are going to heat your coop in the winter. If you’re like me and cringe at the idea of heat lamps then deep litter method may be a good option for your coop. You could also use plastic sheeting on the sides if your sides are wire like ours to create a greenhouse effect.  We simply put a tarp on the north side of ours because the weather here can go from 28 degrees to 80 degrees in two days.  No matter which method you choose to heat your coop it is easy to see which method would best suit your needs by sitting down and thinking it through before beginning construction.

Awe nuts (originally written for modern homesteaders)

Around this time of the year every proper lady is in her kitchen cooking and baking away making those delicious concoctions of candies and baked goods.  If you are like me you have noticed the incline of prices of the key components of good candy and baked goods year after year. What is it you ask that is so crucial to making your deserts the best of the best? Nuts, pecans, almonds, walnuts, and we wouldn’t be able to make that crunchy delight peanut brittle without peanuts would we?
Here on our homestead we have multiple nut trees. We have six pecan trees and a black walnut tree. Now if you have never had a black walnut they are something to be appreciated to say the least.  Harvest time for black walnuts is the same time as pecans around the last of October first of November here in south Louisiana. When the nuts fall from the trees they are ready to harvest.   They look like a green golf ball and smell like pepper. If you cut one open and rub it on your hands you will smell like pepper and have greenish black hands for a long time too. I learned this the hard way.
The hull from the black walnut is known as a great alternative to commercial wormers, antifungals, and dyes.  Although you can find black walnut extract at some pharmaceutical type stores or online it is a simple task to make your own to use for yourself and livestock excluding horses and dogs.  If you have access to a black walnut tree you can simply remove the fresh green husk while wearing gloves with a sharp knife cutting around the inner nut to remove as much husk as possible. Then the husk can be placed in a clear glass container with a lid, and then covered with cheap liquor. You will notice immediately the color change.  The more you shake your concoction and let it set, the more tannin is released and the darker your liquid will become.

Black walnut tincture

There are some down sides to the black walnut though. It is said that tomatoes will not grow within the root range of a black walnut tree but I have proved that wrong more than once since ours is about twenty feet from our garden, well within range for the roots.  Apple trees are said not to grow near this tree either but we do have two pear trees growing fairly close to our walnut tree. The reason is a substance contained within the plant called juglone that inhibits oxygen absorption in plants. It is also considered toxic to horses and can cause laminitis whether absorbed internally or in their bedding. Although using black walnut wood in horse bedding would be a waste considering its desirable coloring and strength used in a lot of wood working crafts.

Now walnuts and many other nuts can be indigenous to your region and you not even realize it yet. Here in south Louisiana we have black walnuts, bitter pecans, chestnuts, and hickory nuts. You can find a great illustration of the leaves and nut identification here.
http://www.lsuagcenter.com/NR/rdonlyres/BA8FFA18-B7CD-4D98-88FF-AF234D5F9ACD/18437/pub1669LeafKey.pdf

Note that not all the trees and fruit on the site are edible, although you would be surprised to find that some are, sassafras is one example of one of the trees on the list that are edible. I suggest you research your region and find out what is indigenous to your local and get out and go foraging. We went this year a lot when preparing our food plots for the deer.  We found chestnuts, pecans, hickory nuts, sassafras, and persimmons to name a few. You can contact your local agricultural extension office for more information on what grows in your area.

Un-husked black walnuts

Riccotta be kidding me?

On my last post I talked about how to make mozzarella cheese, and when doing so to save the whey left over from making it. Today I want to cover how to use that whey to make ricotta. If you don’t know what ricotta is, it is a soft cheese that is predominantly used in making lasagna especially in commercialized operations.  Since ricotta is a byproduct of making mozzarella it means that it is a cheap efficient way to complete your meal without breaking your budget.

After making your mozzarella you let your whey sit in the same pot you made your cheese, overnight for about 12 to 24 hours so that it can develop its needed acidity. The next day it will probably be bubbling a little bit. It somewhat smells like a sourdough starter or beer bread dough at this point.

 FERMENTED WHEY

Warm your whey over a good fire, while stirring so that it doesn’t stick and burn, until it is near boiling (220 degrees Fahrenheit.) Don’t let it boil over. It will be sticking to your spoon at this point too.

RICOTTA IN THE MAKING

Remove your cooked whey from the heat and allow it to sit undisturbed until it is comfortable to touch. This will take a few hours.  Whatever you do, DO NOT stir up your curds. The curds need to be scooped out with a slotted spoon or strainer and placed into a fine mesh cloth to drain.  A tea towel or any solid cotton material will work fine as long as you boil it prior to using so you don’t get any bacteria or off flavors into your cheese. Let your curds drain for a few hours or you can let it drain in the refrigerator overnight. After it is sufficiently drained you can put your cheese into whatever container you like and use it within a week of making. If you do not plan to use it within a week ricotta does freeze very well.  And the leftover liquid is great to give livestock.

We give it to our pig and she goes nuts. Nothing on the homestead has to go to waste and ricotta is a great lesson to that point. I challenge you to use something you would normally throw out this week. Take those veggie scraps and make stock or throw that parmesan rind into some soup. You could even save bones that you cut out of your steak to make delicious brown gravy or take those bread heals and make bread crumbs.  There are endless possibilities to what you can do in your own kitchen to be more ecologically efficient

Let's shred some light on mozzerella

In preparation for having our own milk producers on our small homestead I decided to try something that would use a substantial amount of milk. Since most milk producing animals will produce anywhere from one quart to seven gallons of milk a day we needed to use a lot.  So I tried my hand at cheese, and I say try apprehensively, since I was scared I would screw it up to say the least.  It took me two times to get acceptable results. The first time was almost a complete flop, I only got about a quarter cup of cheese and it tasted so much like citric acid we couldn’t eat it plain. I added some Italian seasoning to it and decided that even though it was a flop, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be fixed and we could use it in lasagna or some homemade pizza.  After researching I found out that the rennet I had chosen to use was not actually good for making cheese, but was for making yogurt (we use it to make homemade ice cream on occasion) and custards, even though it had recipes on the inside of the box for making mozzarella and cheddar.

The rennet was too weak to form a proper curd, so what did I do. Well I extremely stubborn and it’s a good thing in this case. I took the rennet and multiplied the amount in the recipe, so instead of using half a tablet I used two whole tablets and voila I got the cheese I was looking for. It didn’t taste like citric acid albeit a little dry it was still an acceptable cheese.  So let me give you the rundown on how I did it and maybe you can too.  Go ahead grab the thermometer you know you want to.

First I started off with one gallon of whole raw milk, 1 ¼ teaspoon citric acid dissolved into ½ cup cool water, and 4 (junket) rennet tablets dissolve into ¼ cup cool water. Now if you are using a different brand of rennet this recipe will not give the exact same results as different brands of rennet contain varying amounts of enzymes.

First the milk must be warmed in a stainless steel pot to 88 degrees. Then the citric acid and rennet mixtures are added to the milk. Make sure to stir it really well and then let it sit for 1-2 hours without touching it. Waiting is probably the hardest part about making cheese. When it is done you will get what is called a clean break. This is what happens when the cheese has gelled enough that when you stick your finger into it and pull up the cheese does not stick to your finger. If it still like cottage cheese it’s not done let it sit until it forms a solid mass.

When the curd is ready you can use a sharp knife to cut it into ½ in cubes or try anyways, mine was rather hard to cut so I ended up making chunks rather than cubes.  Warm the curds and whey over a low heat while stirring until it reaches 108 degrees and keep it at this temperature for 35 minutes. I turned my fire off and on while keeping the pot lid on to keep mine at the same temperature for this long.

Now you can drain your whey, don’t just pour it down the drain though save it and you can make ricotta too.

Break you curds up and mix in 1 teaspoon of salt, I used canning salt since I don’t keep cheese salt on hand from what I read it is similar. Just don’t use iodized salt.

If you want you could stop here and it would be cheese but if you want that mozzarella stretchiness then you will have to heat it up some more. You can use a microwave or a double boiler whichever you prefer.  But it needs to be heated and stretched and folded until you get a smooth elastic cheese so that you can shape it into a ball.  It makes for a very interesting one person game of hot potato with a ball of cheese.  When you get it to the consistency that you like then you simply store the cheese in a covered container of salted water.  About 1/3 cup of salt to one quart of water is good. Let it sit in the refrigerator overnight and then you can use it within about a week or shred it for freezing to use later.  It comes out to about a pound of mozzerella cheese to a gallon of milk, plus what you will get if you make ricotta also which I will cover in another post.

Writing from the homestead, old articles not so lost in cyberspace.

Since Modern homesteaders will soon be shutting down completely and I have articles that I wrote exclusively for the site, I thought I would share them here so that they do not disappear completely with the site. I feel that with reading these hopefully my readers will get to know me a little better and maybe even encourage a few new people to think outside the big box store. So I will start rereleasing all of my writing to be found here starting today.

It all started on a dirt road.
Let me start by introducing myself. My name is dirtyfeetmaggoo. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road in Oklahoma. As a kid I was encouraged to play outside. This meant climbing trees, digging in the dirt, fishing in the creek and swimming in the lake, and on occasion feeding the neighbors ostriches rocks.  I didn’t realize as a child how much the country life had affected me and stolen my heart. After moving to the city at the age of 13 I discovered that things were much more fast paced living in town. There was always something to do but I still found myself longing to be in the woods on that dirt road. So after a few years of living in town I was introduced to the love of my life who took me on the road all the way to south Louisiana. We don’t live on a dirt road, but we have our very own three acres on which we raise our two children that have increased our love for all things home grown.
 
After giving birth to my son I attended cooking school, it is  in this time that I discovered that I really didn’t pay too much attention to the food that we were consuming. I realized that my children did not know that food was not some magical thing that only the grocery store could have. If you asked my daughter then where apples came from she probably would have told you that they come from the store. I had to change this way of thinking, so I started digging. I planted a small ten by ten foot plot of veggies. It was a failure and nothing really grew well enough to make it to the dinner plate. But the same year our two tangerine trees that were here when we moved started producing fruit. This gave me faith that if I kept at it I could figure it out.

 
The next year we were gifted a tiller and the small garden grew to a quarter acre. I read books, watched documentaries and talked to the local agricultural cooperative trying to figure out the tricks of the trade and how to grow it all.  I was hooked I wanted to grow it all and taste it all. There were many things I had never even heard of until I planted them. Soon after, we built a coop and adopted some hens and baby chickens. We discovered very quickly that this was exactly what we wanted, what had been missing all along. A life on the homestead. My husband being the hunter and country boy that he is helped me realize that our chickens could be for more than just eggs, that it was within our power to grow our own meat.  We built chicken tractors so that we could fertilize our land while growing our own meat. The taste and satisfaction of knowing where our food was coming from was undeniable.
 
Our little homestead has grown from the little ten foot plot, and we have learned things we never thought we could do on our own. Our home now has 6 pecan trees, a black walnut tree, two tangerine trees, a lemon tree, a lime tree, two blueberry bushes, three pear trees, and one peach tree.  Our little flock of chickens that started out as five laying hens and six chicks has also grown to 38 chickens. We have ventured into raising rabbits and have also purchased a pig this year. We are still learning and we hope to eventually be a fully self sustainable farm. It is my hope that I can inspire others to get back to nature and get their hands dirty. To raise a curious generation, anxious to learn.