Project Homestead

Fairly full from Common Ground

I just returned from a glorious, enriching day of lapping up organic living and growing in Unity, Maine, home of the Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association. The group's annual Common Ground Fair is so full of information, friends and amazing food, I left feeling full to bursting. Here's what I can remember...

• Angora goats are “addictive.”
• Organic, locally grown fair food is VERY expensive.
• The Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association, a.k.a. MOFGA, is magic: Its fair is simultaneously down-home and ethereal.
• Young bulls are called bullocks.
• Who needs roller coasters, when kids can slide down a grassy hill, using only cardboard, for two hours and 17 minutes?

• Top-bar beehives give bees room to build honeycomb in the size they naturally need. Some beekeepers plant lavender and thyme beneath their hives to keep mites at bay.
• If you have a cordless drill, you can whip amendments into worked soil with the nifty Tilther from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. 
• I pine for Johnny’s Six Row Seeder.
• “Chestnut” crab apples are sweet, juicy and bright; the perfect size for little hands or a few big bites.
• Apples are the most interesting fruit I know.
• You can make fire by rubbing two sticks together … after tying a basic bow, carving a peg to rub in a whittled plank, and kneeling very carefully while rubbing furiously. Having a friendly Maine Guide nearby is a big help.

• Sheep are far easier to herd than goats. Sheepdogs have an easier time doing it than kiddos.
• Spinning wool is a quiet art; spinning "in the grease" works wonders on dry winter hands.
• “Fingers look like carrots” to livestock.
• Friendships made in the course of pursuing your passions are lasting and real.
• Forests selectively harvested and replanted with varying species are less stressed than single-species stands of timber.
• Hula hoops whirl around hips longer if you stand with one foot in front of the other, spread apart a bit. If you can manage it, your kids will cheer.
• You can live without cell phone service for an entire day.
• Garlic is easy to grow in fertile soil (6 inches apart on 12-inch rows). Hardneck varieties are easier to peel than softnecks. Curing bulbs in a dry place will help them store them well for months.
• Abundance is all around us.

It's time to harvest just about everywhere. Eat up, and enjoy.

promise

My three-year-old early riser and I awoke early the other morning to an unfamiliar friend — the sun! As it peeked over the eastern edge of neighboring pines and ponds, these gorgeous, plump, popcorn-like blackberry blossoms nearly glowed. They hold such promise... for birds and bees, for lovely blooms, for berries green-then-red-then-purple-then-deepest black, by summer's end. In the past, I'd say "I can't wait." But this year feels different.

I've planted so much more, from strawberries, blueberries and raspberries (to harvest next year), to many veggies in an entirely new and experimental garden site, that I'm excited to watch what happens next to each of them, one by one. I feel like a proud new mama of a happy but scattered brood. (Not all of those babes are in the ground yet, either.)

It's the middle of June, but days of cool and rain make it feel like summer is still just around the corner here. The Summer Solstice arrives this Sunday, so I suppose it is. It's the day the sun reaches its farthest point north of the equator, lazing its way through the year's longest day; this year, it falls on Father's Day (lucky papa!). And, lucky for us and the blackberries that surround us, the sun will be warming us even more as the days march on.

As much as I'd like to take credit for their vitality, the truth is, nothing here grows more effortlessly, and with as little human intervention, as these generous canes. Coaxing bud into blossom and tart into sweet, I am sure, is some benevolent and powerful force; one the dew drops on spring leaves, my early riser and I have been waiting to greet.

Welcome, summer. Go ahead, stay awhile.

garden planning with google

Whenever I have looked up from the mud while trying to outrun the rain to plant two peach trees, one nanking cherry bush, three high-bush blueberries, 100 strawberry plants, and a new raspberry hedgerow, I have been madly envisioning where the rest of our food will go. The tomato and pepper seedlings, the greens waiting in flats, and the pumpkins, gourds and corn all need fertile homes, too.

This is the "year of the garden." It's the year I stop dreaming and reading and surfing YouTube (for swale-building tutorials, no less) ... and START PLANTING. It took me a few years, and as many meager harvests, to locate just the right site for really productive fruit and vegetable gardens. This process took a while because, along the way, I became obsessed with permaculture and forest gardening. Lucky for me, deep contemplation is as necessary as good compost for gardens that are high-yield, low-maintenance and as perennial as can be.

Well, the tines hit the topsoil over the past few weeks (please forgive the long lapse between posts), and our new hillside garden is well under way. (The tomatoes are stretching their toes as I type.) A tool I found especially helpful was one I learned about from my friend, Lisa, who runs our impressive local permaculture meetup. She told me that she uses Google Earth to track the layout, patterns of sunlight and even make measurements on properties for which she's designing gardens. I downloaded it, zoomed into our location (the top image is a snapshot of our fledgling homestead), and then traced everything from existing gardens to a tiny future vineyard. A girl's gotta dream, right?

eelgrass + blackberries = one perfect day

Here's how it went:

1. Wake up. Make cappuccino. Eat yogurt and homemade granola. (Dream of sending boys out to fetch fresh berries.)
2. Dig errant roses and sumac suckers and rake dried flower stalks from beloved patch of wild blackberries. (I suppose all of this human tending might make them a little less "wild." On the other hand, they were here long before we were, so I'm sticking with it.)
3. Drive five minutes to our town's best tidal beach. Take black garbage bags and children to water's edge. Children frolic. Michael and I use our hands to loosen piles of well-weathered eelgrass from along the top edge of the beach, where soft sand and beach roses meet.
4. Stuff eelgrass into bags. (This is so easy.)
5. Strip children of freezing, wet clothes. Ask youngest to stop burying perfect stranger with sand. Wrap boys in blankets in the car.
6. Load sandy, grassy bags into the back of our friend's truck. (Thank you, Lex.)
7. With warm spring sunshine on our shoulders, spread fluffy eelgrass on thinned, pruned blackberry patch. Envision its minerals slowly strengthening the soil. Watch boys discover nodules, and smile as they tell me that sitting in the soft, dry mulch is like a trip to the beach—salty and fresh and deeply alive—all over again.

Here's what I learned:

Even though eelgrass grows in the sea, it's not seaweed at all. Instead, it's a flowering plant that forms meadows in the sands and muddy beds of shallow, sheltered waters. It grows in patches ever since the 1930s, when a wasting disease wiped out populations everywhere. Waves and weather help ours pile up on beaches to dry into papery ribbons. We and other coastal gardeners are lucky to have it.

A University of British Columbia's Botanical Garden forum reminded me: Live seaweed is critical to a host of marine life. (Ours marked the top end of a storm surge, when the water was higher than it will be for some time, so I sleep at night knowing it wasn't ocean-bound.) Even so, collecting grass from the length of the beach—while leaving some behind—will shelter and protect any animals left behind.

In my nascent study of permaculture, I also understand that using local materials to heal land (that can then grow food to feed healthy families and communities) is the definition of sustainable. Lex spreads his eelgrass thinly around his broccoli seedlings, which grow up into tender blooms his kids can't refuse. And just one fine day of foraging has enriched our best crop, already.

I can only imagine what it will do for our blackberries.

spring creeps in (under cover of snow)

Despite the snow that still surrounds us and looms large in sad plow piles in driveways everywhere, Spring is here. The sap is rising in the maples* (and the kiddos). The first red-winged black birds just broke into song. And everyone from happy hens to little boys can't wait to stretch out their toes and scratch a bit in the FINALLY thawing ground. 

While soaking up the balmy 40-degree sunshine, I spent a few minutes taking pictures of my various hillsides and sleepy garden plots to help me site future cold frames, bulb and fruit tree sites and micro-climates that might best nurture cold-hardy greens. It surprises me to no end how the complex patterns of sunshine, snowfall and tree cover can influence the ground below. Our land has several aspects, all of which are waking up at different rates.

I observed one clear constant: The chance to dig a bit, if only with chicken claws and Tonka trucks, is a fine, welcome start. There's life under there. And we've all got a primal urge to find it.

* Stay tuned for a first-hand report of the tastiest holiday in these parts: Maine Maple Sunday. Y-u-m. 

the carrot experiment

We wanted to grow herbs, greens, beans, peas, tomatoes (of course), pumpkins, and squash. But, most of all, we wanted carrots. Small "candy" carrots. Stubby carrots. Sweet, right-out-of-the-dirt jewels of the earth. But we put them in an experimental spot, bathed in sunshine in the spring but a bit too shady, come summer. Then, turtles spied the freshly turned dirt from the pond below and decided the carrot beds were the perfect place to bury their tender eggs. As always, they were promptly dug up and eaten by someone else.

The result? A few spindly reminders of our need to relocate our crop next year. The upside? Owen considers the sweet carrot above the "perfect" size for a nibble-on-the-run. If not carrots, at least I'm growing optimists...