It’s early spring, and our homesteading chores have already begun in earnest. I can’t remember spring arriving this early, but both the peach trees in the orchard and the birds nesting along the house’s gutters tell me that spring is here…a few days early.
Homesteading Chores
So what are the homesteading chores on a farm like ours? Homesteading may not be the right word; it conjures up images of chickens scratching in the yard, a contented family cow mooing in the shade of a maple. We don’t have farm animals, just a lot of plants to tend to, and that’s where our chores begin…
This crazy-looking gizmo is my new pea trellis system. We built it from flexible PVC pipes braced with rocks. The idea is that the rows of peas will climb onto the trellis. When the peas are done, I can detach the pipe and form it into arches across the bed, then place a floating row cover on top. A floating row cover is a flexible, lightweight, permeable fabric that lets light, air and water into the plants but keeps bugs out. I’m trying hard to keep squash beetles from entering the bed this year so that I can grow zucchini, squash and cucumbers. Every year, the squash beetles get in, lay their eggs, and it’s bye-bye squash. Not this year. I think I’m going after the $50 cucumber but I don’t care. I’m out of options and I’m tired of buying them at the store, wax and all on the outside of the cucumbers!
The window boxes are planted. I plant pansies in the early spring, then switch over to the geraniums I’ve wintered over inside the house sometime in May. Pansies are cool weather annuals. They can take a light frost. Even though the temperatures have been in the 60s and 70s, there’s always the chance we get a light frost, so I stick with annuals like pansies that can take a bit of cold weather.
Whitey, one of our outdoor cats, likes to “help” me with the window boxes on the front porch!
This is our future composting system. It now has a gravel floor. Tomorrow, weather permitting, we will pour the cement. Then stone blocks go around the base, followed by wood walls to allow for air circulation. I’ll have one bin for “new” waste from the garden, then a second bin to flip it into and dig out the black gold, or the well-rotted compost. I can’t wait! It’s going to be great for the garden!
We also repaired many of the raised beds. They are seven years old, and the wood at the corners is starting to split. We repair them the first year with metal brackets drilled in the corners. The next year, the wood is replaced completely. We still have to do this on the potato beds, the big square raised beds, and fix three loose fence posts around the raised bed garden. I have the vegetable garden fenced in to keep deer out. We did have to patch the wire mesh. A squirrel actually ate through the wire! One of the cats fixed that by removing the squirrel for me…sorry squirrel…but the hole was there anyway. On went the patch!
Lastly, among our homesteading chores we finished spraying all of the orchard trees with dormant oil spray before they began blooming. Dormant oil is a great organic product that smothers insects and many diseases that can harm fruit trees. I’m hoping to write a series of articles on planning and growing various fruit trees, so look for that on Home Garden Joy in the weeks to come.
Most of our orchard The peach trees are just showing a little color.
Jeanne Grunert is a certified Virginia Master Gardener and the author of several gardening books. Her garden articles, photographs, and interviews have been featured in The Herb Companion, Virginia Gardener, and Cultivate, the magazine of the National Farm Bureau. She is the founder of The Christian Herbalists group and a popular local lecturer on culinary herbs and herbs for health, raised bed gardening, and horticulture therapy.
