Bah Humbug!

My mother makes me tear up.

Tools Used in the Orchard

This is part 5 of the Tools {used on my homestead} series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 can be found by clicking on the links.

Our orchard is still young. We were expecting are first harvest this year. But as some of you recall, to my horror, a late deadly frost covered my area, killing all the blossoms on my fruit trees. This list will be incomplete, due to my lack of experience with the orchard. Those of you that have fruit trees, please, feel free to add to the list of tools needed in the comments.

For Planting, your best tool is your local extension office. Believe me when I say, use them up! Not only can you find some great deals on trees, but you can take soil samples in to be tested for a small fee. Testing the soil in the area that you wish to plant in will tell you what you need to add, or subject from the dirt.

Next are your trees. Find trees suitable for your climate. I saw someone purchase a citrus tree just because the local farm store had one out for sale. But unless this person has an arboretums, I don't see it surviving in our brutal cold weather. Maybe it was a GMO, and spliced to make it here. I don't know, it was listed that I could see. Your local extension office will be able to tell you what tree thrive in your area, if you have any questions.

The next tool used is what ever was missing from the soil. As our top soil was stripped, we had a lot of "adding" to do. Mist of it was in the for of compost. Mulch is another thing to have on hand.

Once trees and your add-ins are on hand, planting is your next step. We use a spade for ours. One reason we use this and not a shovel is because we snap shovels, just like we snap those potato forks. We work in the add-ins to the loosened soil with that ever present Garden Claw. And depending on what the add-in is, we may wait a few days before planting.

Once the trees are in, we must use stakes and tape to keep our trees straight. Otherwise that old reliable Kansas wind will have our trees almost laying down. Hoses now come into play. We are in the process of turning a horse tank into a rain barrel (will update you on the project at a later date) A water source is important (another up coming project is a windmill)

Pruning shears and a field knife are also tools e use. Some trees require certain pruning to happen. Shaping the tree to keep them from going "wild" is said to improve the fruit quality. The field knife come in use when suckers begin to grow.

Companion planting your orchard is a good idea, this tool we will call the cover crop. I am trying to locate clover seed for mine (as the bee hives are in my orchard) but there are other cover crops good for your orchard.

Lay out of the orchard is a good idea as well. Placement for your trees can help with pollination, even those trees that claim to be self pollinating can receive benefits from a companion.

This is an outdated drawing, as trees have been added.

We are prepared for a harvest. Bushel buckets, ladders, and netting. Hopefully next year looks like our apple picking adventure of last year.



Remember, by clicking on my tags, you can see other posts on the subject.

Tools used for Seed Saving and Starting Seeds

This is part 4 of the Tools series. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 can be found by clicking the links.

I proclaimed yesterday that I was going to talk about tools used for an orchard. Yet I noticed one thing missing from the Garden series, and no one called me out on it!

Seed Saving is a very important part of homesteading. We can not be self reliant if we are forced to buy seeds year after year. When it does come to seed saving, the tools used are very primitive. Nothing fancy needed here.

The most important tool that you have on hand is your own garden. And it might be a little difficult, but you know that perfect vegetable or fruit you just plucked, DON'T EAT IT! It is the best ones of your crop that you will want to seed save.

Depending one the veggie, you will either need to cut it open, wash the guts off of the fruit, and set out to dry completely {completely is important, otherwise you will get mold}. This is a great way to save your melon and gourd seeds. You may go ahead and eat those.

Tomatoes need to be gutted. Sometimes you can still use the remaining tomato depending on the recipe you are using. You need a jar, water and a window sill. Place the guts in the jar of water, then into your window. A spoon will be needed to stir the contents occasionally. After a few days, a white moldy foam will appear at the surface. Skim it off with your spoon. Use a colander to strain, the seeds that sank to the bottom of the jar are the ones you need to keep. Allow them to dry out completely on a newspaper. If you smoke, use the cellophane wrapper to store the seeds in and place in your freezer until ready to plant. Non smokers, well go make friends with a smoker.

Potatoes need a dark dry area and a paper bag. Use what you can and if roots start growing on them, leave them for seed later. Sweet potatoesneed the vines cut and placed into a jar of water to form roots.

Items like carrots

or onions, need to be allowed to flower. Seed saving is a mater of cutting (shears) the flowers after they have gone to seed, into a paper bag.

Sunflowers and other edibles seeds and root nuts {ok peanuts} need to be cured in a dry warm place, separated from one another. Sunflower heads should be hung upside down in your barn or equivalent (string and rafters needed) with a cheese cloth/bed sheet hung underneath them to catch any fallen seeds. Peanuts after being allowed to cure out of the ground for several days, should be placed in a used nylon stocking to keep.

I use old envelopes to store my seeds.

Seedlings

Starting your seeds is a devastating accomplishment. You might lose half to all of your seedlings. An old milk jug, small cardboard boxes, a hot frame, cold frame, window sill, grow lamp, hydroponics system, soil, and water are tools that might be needed.

We each have our own variation of how we do these things. Experiment a bit to see how and what works well for you.

Tomorrow, Tools for the Orchard { that is unless someone catches a Gardening subject I missed}

Tools for Harvest and Preservation.

Yesterday we talked about Tools used for Maintenance, today is all about the glory.

The glory, that is definitely what it should be called. After all that hard work, and then it pays off, big time. ok, sometimes it all goes to well. . .ya know)

The list of Harvesting tools is a very simple and short list. All you need are your hands, a pair of good shears, and a bushel basket and/or a utility cart. There might be times where you will need a hand trowel, or that cats-paw again, depending on what you have grown.

The potato fork is also important. We go through 1 every season because we tend to snap them at one point. We bought a high dollar one, once. And that was the only time. We have broken all of them on our soil.

Preservation

Preserving your harvest involves many tools. Canning your harvest is the most common way around here. You need to have a large pot to either cook and mix sauces, or to blanch (if the canning recipe calls for it). You will need several large wooden spoons and different sized rubber spatulas (or scrappers). Possibly coffeee filters for draining. A funnel, strainer, and a jar lifter, as well as a kitchen towl. Jars and lids are a must! So is a very good knife.

You will also need to have a food mill, a hot water bath boiler,

a pressure canner {remember you can have the pressure tested at your local extension office, usually free.}


You need the proper ingredients for your recipe, and instructions if you don't know it by heart.

For freezing, you need the blanching pot, waxed paper, a freezer, and jars for storage.

Drying can use different methods, so different tools are called for. The first one is your smaller herbs. A paper sack or an envelope can be used to hold your herbs as you clothes pin them to a rope in a dry airy place.

Your onions, need to be laid out in the sun and cured for a while before braided and stored. Braiding tools needed are scissors, string and instructions. I lay mine out on an old bed sheet.

Jerky and larger veggies that you want to dry, need either a dehydrator (good for fruit leathers} a fan and heater filters, and a window, or an oven. Drying out tomatoes need those items and for sun dried you need cheese cloth.

I do not salt cure, or smoke cure yet.

There are some items I might have missed, kind of a rush post type morning. Feel free to add to the list.

Tomorrow will we list the tools needed to care and tend an orchard.

Tools for Maintaining Lawn and Garden

This is part 2 of the Tools series. Part One; Tools for Planting a Garden, can be found here

Now that we have set the seeds into the ground, and our hoses are in position, maintenance of the garden is in order. Repuprosing items can con in real useful at this time. Such as use a broken fan stand to hold a sprinkler, allowing the water to get over the tops of your taller vegetables.

There is no miracle tool that we use being homesteaders. We do not have a secret store somewhere selling us goods that you are not entitled to. So our maintenance tools will be just like yours. However, we may use a less variety of tools then others. At least what I have seen, here at the Neophyte homestead, we use about half the tools that friends in the city that have gardens, use.

Maintenance of the garden is mainly dedicated to weeding. Even if you have used a weed barrier of some kind (newspapers, straw, store bought black stuff) weeds will still pop up everywhere. That is the nature of the weed. To propagate themselves at any cost. This is your enemy. Pulling weeds by hand are your best bet. Wear good gloves if you have to deal with stickers. Good heavy boots for the occasional surprising mud hole or kamikaze snake.

Aerating the soil isn't a bad idea either, even though it seems to encourage new weed growth. A small claw cultivator, the before mentioned claw or a simple garden hoe is all you really need. At times there are weeds that have managed to dig those roots down so deep or hold fast to the area that additional help is needed. We use a Cat-paw. Yes they are meant to be used to pull nails, but we found that a good quality cats-paw is multipurpose and long lasting. Plus you don't have a need for a plethora of tools that claim to be for specific jobs.

Vinegar is a great tool to have on hand. Pour this around the boundary of your garden to kill the grass and keep your lawn from enveloping your garden. Fencing can also be important, weather you use it to trellis or to keep the dog out. Rabbits will still get in, I recommend dried fox urine to keep them away. For Moles, use an empty pop bottle, not the 2 litters, leave the cap off and stick it half way into the ground into a tunnel. The noise and vibrations made from the wind blowing over the top of the empty bottle will scare off the moles. Don't bother spending all that money on one of those small windmills.

I did spend some money on the purchase of a good utility cart. You want your weeds far away from your garden. A utility cart will help you move large batches of weeds and dead veggies away, and out to your green manure pile.

Lawn Maintenance.

We do have a lawn. I have mentioned before that I like grass and that grass has many benefits besides looking tidy and green. But here is not the time for that debate. Our heaviest used tools for lawn up keep are the goats and geese. They can not keep up with the rate the grass tends to grow, but they do help keep the clovers and dandelions from going crazy. We own a riding lawn mower that doubles for a small tractor, as it pulls the more heftier items that need to be moved. For those tall weeds that grow (as well as future plans for wheat or another kind of cover crop) we use a scythe.
Fire is also a tool we utilize. It promotes growth for the spring when used in early winter, for your fields, lawn and ornamental grasses like a pompous. (not recommended if you live in town)

Tomorrow, Tools for the Harvest of Food Preservation

Tools for Planting the Garden

As I said on Friday, today we will start a series of posts dedicated to tools, and the tools of my homestead. Today we will discuss the prepping and planting the garden.

Something that is typically overlooked when it comes to gardening tools, is the almighty pencil and paper. These are you most important tools to have on hand. You start to work with them in those long winter night, as you gaze lustfully {mind you don't drool} over the newest seed catalog that has arrived in your mail. Not only do you order your seed supply with the pencil/pen and paper, but you plan out your future with it.

Come early spring, right before the ground is workable, you have a preliminary sketch of where everything should go, on your paper. Then you are off to walk the area. Shoes, good shoes (I highly recommend boots) are the next tool that a our homestead relays on. Walking the grounds with paper in hand, we then decide where exactly the garden is, and how it will be set up.

Once the ground has thawed, enough so that it is workable, we can go off in several direction in what is need. If this is the first year for a garden location, and fall prepping was not done, a tiller will be needed. We have 2 options here, one is the gas powered, self propelled rototiller. This makes life a lot easier. We also have a horse drawn cultivator, that will be put into use once we have an animal broke to pull such a device.
If the garden needs little work, just some soil loosening, or the area is small, a product that I have told you before that I live by, is called for, The Garden Claw. This will most likely be the only time a use a name brand, in this series. The reason I love this particular product is due to the fact that I have lots of clay soil, and The Garden Claw chews through it like it's butter, oh yes I said it, like butter. This item is particularly useful when it comes to fluffing the soil on the tops of our potato lazy beds.

Once the ground is broken up nicely, the next tool in our list is a a seed planter. This is for large gardens. You will not need one if you have a smaller garden.


I don't seem to have a better photo for you. This one we purchased last year at an auction. A wonderful invention, as you no longer have to bend down and drop the corn seeds one by one and cover them up. The cylinder behind the wheel is where your seeds go. There is a switch that you can turn to allow only a certain amount {1-5} seeds to drop. If you look carefully, there is a hook like metal piece directly behind the wheel, almost underneath the metal cylinder. This is used to drudge a furrow in a straight line in the soil. At the rear of the tool is a thick, smaller wheel that pushes and compacts the soil over the seeds.

If the garden is small, use your fingers to push a hole into the broken soil, drop your seed, and cover. Hands, no matter what size your garden are very important. Gardening gloves are not a must have, but can be helpful.

Many of the seed companies send you a small dial seeder. These are plastic devices that you can put smaller seeds into, and are used the same way as you hands. The only reason I have ever used one is for some of my very small seeds, like carrots and lettuce. With the Kansas wind, these small seeders can benefit us in less loss.

I do not recommend buying anything that will allow you to make a perfect hole for planting. Instead, a hand trowel works wonders for transplanting your seedlings. Seedlings will also need support. Trellis fencing, wooden stakes, and garden tape is used here. We also use paper cups at the base of our tomatoes to keep certain bugs off, and used stockings to encase our melons in. This helps support the growing melon, tying the nylon to the trellis after placing the melon inside, and helps keep the bugs off.

Now that the seeds are in the ground, the next tool you will need is a hose. I wouldn't suggest going cheap on the hose, unless that is you tend to run over them with a lawn mower or leave them hooked up in the winter. A good thick hose can last a long time. If you have an old hose with a few cracks, put in some more holes and use it as a soaker hose. Tomorrow we will talk about Tools Used to Maintain the Garden.

There are many kinds of tools for planting the garden in the stores. In the beginning you really want them all, thinking that they might just make things easier, yet over time you begin to rely on only your most precious of tools. Please, share your favorites.

Making a living OFF Land

I normally do not place ads here. I have in the past tried referral programs, I didn't like them. I have refused to do pay-per-post. Unfortunately I have to make a living some how. And free- lancing only earns me so much.

So, Just in time for Christmas I have an oversize Calender just for you. Some of the photos you have seen here, some you haven't.

You can see it here. This sale is only good until Monday, but I really don't expect you guys to spend anything.

If you do decide to buy one, Thank you!