After fourteen years of managing and working on a 95 organic farm I am now enmeshed in creating a suburban homestead on 1/6 of an acre. Over the next few months I will be documenting my family’s efforts to raise all of our food, medicinal and utility needs on this small piece of suburban real estate. Some of the features of the landscape will include, vegetable, herb, fruit and nut crops, a solar hot water system with on-demand hot water as backup, a wood stove, a cob oven, chickens and goats (if my efforts at getting the livestock ordinance in Carbondale overturned are successful), water collection, swales in the front yard, hand powered kitchen implements, a gray water system (beginning with the washing machine, which will be replaced by a front-loader), olive oil lamps, cheese, yogurt and butter making (from Nigerian pygmies), food preservation, cold frames, a complete shop area (now building a shaving horse), collecting wild edibles, medicinals and utility plants (wildcrafting) all throughout Carbondale neighborhoods, etc. We have already removed six large trees that were blocking sunlight and used the larger branches for the borders of 450 square feet of beds. We will double that in the next few weeks. 750-1000 sq feet of crop beds should serve us well. Most of the beds are straight. The reason for this is that it will be easy to hoop and cover them to extend the season on both ends of the year. We also chipped the trees and have a pile for our use in the backyard. The beds consist of layers of cardboard, wood chips, leaves, manure and compost. I recently ordered $600.00 of fruit and nut trees and bushes. In the second year I will be collecting scions from neighborhood fruit trees and grafting onto our existing trees. I will also shift into buying rootstocks only and graft onto them (rootstocks are 1/6 the cost of trees). A compost pile is doing its work. We are also vermicomposting in the basement. We have been collecting manure from the local stables and raking up the neighbor’s leaves. We also had 6 yards of finished compost brought in from a local man who recycles all of the city’s organic “waste”. The goal is to pile on the organic matter. We are not digging or cultivating. All of the beds are sheet mulched. Our main sources of fertilization will be exclusively through organic matter caching, compost and herbal fermented teas. Our house already has the aroma of kombucha throughout, sprouts in every shape and form, fermented veggies by the score, wheat grass growing in the windows. On the east side of the house, which is heavily shaded, we will produce mushrooms and rabbits (under the rabbit hutches we will place hay bales and turn the lot into the most nutritious compost available as the rabbit droppings fall onto the bales).
Today we planted our first peas, with spinach and cold weather greens, along with garlic to follow. There are plenty of tax incentives and state wide rebates out there for renewables, energy efficient wood stoves and the like. I will be posting photos as things come about. Why not be able to walk out the back door and get what you need? Why not wake up in the morning and clip off the wheat grass in the tray not ten feet from the bed and down an ounce of green magic? I will also let you know how many hours all of this takes to set up and maintain and what kind of yields we will be gathering from the homestead. Fish are also in the picture, produced out of four, 55 gallon barrels recycled from the Pepsi factory (imagine a few fish drunk on the dregs of Mountain Dew). Be back with more soon.
- Building the Compost Bin
