Wanting to farm, or wanting to garden, however you want to look at it is a common desire. I've read several tweets and blog posts and facebook statuses that expressed that desire.
Raising your own food, eating what you produced for yourself. Salads, sweet corn, green beans, peas, tomatoes, squash, broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts, radishes, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplants, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and dried peas. Oops, I mentioned tomatoes more than once. That's okay, cause tomatoes are something you can't have too much of. Well, you can, but it's better to have too much than not enough.
A big garden is a good thing. It will allow you to have fresh food and enough left over to can or preserve. Corn will make 1 or 2 ears per plant. So you need to plant enough sweet corn to pollinate and then plant some more in a few days. Some people will plant several little plots of sweet corn , one every 7 days so they will have fresh sweet corn over an extended period, since the plants that are planted together should set ears at the same time. It even tells you so on the little seed packets. One thing to consider, the sweeter the corn, the sooner you need to cook or preserve it after picking.
There are charts giving recommended planting dates for different areas of the country. If you can't find one in your local store, search online. 3 of the places that I sometimes go in have the guides posted on the wall.
If you read part 2 of I Want to Farm, I talked about fences. If you have a garden, again, fences are a good thing. Tender young seedlings are tasty fodder for all sorts of animals. You don't want cows, sheep, goats, or pigs roaming through the garden. Tasty fodder. That means good food. And even worse, what they don't eat, they can trample to death or root up. FENCE THEM OUT OF THE GARDEN!
Geese will eat newly emerged plants. So if you have your garden up and growing well, put some geese in there and fence them IN. It can cut down on your having to use a hoe.Mulching around the plants can reduce the weeds as well.
Did I mention canning? It's something you need to read up on if you don't know anything about. A good time to do this is before you plant your garden. WHEN the garden is producing is not the time to be trying to learn about canning. And when the garden is producing is not a real good time to trying to gather the supplies you need for canning. because everybody else that is growing a garden and wanting to can is trying to get their supplies then to. You'll need around 4 million jars plus lids and rings. The jars are reusable, but the lids aren't.
I know I keep jumping around here, but chickens and guineas are great for insect control and very detrimental to tomato production. Something about almost ready-to-be-picked tomatoes that guineas and chickens find irresistible. So they don't resist and you can wind up with a big bunch of tomatoes that have little spots pecked out of them. So if you have tomatoes raised. in cages, some netting might help keep the birds from pecking all your hard work away.
If you're lucky enough to get your garden to produce and you manage to preserve what you produce, you need to have some place to store it. So a freezer night be another good itme to have in place. Some foods work better canned, some work better frozen. And some (potatoes, rutabagas,onions, fruit) keep best in a root cellar or fruit cellar. You can read about that here .
I mentioned tomatoes several times earlier. They are wonderful fresh and can be canned in several ways. When I was a child we used to can a LOT of tomato juice. mostly in quart jars and half-gallon jars. Good for making soup.
No comments:
Post a Comment