Homesteading with Michael David

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Part 3

We of course planted food the first year. I'm used to a 1/4 acre minimum garden growing up so I tried to put in quite a few things.

We also got a steal of a deal on flower bulbs at walmart that first summer (2020). It was June I believe and they were done selling all the bulbs and wanted off of all of them to make space for other things.

While we were looking at them one of the associates told us that they were about to price them all for 3 cents each package. Some of these packages were $15-20 packages originally so of course I jumped.

I took every single flower bulb they had and only spent 20 bucks.

After sorting them out, very very many of them were dried up or rotten. However we still scored over 1200 individual flower bulbs.

Having just a little bit of money left I ordered 7 yard of compost delivered. This far out that was super expensive. It cost us $350 for the load and the compost was only 70 bucks of that.

We did long mounds of the compost and planted.

It didn't take long before we noticed we didn't really have adequate water for all of it.

Having to carry our water in was making it really difficult but we managed to keep everything alive that year, barely.

All the crops grew really small from lack of water so we didn't have much veggies coming from it.

I was also not used to ground squirrels who quickly became our garden enemy.

There are ground squirrels all over out here and these little fuckers are a real pest. I was used to tree squirrels but they don't get into your stuff near as bad as the ground squirrels.

They dug up every root vegetable one at a time...

Almost like they were preserving them for later by letting them sit there lol.

When the peppers and tomatoes came off... there were very little. Like 2-3 per plant.

Ground squirrels know ripe fruit.

So these little bastards actually know ripe fruit vs unripe. Every single tomato we grew they would wait, just like us, until the thing was ripe then snatch it. Seemingly every time was on the day I was planning to pick it or the day before lol.

So no veggies that year but the flowers lived.

To be continued...

Homesteading with Michael David Part 3

Part 3

Ground squirrels know ripe fruit.