As some of you already know, we've temporarily left our Multi-family Homestead with Anarchist tendencies to live in suburbia, but we're continuing on pushing towards a life of self-reliance, and designing a permaculture food forest.
I was writing this and realized that it is a new month and that I should submit this post as part of @riverflows's July Garden Journal Challenge... hopefully it's jot too late? I'm not really sure on what the dates are here!
The last garden post I made was more of an idea on how homesteading can be a hedge against recession, than this one! Here, I just kind of want to show off what we have so far...
As you can see in the picture above, the corn is about at the same hight of our 5ft fence!!! Today is the 5th of July, so if the saying stands right, Knee High by the 4th of July, than we're on the right track, I think. I've never grown corn, and I wanted to also try growing The Three Sisters. It's a symbiotic thing between three plants; corn, beans, and squash.
- The corn helps the beans by providing a stalk to grow on.
- The beans are able to pull nitrogen out of the air (through the help of a bacteria called rhizobium) and deliver it to the soil for the corn to use.
- The squash also benefits from the nitrogen, and gives the corn, beans, and the soil protection from evaporation, and animals.
Our beans never sprouted... so now it's only the two sisters left in that corner of the garden. The corn, and the squash seem to be loving the horse manure we mixed into the ground, so fingers crossed, we'll see later on what kind of harvest we'll have though.
I don't have much of an expectation for the corn, it came from a friend who smuggled it in from Guatemala. All but one of the kernels (seeds) she gave me sprouted, so that's not the issue, plus you see how well it's doing so far. That corn is grown for making tortillas, so it may not be very sweet or anything, at least I'll have learned a little something about growing corn this year!
Forget about our broccoli this summer... We planted it too early (or too late for a sprong harvest), it already bolted! But at least the flowers are edible. We're on a trip with family for a couple weeks away from rhe garden, so a friend is tending to it. Before going I decided to take a the Broccoli flowers, a handful of leaves from our pak-Choi, and whatever was left of the volunteer lambs quarter. I used all that to make a sort of creamed spinach, and it was pretty delicious, if I must say!
These are our tomato plants, which I grew from seeds a bit late again, jut they're some sort of heirloom variety that looks like a pink tie-dyed beauty witha very sweet taste. These will be the 3rd or maybe 4th generation of this type I harvest seeds from. Maybe this year I'll do updated post on saving tomato seeds. I get close to 100% germination rate on these.
The problem with tomatoes, is that they pretty much all come at once!!! You better like them, and know how to preserve them if you have too many, like we tend to do!
We're still learning... gardening is an art and the more you do it the more you know what works, and what doesn't. This bed is full of watermelon and cantaloupe, it may not be enough space, I know, but they're vines and will be able to travel around to other areas of the garden (I hope).
And we have a couple other things going,but like I said earlier, we're not home and I cannot take pictures. The ones you see there were taken by my brother who lives with us at the moment. I can't wait to see what are cucumbers are up to, the peppers,and the zucchini.
Even though we moved to the suburbs, our plan to learn how to be self-reliant is still in action! Eventually, we'll also grow winter greens, in the basement. Now that we're not completely off the grid anymore, I have more time to work on more things like our food systems, and we also have space for emergency water!!!!
I hope you enjoyed this post, let me know what you're up to to create a hedge against the recession!
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