We’ve landed! The cordwood homestead with the woodstove worked out for us, and after many weeks of helping the landlord clean the place up, finishing the job on my own, unpacking, sorting, figuring out just what was in the inevitable lost box (my roasting pan, sadly), acquiring chickens, and sunny weather that’s had me out in the garden from dawn until dark, we’ve finally got a rainy day where I am compelled to blog.
Our Secondhand Homestead
The house is incredible, cozy and quirky and charming, handmade from mostly salvaged and reclaimed materials, never quite finished, and settled in the center of three acres of pasture, 25-year organic gardens, greenhouses, orchards, and woodlot (mostly poplar, but free is free!) We’ve been so enamored of the incredible Finnish soapstone French Top range (a masonry oven with a solid cast iron plate across the top to cook on that we haven’t even installed the equally amazing six-burner Viking propane range/oven. With a firebox maybe 10″ tall, 8″ wide, and 16″ deep, the soapstone stove cooks all of our food, bakes our bread, and heats the house admirably well on very modest amounts of small-diameter wood – for the last week, I’ve been burning mostly wind-downed tree limbs cut into stove lengths. With the main face of the house oriented due south, and huge double-paned reclaimed windows all along the wall, even on a wet, grey day like today I find it totally unnecessary to use any sort of electric lights until well after dark – an unusual arrangement of interior windows lets natural light even into those rooms without an exterior wall, like the downstairs bathroom.
Our Small Flock
The landlord’s son and daughter-in-law live just down the street, and they offered us the flock of past-prime hens and mobile coop that had previously meandered its’ way around this property, which we gladly accepted! There were three Red Sexlinks and a Barred Rock, but one of the sexlinks went missing one night right after we brought them up – possibly the fox that’s been spotted in the neighborhood. So now there are two Sexlinks and the Barred Rock, to which we have added a Speckled Sussex rooster from the Craigslist free section. After watching the hens ping around in the yard on their own recognizance for a couple of weeks, then adding the rooster, I’m more than sold on the value of a rooster for free-range birds! The moderate noise – some crowing in the early morning, a bit in the early afternoon, and when he ‘loses’ a hen (generally when one is off laying an egg) – is well worth the guardian value of a rooster. Before the rooster, it was not uncommon for the hens to get distracted by each eating their own wee trail of food, and be scattered all over the property off on their own, one in the garden, one in the orchard, one pecking around the greenhouse – this, the rooster does not permit. Even in all but the worst driving rain, the rooster is on guard outside the henhouse while the ‘ladies’ take shelter inside. When they’re out around the dooryard, he will call the hens when he finds a particular trove of delicious food, then stand back and guard over them while they eat…if one of the hens wanders off alone, he will bring the whole rest of the flock on a systematic search for her, crowing in distress to call her back to the group. He is very calm around our dogs, friendly with people – one of the first to figure out that we keep a bucket of whole grains by the
Henhouse, and Garden: Before
door for chicken treats, he is the first to come running when he sees someone come outside with muck boots on – but excellent predator protection for the hens.
The garden is HUGE – my best estimate is that the main rectangle is at least 120′x60′, with two greenhouses (one good-sized at 10′x16′-ish and one egregiously large around 16′x30′-or-so) and a second, smaller garden rectangle of about 20′x35′ that’s got some perennials in it. There’s also the random beds around the land – I unearthed an ungodly amount of rhubarb, maybe 12 square feet of solid desperately-needs-dividing leaves and stalks poking up through the mulch under the wild apple trees. Also, GARLIC. The whole property is infested with self-seeded hardneck garlic that has gone absolutely invasive in the yard. Silly me dug up and transplanted about 100 small plants before I realized that there were at least another 500 growing under the OTHER apple tree – at which point I decided we’ll be *totally, completely fine* on garlic For Ever And Ever.
Speaking of perennials, we have lots – not counting the orchard. Dandelions are everywhere in the yard, as testified by the freezer steadily filling up with processed petals ready to be made into wine, but we haven’t yet gotten around to eating the greens. The
Purple Asparagus!
rhubarb is going gangbusters, and Patrick made a lovely strawberry-rhubarb sauce for our homemade toast the other morning with the first of it. Golden raspberries, alpine strawberries, and wild strawberries all have their places around here, but my absolute favorite is the asparagus. Ten-year-old asparagus beds, green and purple (only the purple is producing so far), putting up such tender, sweet stalks that I’ve come firmly into the “what’s sold in stores is NOT asparagus” camp. Steamed and scrambled in with fresh eggs, raw local Jersey cream, and served on hot homemade honey wheat toast…there are no words.
Hoping for dry weather over the next few days, I’ve been diligently sprouting my seed potatoes – All Blues, Red Pontiac, and a local Russet type called Green Mountain – and I was hoping to get them in the ground sooner than later. I’ve got over 80 tomato plants sprouting on the windowsill (god love those south-facing windows in a 16″ thick wall = 16″ of windowsill for starting seeds!) since the landlord was kind enough to pass along all of his leftover seeds from last year, we have a heck of a jump on the garden season over where I
The Main Garden, All Tilled Up
thought we would be. Soldacki, Sun Gold, Juliet, Amish Paste, Orange Banana Paste, Tall Vine Brandywine and Pink Brandywine, Pruden’s Purple, and a few others are all sprouting vigorously and will need transplanting soon. ”Swallow” and “Galine” eggplants, “Ailsa Craig” onions, leeks, a sweet bell pepper called “King of the North” that made the Game of Thrones-obsessed part of my brain laugh pretty hard, jalapenos and sweet Thai peppers, many many many kinds of basil from Sweet Dani Lemon to Black Opal (so dark purple it’s almost black), celery and celeriac…and that’s just in the windowsill! Outside so far are several sorts of lettuce, kale, chard, radishes, peas, garlic, some onions (volunteers I transplanted before tilling everything up), corn salad, bok choi and some other random greens. On the next dry day, I’ll be setting out carrots (mostly non-orange ones, I’m a sucker for vegetables-of-another-color), beets, more radishes, more peas, and whatever else I think of between now and then.
A note on tilling the garden: now, usually Tricks and I are advocates of no-till, soil-structure-preserving methods of gardening. With this in mind, I diligently began preparing the garden row by row, with a hand cultivator, gloves, hens, and a milk crate for weeds. And then I realized, after several hours of daily work over the course of more than a week netted me only about 30 square feet of crabgrass-dandelion-and-thistle-free garden beds, that this was perhaps not the best use of my time. We hired over the neighbor’s grandson with his small tractor, had it all over with in two 1-hour sessions a week apart, and after the row crops are out at the end of summer we’ll be building raised beds which will be much easier to maintain without the use of heavy equipment. That’s the only part of the garden we had tilled – both greenhouses, the small plot, and the random beds are all being maintained by hand – but this year, after two to five years of weed growth in some parts of that garden patch…I’d rather plant potatoes, than still be pulling up weeds when I should be harvesting my garden.
I’ll write about the orchards, house, and our plans for the place another time – for now, it looks like the rain has let up enough for me to slog out to the chicken coop and make sure they’ve got some dry food and fresh water in their coop – it doesn’t look like they’ll be venturing far to forage today.
