A New Normal - Huglekulture and Soap

A still life taken in our living room - transformed to a canvas by Maid Elizabeth

It's been almost a year since we changed our life completely and are just now finding a new normal.  Our days have been drastically different from our old, off-grid life, but just as challenging....and rewarding.

Finding my new normal is still a work in progress.  I'm learning how to juggle being a wife and mother while homeschooling, working in the butcher shop and attempting to maintain a gracious, life-giving home.  There are days I'm pretty sure I'm failing at all of those things, and other days that I think I almost have everything together.  Today was a typical combination of both.

Every morning the children and I have been heading to the gardens to get them ready for a productive growing season.  We have spent days weeding the big garden and pulling out piles of raspberry plants.  I couldn't bear to throw the plants away so we took them to the butcher shop and gave them to anyone who wanted them....they were all claimed within an hour.  We still have raspberries to pull out of the strawberry patch and strawberries to tidy up, but the rest of the garden is almost ready to plant.

I started bush beans, pole beans, tomatoes and leeks weeks ago in the house and have planted most of those in the garden and will plant a second planting of seeds this weekend.  I haven't forgotten the lessons I've learned about permaculture and am in the process of creating two new Huglekulture beds in the orchard.  Master Hand Grenade built two 10 x 3 foot boxes out of old Forest Service beams and we hauled them to the garden.  After positioning the first one where I wanted it,  Miss Serenity dug the ground out beneath it (about 1 1/2 feet), and we began to fill it - first with large organic material, followed by old raspberry canes and other smaller debris.  We then dug sod and put that on the pile upside-down.  Then came a layer of manure and ash and finally the top soil.  We put strawberries in that Huglekulture bed (we're trying to contain the unruly things) - and in the next bed we'll put tomatoes, peppers and leeks.

Raised bed with topsoil taken out

Filled with bulky organic material

Piles of raspberry canes on top

And small organic material

Digging sod

Transporting the sod in the 4-wheeler trailer

Flipped upside down over the raspberry canes

A layer of manure and ash

And the topsoil returned

Miss Serenity transplanting strawberries

Piles of strawberries to give away

After our gardening adventures we also set to work on Princess Dragon Snack's new business - Highland Naturals.  She is making lip balm, lotion bars, bar soap and other hand crafted items to sell at our local Farmer's Market this summer.  Today's job was soap making.  She and Serenity each made a batch.  Snack made Cinnamon/Clove and Serenity made Lavender.  The soap takes 3 weeks to cure and we wanted to get a start on it so that it would be ready to go for the first Market day.  Dragon Snack has been busy already with lip balm and has perfected her recipe.  She's going to continue making soap, lotion and balm now so that she has a large stock going into the summer.

Dragon Snack making soap

Two batches of soap hardening in the dining room

And so, we are finding our new normal.....one day at a time.

Autumn Ingathering

We have been enjoying beautiful fall weather - perfect for putting the garden to bed and preparing for winter hibernation.  Today I picked and received a bounty of goodness - peppers and tomatoes from our small garden, pears from my tenacious garden growing neighbor Patrice and apples and plums from Maid Elizabeth (her new property has beautiful fruit trees).  We'll dehydrate our peppers, can the pears and eat the tomatoes and plums fresh.  What bounty!  The few apples Maid Elizabeth brought over today we'll eat fresh (they're sooo good!), however, this weekend we plan on taking our cider press to her house and pressing apple cider - such a perfect fall enterprise!

Peppers and tomatoes out of our garden

Pears and apples and plums, oh my!

Notice the fire bricks stacked on the end of the cook stove - we'll be putting them in the stove soon!

I still have ripening tomatoes.  I can only hope the weather cooperates long enough for them to ripen on the vine.  If so, we'll have enough to can and enjoy them this winter.  Our Hugelkulture beds have surpassed our expectations and we can't wait to plant a huge garden next spring, and hopefully reap a harvest that dwarfs this years offerings.

Almost ready

I hope you're enjoying this sweet season of ingathering.  May your storerooms be full to overflowing!

Hugelkultur Update

If you have read of our adventures for any amount of time, you know that gardening has been the bane of our existence!  For fifteen (yes, fifteen) years, we have attempted to grow a garden in our red clay soil with (very) limited success.  We amended our soil with organic material, brought in load after load of manure to enrich the poor clay soil.  We tried raised beds, drip irrigation and potato towers.  We planted fruit trees, berry bushes and cold crop vegetables.  Some years I gave my gardening attempts everything I had, other years I merely threw a few seeds in the ground.  To say that I was discouraged is more than an understatement.

Although I had little to no success with gardening, I kept reading, hoping to find some nugget of gardening wisdom that I could apply to my little piece of ground that would coax bounty from the soil.

During one trip to our local library, I stumbled up a permaculture book by Sepp Holzer and was immediately intrigued.  He spoke of gardening and farming methods that were completely foreign to me but appeared to produce tremendous yields.  After studying Mr. Holzer's books for a couple of years and adding other permaculture books, like Gaia's Garden, to my personal library, I slowly devised a gardening plan.

This spring, Sir Knight and I embarked on a new gardening adventure - Hugelkultur.  Basically, we built raised garden beds using bulky organic material (trees, brush, bushes) as the base and coving it in our clay soil, with sod attached, and finished the beds off with good, rich soil.  We began small, with one bed about 40 feet long and 3 feet wide and 3 feet tall.  After we built the bed, we sowed white clover to act as a cover crop and to keep the soil in place until we could plant vegetables and berries. 

Tiny apples on an apple tree

Blueberries

Beginning to turn blue

Mounds of potatoes!

Potatoes looking healthy and happy

Lettuce, poking up amongst the clover

Our thick clover cover

Although the entire garden hasn't been planted (I was ill prepared for a full fledged garden bed), what has been planted seems to be flourishing.  Our potatoes are thick, tall and healthy.  The green beans are coming in nicely and the lettuce is sprouting.  Our blueberries (planted on the top of the raised bed) are bearing already and beginning to turn blue.  Even the trees that we planted in the Hugelkultur method seem to be doing well! 

In addition to the raised bed, we put in a suntrap using culvert pieces.  We used the same organic material, sod, soil method in the containers and planted tomatoes and peppers.  The containers also seem to be thriving with fruit coming on the bushes and blossoms covering the tomato plants.

Tomatoes making their start

Raspberry Brambles

We've been picking berries every morning!

One of the herb beds

Comfrey growing like crazy in front of "Little Shouse"

Although we haven't made it through a full growing season, we are tentatively excited about our new gardens.  In fact, we are planning another, larger Hugelkultur bed to be built this fall so that it will be ready to plant in the spring.

And so, our adventures in gardening continue - with the first measure of success in fifteen years.  And they say gardening is easy..... 

Chainsaw Gardening

As I've mentioned, Sir Knight and I are trying something radically different in our garden this year.  After many years of traditional gardening, with less than stellar results, we put in our first "Hugelkultur" raised garden bed.   A Hugelkultur bed is nothing more than a raised garden bed filled with trees, branches and bushes - in other words, bulky organic material.  These beds utilize the composting trees to fertilize the garden, providing a constant source of nutrients for years.  The makeup of these gardens also reduce (or eliminate) the need for watering, and if done right, don't require weeding.  Or, at least, that's what they say.....

Our new garden is a complete departure from what we've always known!  As our Mennonite neighbors till, fence and create perfect rows, Sir Knight and I are busy dragging trees (windfalls from our huge wind storm) up from the woods, digging trenches in our yard and gardening with chainsaws!  While their property looks perfectly manicured and tidy, ours looks - well - like a construction zone.  Their beautiful shrubs pose a stark contrast to our ragged, shaggy pile of dirt!

And so, we will watch with great anticipation as our garden grows and evaluate the merits of chainsaw gardening....

Sir Knight cutting the trees into manageable bites

Sir Knight had to take a minute to help Master hand Grenade fly a kite!

We had a dump truck deliver 12 yards of screened top soil for the top of our garden bed

And clover to plant as a cover crop over the entire garden bed

Our friend digging our garden bed trench

Filling the trench with bulky organic material

And filling the trench with soil

Adding the screened top soil

Our new Hugelkultur bed

Sown with clover seed and 8 blueberry plants on top (we will be planting more blueberries)

Our Hugelkultur bed method:

1.  Dig a 2 to 3 foot deep trench (you can build these directly on the ground)

2.  Fill with trees, shrubs, branches (any bulky organic material).  You can mound the organic material 1 to 2 feet above the ground.

3.  Add manure, chicken coup material or other stinky compost (if you have it).

4.  Pile dirt onto the mound, sod side down.

5.  Pile topsoil onto the mound - up to 5 to 6 feet tall.  Our garden only ended up being about 4 feet tall, but I would have rather had it taller.

6.  Plant trees or small brushy shrubs on top (we planted blueberries) and seed all over with a cover crop (or plant with vegetables immediately), and water well.

We'll keep you posted on our Chainsaw Gardening adventures!