My Productive Homesteading Weekend

Urban homesteading - The act of transforming a suburban home into a property that produce some or all of its residents own food and other subsistence needs. Participation in home-based activities such as gardening, raising poultry or small livestock, minimizing consumer purchases and generally seeking ways to increase self-sufficiency in a city or suburban environment.

The creation of an urban homestead with the goal of reducing one's environmental impact and returning to a home-based, family-centered, self sufficient way of life. - as defined by urbanhomestead.org.

Every now and then, or at least once a month, I spend a good part of the weekend doing things that many would find odd. I juggled the oven and spent hours in the kitchen. So here is what I did this weekend:

Grinding saved egg shells. This will be used in my garden, mainly with my tomato plants, boosting the calcium.

Made my bi-monthly granola with the finishing perks of dried apples and pears.

Made my almost, whole week of morning green smoothies. Its been almost a year of having mainly green smoothies for breakfast. This batch is spinach, blueberries, peaches and bananas. Stored in mason jars in the fridge, a little shake and you are good to go.

My indoor lettuce seedlings are sprouting and growing towards the sun. Can't wait to enjoy my indoor salad bar. 

Painted my dining room part of the kitchen, below the chair rail. Soon we'll update the wall color above the chair rail and kitchen to do list will be complete.

Pancakes, breakfast during the week can be a lot easier with homemade frozen pancakes in the freezer. I made a batch of pancakes, from my homemade pancake mix, cinnamon pancakes.

Baked two loaves a sandwich white bread, which will last my family roughly two weeks, depending on my husband's appetite.

Not bad for a weekend trying to get things accomplished and ahead of the game. All this and I still got frozen yogurt with my family, went to swimming lessons, going to a consignment sale, cleaning and gardening, including reseeding tomato plants I killed in the greenhouse. This is a year of learning as I try to expand my gardening skills.

A planting I shall go...

Back in early April, I started my garden by planting seeds. Since it's cool outside with warm weather soon to be on its way, I planted the following seeds: spinach, lettuce, carrot, squash, cucumbers and onions.

Here is the garden growing as of Mother's Day.....

Carrot Forest

Cucumbers, pickles will be in our future. 

spinach

onions with a few left over carrots growing.

So the first weekend after Derby, which is a standard event that marks planting your garden in Louisville. Because everyone knows up until then it could be sunny, rainy or even snowy. With that date in mind, I took a vacation day the Monday after Mother's day just to plant my garden.

The day before JP helped me take the compost out of our two bins. It was nice to see that rich black soil that we made from our food scrapes, leaves, grass and chicken coop straw. There was enough to fill the potato bed high and add some to each of the other raised beds to be worked into the soil. With joint effort we got this done rather quickly.

I woke up just as if it was another work day, went through my routine. Dropped little bit off at day care and stopped on the way home for a jog. By 9 a.m. I was dressed in a tank top, overalls and boots. Wheel barrel, shovels and garden plan out and ready to go. It took several trips to get all the plants down to the garden.

Reviewing the garden layout, I got all the plants next to their raised bed. I made sure to rotate plants into different beds. Here are the beds after hours of work, joyful work.

Pepper plants I purchase from the farmers market, half of mine seeds did not sprout.

Here are some of my pepper plants, small compared to the others I purchased. 

Tomatoes

More tomato plants!!

So after all was said and done, I planted 50+ tomato plants including cherry, yellow pear, roma, early girl, beefy and heirloom, 30+ pepper plants including bell pepper and banana, 9 squash/zucchini. It was  a wonderfully cool slightly breezy day, with the sunny popping in and out. I also planted a bed of potatoes.

Now I just need to keep it de-weeded, watered and growing. This is going to be our best garden yet, can't wait to see all that it produces.

Here's whats growing in my herb garden...

Basil

Oregano

First Strawberry

Thyme

Less then an week later.... this is what I saw, my greenbeans sprouted

This past weekend, I sat down with a nice hot cup of tea looked out the window into the winter cold and thought of my garden. Since I have a greenhouse this year, I can get my seedlings started early and not take over the dining area in the house.

So I got out my graph paper to draw out my current garden of raised boxes. Took out of the cupboard my stash of seeds and seed catalog, now I can begin to plan. This year I plan on adding zucchini and summer squash to the list, dropping the peas because I did not get a lot with the space I have. And mini bell peppers, I still need to find a place to order these from.

So this year I’ll be planting green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, mini bell peppers, pumpkins, carrots, greens, spinach, broccoli (one more time), melons (watermelon and cantaloupe), onions, zucchini, summer squash, and cucumbers. I also still have the strawberry patch in the back, along with the herb garden. The blueberries and raspberries, and hoping to add blackberries this year. Lastly, I hope to add two apple trees, I want a small orchard in our back yard!

Now I need to purchase some soil, finishing placing everything on the garden layout so I can figure out how many seedlings to start. Order a few seeds. Then in mid-February, I’ll get the seeds planted and set out in the greenhouse.

What are you planning to grow this year?