Welcome to our Blog

In March of 2011 my wife and I quit or jobs, cashed in our chips and left the big city behind to move to our farm hidden away in northeast Georgia. These are our observations on the news of the day and our adventures in homesteading, becoming self reliant, prepping and living a simpler, more fulfilling life.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Homestead Report: The First 5 Months

            Since we just started this blog I thought I would fill you in on what we have been busy doing over the first 5 months. Once we got everything moved in we needed to get a garden started. There had been a garden here for years but had not been used in 4 years. It was overgrown and covered with grass and weeds. Since it had a tall fence around it to keep the deer out we decided to replant it.

                                                                                Our son and his family came for a visit so I put my granddaughters to work

We broke up the ground with a tractor but it still needed tilling. There were 2 old tillers that came with the place and I was able to get one of them running good so we tilled the garden. That was alot of hard work but we were now ready to plant. My wife MJ had done the vegetable garden thing when she was a little girl, I really had no experience gardening at all. So with our limited experience we set about seeding our garden.                                                      
                                                                                                                              MJ working in the garden

We planted corn, sweet banana peppers, bell peppers, okra, tomatoes, green beans, radishes, cucumbers, watermelon and cantaloupe. Everything grew fairly well except for the cantaloupe and corn. We did get some corn but not much, not sure why yet.. Cantaloupe just didn't grow good and never ripened. We put up lots of okra and green beans and bought some corn at a local farm and put it up.  We ate everything else except MJ did pickle a bunch of cucumbers and they turned out great. We had a major issue with the grass growing back up in the garden so this winter we are going to cover it with black plastic to kill it.
           I'll get MJ to explain how she prepared the corn, green beans and okra for freezing and how she pickled the cucumbers. We'll do a post on it very soon. If I had known that I was going to do this blog I would have taken more pictures and been more detailed about the garden. I will be more detailed with future projects....... To be continued
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2 comments:

  1. GreltamSeptember 12, 2011 at 12:03 PM

    Hello, I am new to gardening. I tilled a 50'x50' plot in my lawn and planted. From my experience and research, I can conclude that a layer of mulch is necessary to discourage weed development and nourish the soil. Take a look into sheet mulching, where a layer of newspapers/cardboard is put down to kill the weeds, and compost/fertile soil is placed next, then a layer of mulch(e.g. straw/shredded wood) to prevent erosion, increase water retention. I will be prepping it this fall for next year's growing season. The documentary Back to Eden(http://backtoedenfilm.com/) is about sheet mulching and benefits.

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  2. JPSeptember 12, 2011 at 12:33 PM

    Thanks for the info. I read your comment to MJ and she said she had heard of sheet mulching before. We'll check out the Back to Eden documentary.

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