Starting an Orchard

Part of the dream of homesteading is being self-sufficient as possible, right?  And part of having a blank slate of acreage is to create the vision, right?

However, the reality that comes along with digging six 3-foot holes in shale to plant an orchard is quite tiring and painful.  This is how we spent a handful of hours one spring afternoon -- digging holes, slamming the shale bar, and remarking at how beautiful that day was.

(The wheelbarrow is so old but the trustiest one we have.  Even the wheel is metal.)

Placement for these trees was also something important.  We had to take into consideration the slope of our back acres, where the water flows, and wind direction.

We got three kinds of apple trees, one apricot, one plum, and one pear.  We also got semi-dwarf trees so that we will be able to manage fruit collection (one day) and get fruit a bit earlier than with a traditional root stock.  I like to call it the future orchard, but I've been criticized that six trees don't make an orchard.  

Meh, I don't care.  If one day I get fruit from these babies, I will continue to call it an orchard.  If I end up killing all six trees, then we will pretend this never happened.

(There really is nothing quite like a flowering fruit tree.  So pretty!)

Garden Plan for 2016

We have a lot of plans for the garden this year.  For one, I am so excited that we actually get to participate in growing some spring lettuces and cooler crops -- last year we didn't get the garden in until early June because of the septic installation.

Taking from our experience in the garden last year and the crops we grew, we decided that we need to double the size of the garden.  We want to add about seven more raised beds to grow some other crops we haven't tried yet.  So by the time we are completely installed, the garden should be 50 feet deep by 50 feet wide.  I guess it sounds big, but there's also space to walk around and enjoy the experience of being in the garden... and that really excites me!  I would love to get a bench or something to put out there.

We also have some plans for installing a garden fence.  In the late fall I found a guy selling 200 linear feet of basic fence post with rails.  It was deeply discounted and the guy offered to deliver, so all winter we have had tons of fencing sitting in our garage.  I know we are both looking forward to getting that out of there to get the tractor in to work on it (that's a whole 'nother story/issue that hopefully we will be exploring in a few weeks...). But we should be starting garden fence installation here in a few weeks, which means digging post holes and lining up fencing.  With the amount of fractured shale we have around here, digging the post holes should be pretty interesting....


Ok, back to plants and gardening.

(I have a seriously nerdy way of planning the garden.  It must be the teacher in me!)

Last year we grew: 4 different kinds of tomatoes (but didn't have 100% success because of some blossom rot), lettuces, kale (lacinato & curly), broccoli, English peas, golden beets, red onion, carrots, herbs, collards, cantaloupe, butternut squash, radishes, tatsoi, nasturtium, cucumber, eggplant, red and purple pepper,

This year we are continuing what we grew last year, except for a few that we discovered we weren't that fond of, and adding: spaghetti squash, corn, sugar snap peas, strawberries, garlic, asparagus (we don't expect to harvest this for a couple years), ground cherries, pumpkin, and potatoes.

Last week when I planted the garlic, asparagus, some beets, radishes, and lettuces, I put some chopped up leaf matter in the beds, turned the soil, and then topped off with more of our stash of gardening soil.  All the current beds are ready for planting...

I also have my seed starting operation up and running in our basement, which is awesome!  I have a lot of seeds started, but I really need to start some more of the plants I need to wait until after Mother's Day to plant.

(Two shop light fixtures per row; one cool and one warm bulb in each fixture -- that way you get the whole light spectrum for the plant babies to grow up!)

How do you all start your seeds?  For the past few years I've been very must dependent on the lights-in-the-basement system, but I'd really like something more environmentally friendly.  I would LOVE a passive green house, but a hoop house is probably a good intermediate step?  Not sure about these options yet, but I would be excited to know what others use and have found to be the most efficient.  Obviously hoop houses and green houses serve different purposes (extending season v. seed starting), but I'm just looking for some anecdotal evidence from people who use them.

Cheers!
~L

Raising Baby Chicks

We've been so excited to get our baby chicks.  Surprisingly, they come in the mail!  We ordered 15 chicks -- Barred Rock, Easter Eggers, Rhode Island Reds, and White Leghorns.  We were a little unsure about where we would keep them, but a good friend assured me that playpens in the basement or garage were best.

Here are our cuties eating some chick food to help them get big and strong.  Sadly, though, we lost all but one of our White Leghorns in the first week -- one was DOA, and the other two died shortly after.  It was pretty sad to experience these little babies' deaths, but it's all part of keeping livestock on the homestead.  (At least we don't have kids yet to become attached to any young animals!)

A few pro-tips: 

• Don't put them in your basement.  EVER.  Even if it means having to wait a couple of months to get the babies.  I would never EVER keep them in the basement again.  Everything quickly became dusty and I had to do a VERY thorough cleaning of the basement after we moved them to the garage.
• Death is all a part of this process, so if you want a certain number in your flock, over-order by at least five chicks.  Although our flock is 15 now, which is a good number, I still wish it was closer to 20.
• Don't use pack n' plays as baby pens unless you have them laying from rearing a few children.  We used them and now they are pretty beat up and I'm not sure they'll be useful again in the future.
• Do learn how to sex your chickens -- we ended up with one rogue rooster after we became attached to him, mainly because we thought he was a she and the most natural leader.
• Try to find a local supplier -- it's not ideal to get chicks through the mail, but it's the only way if you want to start rearing them in the middle of winter.  I would wait until March or April next time and get them from a local place. 

Dining Room Dreaded Black Mastic

When you are ripping things up and out of an old house, you just never know what you may find.  We had a good hunch that the entire house had hardwood floors, but what we didn't know is what exactly we would have to do to restore them.

When we began ripping up the tile in the dining room we found this somewhat thick layer of black mastic directly on the hardwood.  After a lot of internet research and a failed attempt with heat guns, I tried applying some citrus mastic remover.  After hours and hours of hand-scraping a small area, I had made minimal progress.  The next thing I tried is when I had the square buffer sander for the upstairs floors, I decided to try it out on the black floors here.  Didn't work.  The sand pad became immediately gunked up -- heat + friction = no sanding off glue.

As the days passed and we made great progress on lots of other projects, we began to fret about this one -- how the hell were we going to get this black stuff off the floors.  I called a couple of professional companies and they were not interested in doing the work -- for one, they wanted to sell me engineered hardwood instead; and two, they were afraid of doing more damage to the floors.

Then Mike came up with a great plan to use mineral spirits.  These are strong, but not as strong as some of the other products out there.  So we ventilated the room well, taped it off from the rest of the house, and then Mike spent two nights (up all night kinda nights) scraping the mastic off after it soaked in mineral spirits.

After as much of the mastic was scraped off as we could, I went over to Home Depot to talk to my tool rental guy.  I had my heart set on getting the random orbital floor sander (it has three sanding discs on the bottom), but there were none left.  He only had square buff sanders (way too weak for this job) or the feared drum sander.  I showed him the pictures and he was pretty skeptical that any sander could fix the floors, but he convinced me to go with the drum sander.

Working with the drum sander was a lot like the first time I rode a roller coaster -- at first I was terrified, and then I was completely thrilled!  When used properly and carefully, a drum sander can be your best friend.  However, if you're not paying attention, it would take literally 10 seconds to screw up the floors completely.

The drum sander is exactly what we needed for this job.  It didn't make it simple -- I still changed the sandpaper at least 10 times because it kept getting gunked.  But the drum sander is what got us down to the original wood.

Here are the floors after polyurethane -- we decided not to stain any of the floors because just the natural hue with poly looks amazing.  Also, if you look closely, you can see that in a few spots there is a little haunting black mark -- these floors will never look like pristine brand new hardwood.  But the great thing is that they are original to the house and we worked our asses off to restore them!

Our Friends, the Bees

We became beekeepers a couple years ago.  My grandfather was a beekeeper and during my entire childhood I enjoyed eating the honey that he harvested.  It's only recently (the last few years) that the last of the honey from his harvest was eaten, and he's been deceased for twenty years.  Mike and I decided to get bees when we still lived in an apartment, but our friends really wanted us to keep the hive at their place.  So we did!

Our first hive! (2014)

We ordered a nuclear colony from a local beekeeper that raises notoriously gentle bees, New World Carniolans, specifically.  There is a clear advantage to getting a nuclear colony, as opposed to a package of bees, because there are already five frames with drawn comb and the queen has established her brood frames.

Sometimes I like to pretend that I am the beekeeper, but that's absolutely incorrect.  Mike is our beekeeper and he is fantastic at it!

Here Mike opened up the hive to show a few visitor to our friends' farm.  They had never been "up close" to bees before.

Now that we have our own property, we plan to expand our apiary efforts here!

Installing a New Septic System

Having to install a new septic as part of the purchase of this property was not something we considered lightly.  It is a HUGE investment and something we knew nothing about.  It is also a costly item to have done on a property, and we were lucky (and innovative) enough to roll it into our mortgage payment to have minimal out-of-pocket expenses.

The other important part of our property purchase and the necessary septic replacement, is that the sellers agreed to contribute some money towards the new septic as an incentive for us to remain the buyers.  They weren't contributing a lot, but it was enough to offset the cost of the soil perc test and design fees.

In February 2015 we had the perc test done.  It was 9 degrees that day and the first backhoe seized up because of the cold and the guys had to drive in another backhoe from a couple towns away.

The purpose of a percolation test provides information on the drainage capabilities of the soil.  Since a septic system is designed to have the liquid seep back into the soil through a leech field, the land engineer needs to show it's possible.  In this particular town, there is a lot of fractured shale in the ground surrounded by a clay soil, so we weren't expecting a good perc test.

In order to find a spot where they could dig down at least seven or eight feet, they had to dig around the yard and by the sixth hole, they were satisfied.

Bill getting a lesson on perc tests from John. 

So at the end of the day, we had a hole with the desirable depth and they were able to perform a percolation test.  They then needed to show the percolation test to the township in order to get the approval to design the new septic.  At some point before installation Mike and the design engineer actually had to go to a town meeting to answer some questions about the design.  But, we finally had our approved design and were just waiting to schedule the installation of the system after we closed on the house.

We bought the property in April 2015 and by the middle of May, work on the septic started.  They install the system from the "end" moving up towards the house.  So, that means that they install the leech field first, which is where the liquid leeches back into the soil.  Since our perc test was less than desirable, we had to pay for extra gravel and sand to create the proper conditions for a leech field.  Below you can see the beginnings of digging out for the leech field.

This was the day when a bunch of dump trucks had to drive across our lawn to the back of the property to dump the sand and stone for the leech field.

As they got closer, they had to install the tanks.  Our system is large because we have two houses sharing the same septic system.  So the system includes two septic tanks and one central pump tank that sends the liquid back to the leech field.  Here you can see the septic tank for our house and the pump tank right behind it.

And just on a side note -- having your entire yard torn up to put a septic system in is not for the faint of heart.  There were certain things that we were not happy about, like how all the dig lines were not seeded afterwards, so now they are all still visible in the yard, or how I had to badger the installer and designer to get a finalized map of everything.

But at the end of the day, the project is done and we can use the bathroom.  If we take care of it properly, this system could last for the rest of our lives...

Half Bathroom Facelift

The third important space on our second floor that desperately needed renovation was the half bathroom.  Of course if money and space was no issue, we would have loved to make it a full bathroom, but with the limitations of space (we tried and tried to figure out how to fit a shower stall in) and the changes that would have to be made in plumbing, we decided to do a "quick" facelift.  We adore the 1940s sink and medicine cabinet, so we kept that; and the toilet was fairly new and in good working order, so we kept that as well. 

After removing the awful pink plastic sheet of "tile," we discovered that the walls were pretty beat up and had some residual crusty 60 year old glue on them.  We had to make the decision whether to rip out the sheetrock (or at least he mid-century version of sheetrock) or to make do.

We also debated heavily whether or not to leave and refinish the rustic wood attic flooring or to cover with tile.  Since we wanted something classic and clean, we decided on this mosaic tile below.  It looks very impressive when installed, but it's much easier to lay out because it comes in sheets like these.

I've never tiled anything by myself, so I laid out all the sheets and marked where I had to trim the tiles around the toiled and sink.  Then I watch probably half a dozen YouTube videos about how to mix thinset properly.

Here you can see that we did NOT tile directly on the wood floor.  We put down a cement board sub-flooring.  To lay down all the tile it took about two and a half hours.  In hindsight, I shouldn't have started it at 9pm, but once you start tiling you cannot stop!

For the walls, considering all the glue damage, we decided to put up wainscoting and trim to achieve the classic look we wanted.  Mike is the carpenter, so he had the task of cutting all the trim to size and installing it with our finishing nail gun.  We originally bought the nail gun to make center piece planter boxes for our wedding, but it really came in handy for this project.  You can't use a finishing nail gun to put a roof on or frame a house, but for putting up trim it is perfect!

Next came paint and installing a toilet paper holder and towel rack.  The best part about the paint is that it was an "oops" can of paint heavily discounted from Home Depot -- we paid only $8 for an entire gallon.  Now to figure out what else to paint yellow with all the left over paint...

Below is a before and after picture of the project.  Total project cost for materials: $275.  Labor: free!

It should also be noted that we didn't have any of these skills starting out -- we really learned "on the job" and figured things out as we went.