Garden Maintenance

As I write this I am sitting in a beautiful hotel lobby in Mexico waiting for a group I am escorting to come check out and head home. My best friend of 40 years is arriving later today and we will spend three days together catching up and relaxing.

At home we are having what I hope is the last freeze of the season. I have many seedlings under lights as well as my 5 hens out on the pasture. I have two bee hives enduring the winter and I have a batch of kombucha fermenting in the pantry. Now, I love my family dearly and they lovingly tolerate what many would consider my strange hobbies. They don’t have the same enthusiasm for them that I do. I don’t generally ask them for help when I go out of town except in very limited circumstances.

So what happens when I go out of town? My husband and I have owned Legacy Travel since 1989 so we travel more than the average person. A couple of weeks from now we are on a cruise, later this year we are in Italy, another time this year we go to Africa for a safari. We are both elite travelers with our hometown airline. We travel ALOT.

So what happens with the bees, the chickens, the seedlings, the kombucha SCOBY and the garden when I travel?

You’ve heard the saying “It takes a village to raise a child”? Well, it also takes a village to keep my operation running. I have managed to knit together the help required to keep things humming while I’m out of town. Of course, I also try to plan when I plant and start seeds around when I’ll be home, but that isn’t always possible.

Here’s my team at the moment:

I have a friend who loves to take care of my chickens when I’m out of town. This requires driving out to the pasture twice per day every day as well as worrying about them when they manage to escape their fencing. If I’m gone for more than a few days, I have a young lady who is a local FFA officer who I pay to take care of them.

Then for my seedlings, If I’m just gone a night or two, my husband will water my seedlings. For longer trips, I have hired a middle school girl who lives right across the street from me. I gave her a garage door opener so she could get in and water the seedlings. I showed her what to do and put signs on each tray to remind her of the requirements of each one.

As the season continues, I suspect that I can show her how to harvest things, check to see if something needs additional watering, etc.

All of this to say, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”. Perhaps you have a more willing interested family than I do. If you look around, I’m betting there are solutions. Like everything gardening related, if you take the attitude “I know there is a solution here…what is it?” the solution will eventually become known. Gardening is pretty much a series of solving one problem after another. This is just another one waiting for your ingenuity!

Sometimes when people start gardening they have the foolhardy idea that they will save money on food. If they stick it out a couple of years they quickly realize the error of that idea.

Nonetheless, both for economy’s sake as well as that of sustainability, I do try to make use of things that are readily available at home as much as possible in the garden.

Here are some of the things available to me that I use in the garden.

Grass Clippings: I don’t use chemical fertilizers or weed killers in the back yard. I have my yard man save all of the grass clippings that come from my backyard. They build up in a pile in my garden. I use them for mulching, composting or at the very least they don’t end up in the landfill.

Leaves: I live in a new subdivision so we don’t have any large trees. My yard man brings me as many bags of leaves that I can use. This year I made wire cages so that I can fill them with leaves and make leaf mold. I also use the newly shredded leaves for mulch.

Egg Shells: I save and dry the shells from the eggs I eat. I crush them up and add them into the worm bin as well as the garden beds when I turn them over in between seasons.

Table Scraps: Non citrus uncooked fruit and vegetable scraps are added into my worm bin. If you haven’t looked into vermicomposting, you should. Worms work hard to make fantastic organic fertilizer.

Fire Pit Ash: Wood ash adds potassium to the garden soil.

Cardboard Boxes: Several layers of cardboard underneath a new garden bed will both keep grass from growing through and attract earthworms into the raised bed soil. (Finally, a justification for more Amazon orders!)

Shredded Paper: That shredder at the office can be a goldmine for you! If you have a worm bin, that shredded paper can be soaked in water and used along with those table scraps to make beautiful fertilizer.

Rainwater: If you don’t have a rain barrel or two, you’re missing out. Captured rainwater doesn’t have chloramine like your municipal water probably does. Chloramine isn’t friendly to microorganisms, so the more you can water with untreated water, the healthier your soil is likely to be.

Garden Waste: For instance, this was the first year I grew califlower. I pulled the plants after I harvested the califlower. I pulled the plant out of the ground and fed it to the chickens. (And, I’ve learned, after the chickens eat the leaves down to the stalk, if I bring it back to the house my dogs will enjoy the stalk!)

As much as possible I try to keep a closed loop between my house and my garden. Use what I already have to make my garden better and more productive.

A couple of weeks ago I was at a family reunion and my very own uncle was surprised to hear that I still work full time and travel extensively for work. My husband and I own a retail travel agency and we each are elite travelers with American who traveled at least 75,000 miles in a calendar year. I am on the road a lot.

He thought I all do was play with my bees, my chicken and my garden.  I suppose that’s what my life looks like to him via social media.  I immediately set him straight.  Some of the other people at the reunion were asking how I work so much and still do what I do outside of work.

Here are some tips to consider if you want to dabble in the various aspects of urban homesteading and maintain a very busy life.

Irrigation

Regular watering is time consuming and really must be done regularly to avoid stressing plants and impacting your crops. This is also a fairly easy thing to automate which frees you up for other activities or to be gone altogether. You can use drip hoses and timers, or you can install a fancy drip irrigation system. Either way, free yourself up from daily watering.

Mulch Mulch Mulch

Mulch is your friend that helps you three ways. To start with, mulch helps supress weeds. This saves time weeding. Also, it preserves moisture which saves time watering. (Or, if you have automated your watering, it at least saves water.) Finally, as it breaks down on top of the soil it provides nutrition to the soil. One of my favorite mulches is grass clippings. Grass clippings are a fantastic mulch and, best of all, FREE!

Mulching With Grass Clippings: Can I Use Grass Clippings As Mulch In My Garden

Let your standards go (a little).

I always want my garden beds to be weed and grass free. I want my chicken coop not to smell. I want to be on top of everything. The fact is, though, during seasons when I am out of town a lot something has to give. For instance, I was out of town starting August 3rd till the 12th. I cleaned the coop the day before I left and today is August 14th and I haven’t been able to clean it since I got home because it’s been raining. It is messier than usual, but I think most chickens live in much less clean environments. I’m not suggesting neglecting them on a long term basis, but missing one cleaning probably won’t hurt anything.

The same thing translates to other parts of your urban homestead. Your bees will probably survive if you don’t open up the hive every single week (although you may think YOU will die not checking on them!). Your garden will live (as long as your irrigation system is watering it) if you don’t pull the grass and weeds out for a week or so.

So, allow yourself to relax and live other parts of your life when you need to.

Large feeders.

My spoiled hens really prefer when I bring them freshly chopped herbs and flower petals from my yard to mix with their dried mealworms and chicken feed. However, the fact is that they are chickens and can certainly eat plain chicken feed. To that end, I do have a large poultry feeder underneath the coop in the run (protected from rain). If they have to, the girls have several days of feed available to them. Also, I have a five gallon waterer and now that the weather is cooling off that is an option also.

Likewise, I have several different sizes of syrup feeders for the bees. I’m not needing to use them at the moment since my bees got honeybound from me feeding them too much! 

Help

You probably have friends and/or neighbors who want to garden / homestead like you do. Let them try it temporarily while you’re gone! I have a dear sweet friend who has been lovingly taking care of my hens when I’ve been gone. I have also established the daughter of a friend who is in FFA (Future Farmers of America) who is experienced with livestock available to take care of the girls in the event my friend isn’t available. You may have a family member who can be trusted to do basic tasks that can’t wait for your return. Look for help.

Timing / Planning 

In a perfect world, I would have planted things like broccoli and brussels sprouts a couple of weeks ago. But, I was about to be gone for most of that two weeks, so I made the decision not to put in new plants or start seeds when I was about to be gone. Yes I sacrificed two weeks of growing time, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to take care of them like they would need.

It’s all about planning and knowing what you can do. (And what you can’t)

Accept that you won’t produce as much as if you were home all the time.

To everything there is a season. If you are in a phase of life when you are working a lot, or traveling a lot, it’s just a fact that your endeavors won’t be like they would be if you could devote all of your time to them. Your garden may not look like the photos in Mother Earth News and that’s just going to have to be okay. You do what you can, when you can.

Remember the goal

I assume you are gardening, or keeping chickens or bees, or whatever, because you enjoy it. It’s supposed to be fun. You probably live near a grocery store and you won’t starve if you don’t grow enough food. Remember, gardening is fun.

Don’t over plant

Northaven Gardens is my favorite local garden store. Usually when I go there, I’m there for something specific. It isn’t very close to my house, so I’m there for a specific purpose. But, I can’t help wandering around and seeing everything. To guard against overbuying, I always start out not getting a cart. So far, every time I have ended up getting a cart. Do as I say here though, and not as I do. If all you have time and space for are 6 broccoli plants, don’t buy 20. Remember you’re going to have to find time not only to get those plants in the ground, but also water, fertilize and harvest.

Go with nature.

There are things that grow well in your area. There are things that don’t. With lots of time and intervention, you may be able to coax other things into producing but if you are short on time, go with the sure things.

Basically, you have finite resources. Just like in all other areas of life, success with gardening within a busy life is a matter of planning and intentionality. You can do it!