Every few days I have just enough veggies from the garden to create a meal without adding much store bought stuff to it. This time it was used for making our own version of stir fry.
I picked and prepped some fresh carrots, sugar pod peas, shallots (green onions), and a couple of leaves from my horseradish plant. I cut the center ribs out of the horseradish leaves because it's quite tough and woody. The leaves are very mild once cooked. I matchstick-cut the carrots after scrubbing them. I angle-cut the peas and green onions. And I ribbon-cut the horseradish leaves.
I put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet, since I don't have a wok, and lightly sauteed the veggies.
I added some of my home canned pork along with the broth from it.
I also added a few tablespoons of home canned mango jam and a couple of my farm fresh eggs. I thickened the sauce part with just about a tablespoon of cornstarch.
I added a few splashes of soy sauce then cooked it all together till the eggs were done.
Served the stir fry over rice to round out the meal.
I hope you make this, too, or something similar. If you do, share what you did in comments. I'm always looking for cooking ideas!
I certainly hope so! I’ve begun my gardens on my new homestead. Not a lot planted yet, but the ground is broken in some places and a few early crops have been planted.
I’ve also put seeds in starter trays in my portable greenhouse. They haven’t sprouted yet. I always get nervous until I see the first baby green leaves coming out of the soil! I put lettuce, two kinds of tomatoes, spaghetti squash, cucumbers, watermelon, and pie pumpkin seeds in them. I do still have some of all of these seeds left if it turns out I need to replant them.
We built a new chicken run to attach to the previous small one. This will keep the chickens from eating the seeds and tender new plants in the garden areas. We’ve tilled up a very nice spot for potatoes, and will continue tilling other locations for more gardens.
I was able to move 3 of my old raised beds to the new homestead, so I’ve started them over again as well. I put cardboard on the ground under them to block weeds. (Most of the grass here is fescue or bermuda grass.) I put a mixture of topsoil, peat humus, and composted manure into one bed to get a bit quicker start on it. I hope I can dig up other soil from the property, but I needed a “quick fix” for this first bed. In it, I planted some green peas, mixed lettuce, and mixed radishes. I didn’t fill the bed with these veggies, so I’ve got room to add a few other things to it.
We’ve been getting the goats out and putting them on tethers to eat down the proposed garden areas. It works out very well all around. I get a cleared garden spot with bonus fertilizer and they get full tummies of grass.
The small tiller, various garden tools, and fertilizers and soils were all from my late brother-in-law’s collection of garden tools and amendments. Sis let me have them since she doesn’t garden. (In her words, “I don’t garden and you can’t make me!” lol) Her late husband was a Master Gardener and wound up with a large array of tools, books, and soils/fertilizers.
As we tilled the proposed potato patch, we also dug out the larger clumps of fescue grass. While fescue is excellent for pastures (where we live, it will grow even in the winter), it clumps up pretty big as it grows, sometimes making walking over the field difficult due to stumbling! Those clumps, some large enough to fill a 2 gallon bucket, are being tossed over into the pig pen and chicken yard where the pigs and chickens are enjoying eating them, rooting in them, and scratching them apart.
Along with veggies, of course, there will be flowers. I was very pleased to find that some previous resident had planted loads of daffodills in the past, but they were in a very unlikely location – in the center of a bunch of privet hedges! So, we’ve been busy digging them out and moving them to places where we can enjoy them much more, such as a row of them in front of the cabin. There’s still more to move, but I have planned where I want them around the perimeter of the yard, to define it.
I also brought my daylilies, regular lilies, violets, irises, and butterfly weed with me and got all those planted out in a bed at the front edge of the front yard. All these flowers are beautiful and pretty well native varieties, but the daylilies and violets are also edible! Along with these I moved things like monkey grass and purple wood sorrel, which are still in pots but will be planted over the next few days.
None of my herbs except rosemary survived the move, and even the rosemary is looking pretty sick. The buck goat we had got loose and had a “fight” with it, knocking it down, scruffing it badly, and even breaking some branches off. I’m hoping it make a strong comeback this summer. Last summer and fall, it did seem to be growing.
I also brought over the Jerusalem Artichokes, and we recently added some, fried up like fried potatoes, to a meal. They were excellent so I hope they really do well. I want to try pickling them and also making relish from them! They never did bloom last fall so I’ll leave the rest of them alone to see if they take off again. I had uprooted them for the move last summer after they’d already started growing, so that set them back a lot.
Now, tell me what you’re doing or planning for this spring!
One of our projects for sustainability is our solar aquaponics setup. I am going to need a new 12 volt water pump for it and a new small battery and small solar panel to run it, but at least we have moved the fish tank and grow bed over to the new homestead. I'll tell you, THAT was a lot of work!
We had to use a broken shovel (the handle was broke out of it awhile back) to dig out the gravel from the grow bed. It's somewhere around 400 pounds of gravel. My son did the digging out and put it in a bucket, and I dumped the buckets of gravel into an old tub from a washing machine. When the level of gravel got pretty low, he just dug it straight out and over into another old tub. Both of those were in the back of the pickup truck, which we backed up close to the setup.
Once the gravel was all out, we disassembled the bell siphon and any other loose parts, then put the grow bed into the back of the truck. Then, we had to empty the fish tank part, which only has minnows in it, and try to catch all of those we could. I think we had about a dozen or so in there that we put into a 5 gallon bucket of fresh water, so we may have missed some little ones.
Then my son took a car washing brush and scrubbed out the fish tank, rinsed it, and put it in the truck.
Finally, we took the whole setup over to the new place, put it in its permanent location (face it, you can't really move something like that again), filled it with fresh water, and put the minnows back in it. We also did a little "remodeling" to make it easier to access the fish, since we are wanting to get real fish that we can grow for food in there a bit later.
Now I just need to get a new pump, battery, and solar panel, some plants for the top, and reconfigure a hoop greenhouse over the top of it to help grow things in cold weather, too.
One step at a time! Hope you enjoy these two videos about moving the aquaponics setup!
I barely planted anything this year, after learning that we would have to move. But, I had already planted sugar snap peas and potatoes early on. That means, I’m getting tiny harvests of peas now, and I’ve already dug all the potatoes.
Why did I dig them so early? Because we wanted to go ahead and eat them as “new potatoes” with a few meals. The potatoes I planted were just some that were given to me. They had chitted on their own, so I dug up a bed, added well rotted hay, and planted the potatoes in it. They grew very well, even though they did suffer a freeze two nights in a row after they had sprouted.
And, oh my goodness! Did they ever taste good! I probably only planted about 3 pounds but we got five good meals out of what grew, and it was basically all free, so you can’t beat that! I’m hoping next year, at the new homestead, I can plant a lot of potatoes to store and can for the year.
I had told myself I wasn't going to try planting potatoes this year. I tried a method last year that I'd seen online. (Probably a big mistake to learn it there.) Anyway, I planted potatoes in very good soil into feed bags. They grew beautifully. The problem is, they didn't make potatoes. Just beautiful plants! That's not what I wanted. I wanted something we could eat.
Those ^^ are the potatoes in feed sacks.
See how beautifully they started out?
I even put some in containers!
So, I swore off planting potatoes. They take up a lot of room and I only have raised beds to plant them in.
I'm a glutton for punishment, I guess. Either that or I really want to get this potato growing thing down well enough that I can grow enough for us to have at least 6 months' worth, if not more. So, the other day I headed back out to the garden and planted...you guessed it...potatoes. This time I did a more traditional method of planting and put them in the dirt of one of my deeper raised beds. Keeping my fingers crossed this works! I used potatoes from my storage that were trying to sprout anyway. I did NOT cut them. They were fairly small anyway. I did put them about 2 feet apart in the bed and covered them well. I had amended the bed with well-rotted hay.
Yes, I know potatoes can be bought pretty cheaply year round, but just being able to produce them here, on the Mini Homestead, would be another step toward food independence. So, without further ado, here's my video from when I planted the potatoes. Any suggestions are always welcomed!
Brrr!! It sure has gotten cold again! Last weekend, we had temperatures in the mid and high 70s. Today, it's windy and in the mid 40s. I'm so glad I got some things planted while it was decent weather for working outside.
Part of what I planted was sugar snap peas, radishes, and collards. All those things do well when the ground is fairly cold so I expect they will make their presence known very soon. As usual, I made a video showing the planting of these vegetables. I hope you enjoy the video. Be sure to check out my YouTube channel for more homesteading videos! And don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe so you can stay caught up with what's going on here!
I want to share with you all the source of my heirloom seeds.
I bought seeds from a fellow YouTube publisher who lives completely off-grid, works odd jobs to support herself, and sells heirloom seeds on her own website. She also sells some plants and produce at a farmers market close to where she lives. She really is living the life of off grid homesteading, and she works very hard at it, too!
She goes by "Arky" and has the YouTube channel "Crystal Cottage Off Grid", where she shares her successes and failures, her ups and downs, all along the way.
You can find her by clicking the link for Crystal Cottage Off Grid and watch her many adventures in primitive living.
If you are interested in buying seeds from her, just visit Crystal Cottage Seeds. She offers free shipping in the US and only $3 shipping to Canada. I bought 10 packets of seeds from her back in January and planted the collards over this past weekend. I'm anxious to get the others into flats in my portable greenhouse and get them started.
Here's a video I made showing the seeds I got and giving you more information about her and another YouTube publisher. Take a few minutes to visit them both, subscribe to them, and be sure to comment. YouTube publishers love comments!
My friend, who is also on Facebook and YouTube, has thrown down the gauntlet for a 30 Garden Challenge. The challenge is to do something toward gardening every day for the next 30 days.
I have to tell you -- I have spent the past weekend really doing a lot of digging and planting. So, I wondered if I could make that account for 2 days. Of course! (What are friends for?)
I've already shared this on my YouTube channel, but I'm going to share her video here, too. Go visit her channel, leave a comment, and subscribe. It's free and, who knows, you might learn something!
