5 Steps to Designing your Cold Climate Food Forest
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My Pear Tree Guild
If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know how much I love food forest systems. While growing tomatoes, peas, squash and other annual edibles is rewarding (and delicious!), there is a different feeling that you get from designing and planting a perennial ecosystem of plants. When I plant things in my food forest, I’ve
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Mid-June Greenhouse Tour
If you’re going to have a garden in a cold climate, using some sort of season extension technique helps to increase your yields, get earlier harvests and know that at least some of your plants will be protected from June snows, July hail storms and August frosts! Whether it’s a cold frame, frost cloth, cloches,
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How I Create Supplemental Feed for my Chickens
Chickens are one of the easier backyard livestock to have on our homesteads. One issue I’ve always struggled with, however, is buying feed for the chickens. On our homesteads, we’re always trying to close the loop. In other words, working towards importing as little as possible onto our sites over time. With a suburban homestead,
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How to Plant a Bare Root Fruit Tree
If you’ve taken any of my classes or I’ve consulted with you on your site, you may already know that I most often recommend planting bare root fruit trees to establish your food forest. Bare root trees and shrubs are typically 2 years old and come with, you guessed it, bare roots. So they are
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March Greenhouse and Garden Tasks
March has arrived which means the growing season is ramping up! In my video today, I go over some of the greenhouse and garden tasks that I typically do in this month. They include: 1) Harvesting snow to moisten the soil in the greenhouse. I usually start doing this mid-to-late February and continue until a
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What I do in January to Prep for the Growing Season
In my video today, I share the tasks that I typically do in January to prep for the growing season ahead. I call it a very slow easing into gardening mode. After the madness of what our growing season can be, I’m reluctant to ramp things up too soon. So here are the tasks I’m typically doing
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Top 10 Lessons after 10 Years on our Homestead
This growing season marked 10 years of being on our site. I can’t believe how fast the time has flown by! Sometimes I forget how the yard looked when we first arrived. What I do remember thinking that it already had some great features – a corner lot with a Siberian pea shrub hedge on
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How I Established My Native Wildflower Garden
Despite a bumper crop of raspberries and tomatoes starting to produce, it’s not all unicorns and butterflies over here on the homestead. Weekday harvests in the food forest have been interrupted by the background noise of earthmoving machines. You may recall that to make way for a new development, a substantial wildlife corridor was taken down
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My Top 3 Questions to Ask When Designing your Homestead
One of the most frequent comments I get from potential clients is, “I recently moved to our site, and have no clue where to start.” It’s common to be immediately overwhelmed by the possibilities. How big should your garden be? How many fruit trees do you want and where do you plant them? Should you
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