Dreams Coming True

Remember all those ideas for the cabin? I'm actually doing them now

If you’ve been subscribed for a while, you’ll remember my lofty plans for a permaculture food forest at the cabin. You’ll also recall that very few of those ideas actually became reality. Oops.

Actually living in a house with a backyard garden, it turns out, makes accomplishing all these things much more straightforward. I thought it might be nice to share photos and some of the projects from our first year living in New Hampshire.

That includes:

• A Veggie Garden

• Growing Garlic

• Mushroom Logs

• Foraging

I’m learning a lot and we’re having tons of fun growing food.

Rebuilding the Backyard Garden

Before

When we moved into this house, the backyard had an old garden that had gone feral. It needed to be cut down to the ground, down to the roots. There was no other choice, sadly. I’m quite proud of the sweat-equity here.

I did save some peony tubers at least

I first pulled every plant by hand. The bittersweet had taken over. Every layer deeper I dug, I found more and more red roots. I cut and pulled and cut and pulled.

The only thing worse than bittersweet is landscape fabric. I took out hundreds of square feet of it, which was about a dozen bags for the dump. I removed rocks and bricks and stumps. Finally, I was back to zero. Time to add in some raised beds.

I ordered and built some metal raised beds. I put cardboard and hardware cloth underneath the beds to prevent plants and critters from coming up from under them. Then I filled the raised beds with wood, composted grass clippings, leaves and a loam/compost mix. Then more organic compost. Finally, some plants and some straw to keep the soil moist.

The last step was adding the wood chip mulch around the area to suppress weeds.

All willing, we’ll have lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and broccoli this year.

Growing Garlic

When I was at The Spotted Duck for ice cream last fall, I bought a bag of seed garlic. We planted one bed of garlic, which should be about 40 new garlic bulbs. This has been totally hands-off, except a little watering on hot days.

We recently harvested the scapes and made some pesto. The garlic itself should be ready to harvest soon. We’ll save some to plant again next year and likely grow even more.

Shiitake Plugs & Winecap Spawn

Mushrooms are a long-game. This past spring, I chopped down a little maple tree with my father-in-law on their property. The plan is to start growing shiitake mushrooms.

We drilled, plugged and sealed about ten logs with shitake plugs. I also threw some wine cap spawn in our mulch bed. We’ll see when it all starts fruiting. 🍄

It takes about a year for shitake to start showing up. The best part of these mushroom projects is that they will yield mushrooms for years. Each inch of diameter of the log is about a year of fruiting life. So we’re looking at about five years of shiitakes here.

Foraging & The Local Food Scene

The last thing I’ll add is that I’m loving the abundance in New England. Edible mushrooms pop up all over the rainy woods. There are also so many amazing farmers and bakers around here. We have a local co-op that has fresh local produce every day. We live close to two farms that have pasture raised meat and CSA veggies. We could bike to both!

Breakfast from this past week included locally baked french bread, local eggs, our chard and kale, foraged chanterelle mushrooms and locally roasted coffee.

With all the insanity in our world today, I’m grateful to have the resources, time and space to grow some food and share it with our family, friends, and neighbors.

Growing food, saving seed, buying local organic food, sharing that abundance with neighbors - I’ve had dreams of doing these things for many years and now is the perfect time to start.