Garden and Food Forest Updates

With the end of May fast approaching my garden and food forest are growing quickly and the flowers are blooming.

Over the last few months I have been sharing on and off about my new kitchen garden and food forest. Both are still works in progress but they are coming alive and I'm enjoying watching the plants grow.

Here is a quick update on my new kitchen garden and food forest.

Kitchen Garden

As you can see the kicthen garden is planted, mulched and growing. It is still a bit early but the plants are doing great. I was a bit late getting everything in and I hope next year to have more plant growth by this time of year and hopefully already be harvesting some greens.

I got a basic picnic table and my family and I have been loving eating dinner out there. My son especially just loves it and regardless of the weather he wants to sit out there.

I'm sure my daughter will love it too but she is only just over a week old! ;)

This has been a dream for my wife and I since moving to our homestead about 2 and a half years ago. We are thrilled to see it coming to life.

Above is one more shot of the garden. If you look closely you will notice that some of the beds have logs in the growing area. I'm using these to create moist micro-climates to help some of my plants grow through the heat.

This week's blog post (see link at the end of the post) covers this method and others.

Food Forest

My front food forest is really doing great and I'm thrilled to see all the lupines in bloom (the bumble bees love them!).

The above picture is the "entrance" to the food forest (there is more than one but this is the one that visitors see first).

At this point the main work to do in the food forest is to finish mulching the grass.

As you can see I'm making some good progress and I'm using decent size logs to designate the paths through the food forest.

I hope to finish mulching the whole food forest by mid-June. This way the grass and cardboard will breakdown before the fall.

In the fall I will be adding a lot more edible plants to really build up the abundance in the food forest. This food forest will be almost all perennials but I might add some self-seeding annual vegetables like arugula.

I love seeing this food forest take shape and I can't wait for it to fill out and for the grass to be turned into nice soil!

Next Steps

Tomorrow is a big work day for me. With my new baby recently being born I'm on paternity leave and tomorrow my wife is taking our kids to see her parents. This will let me get a lot of mulching done in the new food forest.

For the garden I do nightly slug checks but I'm not finding many and with the heat coming back I expect to find less. Other than the occasional watering at this point the garden should just take care of itself as it grows.

I won't be harvesting for another couple weeks but I can't wait for a bunch of fresh garden produce!

Thank you!

Weekly Blog Post

• 19 Ways to Deal with Drought on the Homestead
• Companion Post on Steemit - 19 Ways to Make Your Homestead Resilient to Drought

Related Blog Posts

• What is a Food Forest? (And How to Get Started)
• 5 Essential Steps to Plan Your New Garden

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Follow me for more posts all about homesteading, working with nature, and growing your own food: @wildhomesteading

And check out my blog - www.wildhomesteading.com for weekly in-depth posts on working with nature to grow your own food and start/build your homestead.