Working on the Garden, New Trees and an Eco-lawn - Weekend Homesteading Report

Busy busy weekend as always on the Wild Ride Homestead! Got some new fruit and nut trees, mowed my eco-lawn for the first time this year, and continued to work on the new kitchen garden.

But I also got to spend time outside with my family and had a lot of fun with them. My son loved helping out with the garden and he also found a slug which became his temporary pet :) lol, he loved just walking around with the slug sitting on a leaf that my son refused to put down. The slug was very small.

New Fruit and Nut Trees

My fruit and nut tree order arrived in the mail and I also got one from a local nursery over the weekend. All in all I got 3 hazelnuts, 1 cherry, 2 apricots, 2 European pears, and 2 pawpaws trees.

The 2 pawpaws and the cherry tree both got planted in my new front food forest that I mentioned on a few of my other weekend homesteading reports.

The pears, apricots and hazelnuts all went into a different food forest area that used to be an old parking lot. I mentioned this area in a previous weekend homesteading report. I'm very excited to be turning this area into a food forest.

My next steps in this old parking lot food forest will involve setting up brush piles on contour and then broadcasting 2 types of native lupine seeds as a living mulch. I will also be mulching some paths using wood chips.

The lupines are nitrogen fixers and get deep taproots that should really help to improve the soil. The brush piles on contour will help hold water and keep the leaves from blowing away.

I can't wait for this old parking lot to be green with life!

Pawpaws naturally grow in the sub-canopy of forests so I decided to mimic this environment by putting a lot of mulch and even a small brush pile near them. In the picture you can see one of the pawpaws and the work I did around it. The earlier picture shows the same pawpaw before I built the brush pile and put the mulch down.

This is all part of my efforts to work with nature and rewild the land to create a true wild homestead.

I'm also going to be making some basic shade cloth structures to keep the pawpaws from getting too much sun until they get established.

The Eco-Lawn

Overall I'm not a big fan of lawns but they do serve their role. But if I was going to have one I wanted it to be smaller than the existing grass area and I wanted it to be easier to maintain and more environmentally friendly.

So last summer I put in an eco-lawn using solarizing which if your interested in that method of land prep I wrote a blog post that covers solarizing along with 5 other methods for land prep.

But basically solarizing involves using greenhouse plastic to kill off the existing vegetation. I'm reusing the greenhouse plastic to prep other areas this year and I will be building basic greenhouses out of it later on.

I really like this eco-lawn. The grass mix was chosen by the company I got it from to only need to be mowed once a month and never watered or fertilized. I use a unpowered reel mower to mow it and it only takes me about 15 minutes to do it all.

The grass mix also has micro-clovers in it and I also got some small flowers growing in it too that can handle being in a lawn--that includes dandelions which I'm not removing.

I'm also mowing it at a higher height than normal--about 3 inches. This helps to minimize watering needs and naturally keeps weeds down.

This weekend was my first day mowing it this year and I was amazed at how quick it was to mow and how easy it was. Plus the reel mower makes it so much more peaceful to mow. My wife and son were just hanging out near the lawn and we could chat while I was mowing.

Kitchen Garden Update

The kitchen garden is an ongoing project. I finally got all the grass dug out and started digging out the final 2 beds. There are 3 beds in total. Each bed is fairly large and together they go completely around a new outdoor gathering area which will include an outdoor kitchen in the future. There will be 3 entrances/exits to this area between the garden beds.

The garden beds are all hugelkultur beds and being built to be about 2 feet below ground level and about 2 feet above ground level. If you want to learn more about hugelkultur beds check out my blog post introducing the concept.

But hugelkultur beds are really just beds with buried wood. This mimics what happens in nature with nurse logs.

As you can see in this picture I still have a ways to go. Next steps are to finish digging out the beds and then add wood back in and then the removed grass and then some soil. Then I need to add more wood and add the frames to the raised parts of the beds and eventually add more soil on top of the final wood layer to finish the beds.

I'm also adding snags and some rock features plus some woody debris to make this a truly wild garden.

The Next Week

I hope you have enjoyed this weekend homesteading report. I got more planting to do but the kitchen garden will be taking up most of my time over the next week and through the weekend. Though it will likely take another 2-3 weeks to finish it. Not ideal since I need to get seeds in but that is just how it goes.

What about you? What gardening or homesteading projects are you working on? Please leave a reply sharing what you are working on.

Thanks for reading!

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This Week's New Blog Post

• 3 Things Your Garden Needs to Attract Birds
• Companion Post on Steemit - What You Can Do to Attract Birds to Your Garden

Related Blog Posts You May Find Interesting

• How to Work With Nature to Rewild your Homestead (And Why You Should Do It.)
• 6 Methods for Preparing Land for Planting
• Hugelkultur Beds: The Best Raised Beds for Your 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.