The Homestead Garden - Efficiency and Production.

One thing I've learned with age is that the word 'garden' means different things to different people. My neighbor down the road thinks it means a massive spread of tulips. An acquaintance of mine the other way down the road thinks it means a big patch of dirt that he plants way too much sweet corn into because it reminds him of farming when he was a kid. My European friends I've met through the internet think it means "the place with grass where the dog pees" or something like that.

For your average person, though, a garden is a place where they grow some stuff, usually vegetables, that they eat some of and give most of away because they don't know what to do with way too much of something. We'll all meet someone trying to give away a bucket of massive zucchini, sooner or later.

So here it is late June and I'm going to talk about garden planning. Yes, really. I won't be offended if you stop reading and bookmark this for January reading. Promise. There are some things that I've learned over the years that I need to put down, so here goes.

Philosophy of Gardening

From a homesteading perspective, your garden is a significant portion of your food for the year and must be very well planned and very efficient. That will probably mean different things to different people. For some it probably means that it needs to be laid out and organized to allow mechanized cultivation and maybe even harvesting. If your family goes through a lot of potatoes and you have heavy clay soil, nobody on this planet would argue with using a tractor and potato digger. I can't think of a worse job on this planet than hand digging 1/4 acre of potatoes in gumbo. Mechanization is efficient in this situation.

But, here I'm going to talk about what I do. If you've read much of this blog, you've probably realized that I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to my gardening and animal raising techniques. I despise rototillers, I'm probably a bit snobbish about use of any chemicals, and I take great pride in the fact that between my gardens and my chicken setup I haven't spent $500 combined in the last 5 years. All of my tools were homemade or obtained secondhand. Much of our seed is saved from the previous year. To me, this is what it means to be functional and productive. What am I gaining by growing all this food if it costs me hundreds or thousands of dollars to do so? I can buy a whole lot of veggies at the farmer's market for the cost of a rototiller, expensive seed packets, commercial fertilizers, etc.

Garden Design

In keeping with the ideals of efficiency and productivity, my gardens are designed to all be hand worked. Most of the garden is made up of raised beds 4 feet wide by 25 feet long. These beds are easily worked by hand. Some of it is made of 10'x10' patches that corn, melons, squash and potatoes are rotated through. These beds are small enough to reach into with a rake or hoe to cultivate, minimizing foot traffic and compaction, but still square to help make better use of space for vining plants like pumpkins.

Spring Prep

The first thing I do with all garden beds in the spring is rake them off. There's usually some debris and certainly some mulch still laying on the raised beds. This gets raked off and becomes the beginning of this year's compost pile. Step 2 is to test for compaction and do a light aeration of the soil with a fork. I use my big fork for this, if I can bury all 10 inches of tines in the soil easily, I consider the soil ready to plant. If there is some compaction due to foot traffic or excessive rain, I'll lightly lift soil throughout the bed with the fork, but don't turn it over. I don't want to destroy the soil structure by tilling unless it's absolutely necessary. After all that, I pull any remaining weed stems or old plant stems and rake smooth and the bed is ready to plant.


Seed Starting

Under no circumstances should you ever put yourself in a situation where you have to pay $2 for a plant to put in your garden. Learn to start your own plants indoors. Even if you only start them 3 weeks early by putting them outside during the day. Seeds are cheap - free if you save them yourself. If you get good enough at this, you can even sell some of your starts to pay for some of the soaker hoses you're going to need later on.


Planting Planning

If there's one thing we've learned from Square Foot Gardening, it's that plant spacing recommendations on seed packets are pretty much wrong. For example, you do not need 36 inches in all directions between tomato plants. Most other vegetables will behave similarly. I have great looking broccoli heads right now, with plants spaced about 10 inches apart in a grid compared to the standard recommendation that broccoli be planted 18 inches apart in rows spaced 24 inches. What an astounding waste of space that would be. Use your head when it comes to plant spacing. Don't let the seed packet think for you. If you know the plants you're growing, why don't you decide how far apart they should be?


Intensive Planting

I think that generally, plant spacing recommendations are designed to get the maximum yield from each individual plant. If I had only one tomato plant, I would probably keep everything at least 3 feet away from it. Thing is, I don't. I can plant as many as I want. I can blanket an entire garden bed with tomato plants if I want. Why would I want to do this? Well there's a few reasons. Every bit of soil that's not growing a plant is lost space. Think for a moment - would you rather have 2 tomato plants that yield 20 pounds of tomatoes each, or in the same space, 3 tomato plants that yield 15 pounds of tomatoes each? You can do this with just about everything in your garden. Currently, I have two garden beds dedicated to tomatoes. That's 200 square feet that contains 60 tomato plants. By staggering the grid and pushing the plants to about 18-20 inches apart, I make better use of the space. No, none of my individual plants will compete with someone else's plants when it comes to individual yield, but overall, I'll take more tomatoes out of that 200 square feet than I could using traditional plant spacings. There are other benefits to this too - A dense pack of tomatoes that keeps weeds down by choking out light penetration to the ground. The ground on the entire bed is shaded as the tomatoes mature, meaning I lose way less moisture from the ground during the heat of July and August. Mulch helps, living mulch is even more help.

This applies to most things in the garden. Cabbage don't mind being packed together at all. Stagger them and you can get stonehead cabbage to grow well even if planted 3 across in a 4 foot bed. That comes out to something like 30-40 cabbage heads in 100 sq feet of garden. Maybe more. As with tomatoes, does it matter that each cabbage head be the biggest it can be? Or do we want the most cabbage per area of garden? I don't know about you, but I'm not trying to win any state fair ribbons. This is food, man.

A lot of what we're talking about has been said repeatedly by those espousing the benefits of square foot gardening, but we're not going to exist in such a rigid structure. If I have a spot where a pepper plant dies, I'll drop some radishes or lettuce there. Maybe a handful of turnips. Just remember, efficiency is the goal. I have to weed the whole garden, I might as well be growing something on the whole thing.

Companion planting

This is a great way to make better use of space. Do you really need a dedicated space in the garden for short season crops like radishes and spinach? Why not plant them between your slower growing plants like tomatoes? All that garden just sitting there in between those 3 inch tall tomato transplants, waiting to be used. You have to weed it and water it and mulch it. You should grow something on it too.

The whole sun-facing side of your corn patches can be planted in beans, pumpkins, squash, etc. I have planted 'connecticut field' pumpkins IN a corn patch (6 feet from the edge) and so long as they're started early enough, they find a way to send vines out of the patch and find sunlight to feed themselves. Train the vines around the edge of the corn stalks and you'll take 100 pounds of pumpkin out of your corn patch too. Free chicken feed if nothing else.

Pumpkins harvested from a companion planting with corn

Mulching Early and Often

Man, I could go on about mulch for days. You know how you manage a garden that's enormous in minimal time? Mulch it. There is no single thing you can do to reduce the amount of time and effort required to maintain a garden that is more effective than mulching. Minimize weed growth and moisture loss at the same time. I have only one concern about mulch and that is that you don't want to mulch too soon. Cool season crops can be mulched immediately after the soil warms to about 60F. In fact, keeping the roots of your broccoli and cabbage cool will actually help them grow faster. Warm season crops like tomatoes and corn need to be mulched a bit later to prevent stunting their growth waiting for the soil under that mulch to warm up. Typically I mulch cool season crops as soon as they're 3-4 inches tall, and I mulch warm season crops as soon as we have a few 80 degree days to warm the soil.

Mulch everything. If you've got a lawnmower with a bagger, you have all the mulch you need.

*Safety note - Don't use grass clippings from sprayed lawns.

*Advice - In fact, don't spray your lawn either. Clover, dandelions, dock, wild lettuce, they're all infinitely more beautiful and rewarding than a monoculture of tall fescue or kentucky bluegrass. If your neighbors complain about the big native bumblebees and the pretty yellow or white flowers, remind them that the flowers and bees were there first.

Water Efficiently

Ideally, we would all have nice gravity fed drip irrigation systems fed by rainwater catchment. If you do, that's great. This is the most efficient way to water that I can think of. There is cost associated with the drip supplies, but it pays for itself if you're not paying for water. If you're like most of us that water with a well or a municipal/rural water supply, your best bet is soaker hoses. Soaker hoses are better than all other types of watering. They're better than overhead sprinklers because there's no water waste due to wind and overspray, and because you're keeping the water off the foliage, reducing dramatically the risk of fungal growth. Soaker hoses are better than sprinkler hoses for the same reason. Soaker hoses are better than hand watering with a wand because it requires almost no time, and because it waters deeper and slower. Hand watering is ok for very small plants, but your more mature or larger plants will not develop properly without adequate deep watering. Hand watering almost always results in soaking the top 2 inches of soil and leaving the rest dry. If you don't believe me, go try it. Soaker hoses are one of the reasons that my garden beds are 25 feet long. A 50 foot hose goes down and back. If I need to water a bed that is planted in an edge-to-edge grid as would onions be, I use 2 hoses down and back. There's a hose about every 8-10 inches that way, and it fully waters the bed in about 45-60 minutes. I advise you check the flow rate of your soaker hose so you know how much water is coming out of it. You can then use this information to calculate how long you need to leave the hose run in order to properly water a particular area.


Harvest Time

If you've established a mindset of efficiency, getting as much out of your garden as you can based on what you put into it, you're already a step ahead when it comes to harvest. Not all your tomatoes are going to be pretty. If it's split or scarred, so what. You can trim those right up when you can them. The same goes for everything else. Don't let cosmetic flaws turn you away from part of your harvest. It's important to get out of the grocery store mindset, not all veggies look the same and meet the same standard of shape and size.

Even those things that are damaged beyond the point of salvage can go to good use. My chickens eat anything that doesn't go into the basket. If you don't have chickens or pigs or horses you should be composting anything that can be composted. There shall be no waste.

Food Storage

Treat the fruits of your labor with respect. Don't waste something because you didn't get around to freezing or canning it. Plan your harvest so that you can invest the time to properly store everything. If you can't take the time right now to can it, you can probably at least blanch and freeze it. Tomatoes don't even need to be blanched before freezing if you're going to can them or make sauce later. If you're harvesting large amounts of something, learn different ways to store it. Consider drying and freezing as alternatives to canning.

Seed Saving

Many of the vegetables we grow are very easy to save seeds from. The more seeds you save, the less you have to buy. A brief and partial list of things I save seed from: spinach, lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, pumpkins/winter squash, summer squash, cucumbers, melons, peas, beans, corn, potatoes, peppers and probably other things I can't think of right now. This will take you back to your planning phase - the more open pollinated heirloom-type varieties you use, the more seed you can save and the less money you spend next year.


Do it all again

Gardening is an interesting situation we put ourselves in. We don't get many repetitions to get it right. How many times are you going to plant tomatoes in your life? We only have so many summers to practice these lessons. It's important that we learn from what we do every year and then make improvements year over year. Besides, everything is more fun if we're successful at it.

Cheap Chicken Feed?

This is a pretty common question, and something that I think many of us think about at least once in a while. If we subscribe to the ideals of homesteading at all, I think most of us have come to the conclusion that if we're buying chicken feed, we're probably paying more for our eggs than it would cost to buy them in a grocery store. Without going to far into the obvious differences between homegrown eggs and grocery store eggs, I'm going to go over a few things that I've learned over the years that help me cut my feed bill down to almost nothing. How close to almost nothing? It costs me about 90 cents to produce a dozen eggs during the summer, and about $2.00 during the winter. Considering the recent spike in egg prices thanks to bird flu, that's pretty darn good.

So how do we accomplish this?

First of all, you will have to reference a post I wrote a couple years ago about growing your own chicken feed, and the followup post I wrote last year. You can find those here and here. They will get you a good start on storing up homegrown chicken feed for winter.

Today, though, we're going to talk about summer feeding and production. There are a lot of different ways you can save a ton of money on feed.

First of all, let's start with a baseline - assume we buy commercial feed and feed our birds nothing but that. Very easy, very safe. Also very expensive. Various sources put the intake of a laying hen on commercial bagged pellet feed at about 1.5 pounds per week. Let's assume we have 10 birds. 1.5 x 10 is 15 pounds of feed per week. Now if we start counting on April 1 (which is about when I can start letting the birds out in a tractor) and go until about November 1 (which is when it gets too cold to leave them out in the tractor overnight), that's about 30 weeks, give or take a few days. 30 x 15 is 450. So during the pasture season, if you just feed bagged feed to birds in a coop/run setup, you need 450 pounds for those 10 birds. That comes out to a little over 11 40 pound bags of feed. For me, quality chicken pellets are about $17 for that 40 pound bag. $187 to feed those birds for that 30 weeks. Ok now let's figure the cost per dozen eggs. Let's assume that your hens do about what my barnyard mix of cross breeds do, and assume you get 6.5 eggs per day average from those 10 hens during the summer. I'm not going to factor for molting, just for sake of simplicity. That comes to 1365 eggs in that 30 weeks. Round to 114 dozen eggs. Of course you aren't going to actually get that many. Some will be cracked, some will get eaten, then there's the molt to think about, but we'll just use that number to figure. Using $187 as feed cost (and we won't even start to talk about other costs here) that comes to $1.64 a dozen using my rather optimistic numbers. Reality is going to be closer to $1.80-$2.00 in the summer. And then how about winter when your egg production is cut in half or worse?

So what can we actually do about this? Well, Let's start making a list.

1. Feed kitchen scraps - Instead of putting it in the compost pile, feed it to the birds. They'll ultimately turn it into a more concentrated fertilizer anyway.

2. Get them out of confinement - A chicken tractor is one of your best friends here. Not only does it allow the birds some freedom to forage, while still being generally safe from predators, it also gives your birds some freedom to choose what they eat. This is important for happy, healthy birds. If you have the room and a safe area, let them roam during the day.

3. Start gathering feed - I'm going to break this section down further.

I have an astoundingly low-brow method for this. Much of my yard area is has gone from grass to clover over the years. Also, tons of dandelion, dock, and other edible plants that chickens love. I run over a patch of this with a bagging lawnmower and dump the contents into the tractor or run, and let them sort through it. There's lots of greens, not to mention a good handful of grasshoppers and other insects that get mowed up, and they clean it up nice.

Use a maggot feeder - yeah, gross I know, but it's important protein. I've also written about that here.

Your land is probably full of things chickens like to eat. Go pick it and throw it to them. Every pound of that they eat is one pound of expensive commercial feed you don't have to feed them.

Talk to grocery stores and restaurants and ask if they will save waste produce for you. Some will, some won't. Here in my town we have a bread store that sells expired or nearly expired bread, I can buy about 25 pounds of stale bread for $5. That's about half the cost of commercial feed.

4. Find a grain elevator - This is the best way for you to separate yourself from commercial feed. Our local farmer's co-op elevator sells grain in 50 pound bags, and in bulk if I want to have them load up the back of my pickup with a skidloader. Depending on where you live, you might have one of the keys to this system available to you at your local elevator. Current prices here in town put cracked corn at about $6.25 per 50 pounds, whole corn at $5.50 per 50 pounds, whole oats at about $8 per 50 pounds, and then my favorite. Something commonly referred to as DDG or "Dried Distiller's Grain". DDG is a waste product of ethanol production. It's what's left of the corn after the fermentable sugars are used up. DDG is about 25% protein - a key to a balanced diet when you're not buying more expensive feeds like soy meal, fish meal, or alfalfa meal. DDG usually costs about $5.50 for a 55 pound bag.

5. Everything that comes out of your garden - including weeds - goes to the chickens. They'll eat 75% of it if you offer it to them.

Dried Distiller's Grains

Putting these ideas into practice

So by now you're feeding everything edible that comes out of your house to your chickens. You're either pasturing, tractoring, or harvesting/gathering available greens/nuts/seeds and bringing them to your chickens in their confinement. You've stopped buying commercial feed and you want to use bulk grains to make up the difference between what they get from the above methods, and what they need.

It's important to consider nutrition here. I know I've talked a lot about bulk of feed, but quality of feed is important. If you're pasturing/tractoring your birds, they will probably get a lot of the nutrients they need on their own from grazing. A common problem with this model of "feed scrounging" is that many of the greens, scraps, and grains are low in protein on their own. DDG will do a lot to alleviate this problem, being very high protein. There is a potential pitfall here, though. There is more than one type of protein, and you will find that if you feed your hens nothing but DDG and wild greens, they'll eventually start eating their eggs to try to make up whatever protein deficiency they have. This is why it's important to have an alternate source of protein. Whether this be insects they catch at pasture, a maggot feeder, or maybe you just go collect nightcrawlers after a rain and toss them to the birds the next day, you need something. I have one friend who traps minnows from a local pond and then feeds them to his hens. It's really about using your imagination and being resourceful.

For my hens, this breaks down something like this.

Sometimes the hens are in the run, when they are I mow up greens and feed them that. When they're in the tractor I do this too, but much, much less often. I keep 10 birds in a 10x10 tractor and move it twice a day to make sure there's enough there for them to find to eat.

I feed all kitchen scraps I can find.

Any time I'm about in the yard and I find something they'll eat, I grab it and throw it to them.

Everything that comes out of the garden that doesn't go to the kitchen goes to the birds. This includes rotting/damaged/waste veggies.

In addition to this, I give my birds free access to a mix of whole corn, DDG, and whole oats. I mix this as 2 parts DDG, 1 part each of whole corn and whole oats. Some of this corn I grow, some of it I buy, depending on the time of year. On average, I spend approximately $12 per month at the elevator on those grains. This is what it costs to purchase the amount of grain that the hens eat from the feeder that supplements their foraging and the feed-stuffs that I collect for them. If I could expand my corn growing operation I could probably cut this down to $8/month, but I don't find this to be worth the extra space and work.

$12 per month comes out to $84 over the course of that same 30 weeks that bagged commercial feed costs someone else $187. If I use the same formula I used above, that means that hypothetically my cost is about 73 cents per dozen eggs. In reality it's about 90 cents - which is why I can safely say that the $1.64 I mentioned above is a low estimate. In the end, though, I spend slightly less than half to feed my chickens of someone who buys bagged commercial feed. And here's the kicker - the more hens you have, the more real dollars you can save. If you have 30 hens, you could easily cut your summer feed bill by $300. Whether this is worth it or not is a big question that you'll have to answer for yourself.