Busy Life of a Homesteader

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Plants, plants, plants and more plants! This is going to be a busy week at my homestead. I just had 190 native plants show up in a nice big box today plus I picked up 3 evergreen huckleberries (also native to my area).

So much fun!

But now I need to plant them all... and go to work... and work on the business... and repair the deer fence... gulp...

Oh and finish the new garden... yeah... homesteading life can be a bit busy! But it will be worth it when I'm enjoying fresh veggies from the new garden and watching all the wildlife enjoying my new native plants.

Why All These Native Plants?

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The list of plants that just arrived--all bareroots so they need to be planted soon.

I have planted a ton of native plants on my homestead since moving here a bit over 2 years ago. This recent bundle of 190 is actually less than I normally have delivered this time of year.

So why not a couple dozen fruit trees and a ton of berries? Or other food production plants?

My view on this is that by focusing on native plants first I can give my homestead a substantial boost by creating habitat for wildlife. This will help to keep pests under control by avoiding what I call the "oasis garden in the desert" problem.

Imagine you are a critter looking for food. You are wondering through a food desert of lawns, pastures made up of only a couple plant species, or monoculture tree farms or regular monoculture farms. But then all of a sudden you come across some lovely fruit trees, berry bushes, and a lush garden full of yummy produce.

What do you do? Well you stop and munch.

But if instead you showed up and the land around the garden, fruit trees, and berry bushes had been planted with all your favorite native plants (critter's favorite food!) then you (the critter) won't even reach the garden.

You might occasionally nibble a veggie or fruit but the garden, fruit trees, and berries are nothing special. They are not an oasis because the desert has been turned green and abundant once again.

At least that is my theory.

What I will say is that my first year here my large cherry tree got swarmed by birds and I barely got a harvest. After planting over a 1000 native plants which is already resulting in great wildlife habitat I had more cherries than I could harvest.

At the same time there are more birds hanging out at my homestead than ever before. So at least so far it seems to be working.

I should add that I'm also planting fruit trees, berries, and creating a new garden. But I first made sure to green the desert before I got too far along with the food plants I wanted.

The Rest of the Week and the Weekend

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So now I'm off to plant those native plants! But I also need to finish the garden. I already talked a bit about the new garden in my last weekend report but just a quick reminder the garden will consist of 3 large hugelkultur beds.

In the above pic you can see the wood being added to part of it. I uncovered my water line from the well so I had to quickly fill that part back in so the water line would not freeze!

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Here is what that section looks like filled in enough to protect the water line. There are 2 layers of wood with soil/sod mixed in. The sod is on top of the first layer of wood. The next steps is to finish filling in the rest of the bed and then add a 3rd layer of wood on top and start building the bed up.

Lots of work and I need to fix the deer fence since the deer are starting to show up again... hopefully they won't find the damaged section before I get it fixed... fingers crossed!

Thanks for reading this post and I hope you have enjoyed it. Please upvote it and follow me to get more posts on working with nature to start/build your homestead and grow your own food.

Thank you!

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Exciting to read about all these native plants you are adding to develop the natural ecosystem. Hugelkultur is ambitious as well. How long do you wait to plant something on that plot after the wood is buried? Is this for making a rich soil for annuals crop or a more permanent plot for perennials?

Thank you! I'm going to plant in the bed within a week or 2 of finishing it. This year will be mostly annual vegetables but I will be adding some perennial vegetables and more of them overtime. At least 4 and potentially 7 of the perennial vegetables I want to add to it are native to my area :)

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