Homesteading: The 5-Year Plan

Take a minute to ponder something with me.  What would you like your living situation to be in 5 years.  Like many, you may have dreamed of living a more simple, or self-sustaining life, one where you rely on your own efforts to produce much of the food that you eat.  You've heard of the term urban homesteading, and it has a special appeal to you.

Let's take another minute to flesh out that vision a little.  I would like to have a well developed garden for annual vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, and squash.  I'd like to add a few fruit trees that reliably produce fruit I can preserve and make jelly from each year.  If possible, I'd expand that with a few blackberries or grape vines.

With the garden and orchard producing the food to live, I would need to skills to preserve that harvest so that it is more valuable than an occasional radish in the salad.  For me, this means water bath canning, and possibly pressure canning as well.  To get the most out of this, I would need to be able to cook with the tomatoes I canned, so I'll be on the watch for recipes that use the produce I'm preserving.

As I become familiar with the kitchen, I might want to expand into more artisan crafts such as baking my own bread and forming my own cheese.  I might expand into indoor winter gardening with hydroponics and microgreens.  And there are any number of additional possibilities just like these for someone who has begun the process.

As with all visions of this nature, it take inspiration and a plan of action to move from the dreaming stage to making it a reality.  How do we get there?  That's the question we're trying to answer here.

 Year 1.

1.   Establish 4 raised beds.  4 ft by 8, 10, 12 ft, depending on your available space.

1. tomatoes, interplanted with basil
2. Peppers, interplanted with dill
3. Rooting vegetables such as Radish, Turnip, and Potato
4. Zucchini, Yellow Squash, Marigold

 2. Buy 6 fruit trees:  2 mulberry, 2 fig, 2 of plum or your choice (peach, apple, pear, jujube)

        These should be planted in 14" pots and kept watered and fertilized generously.  For the first year you will grow the fruit trees in the pots  to give them a chance to develop into larger and more sturdy plants.  Over the winter, you will bring them into the garage or your garden shed to prevent them from experiencing deep cold temperatures.

While they are growing during the temperate seasons, you want to place the pots around your yard as test sites for your future planting locations.  Notice if they get enough sun, or are shaded by surrounding trees, walls or fences.  Because they are in pots, it will be easy to move them around to different locations to decide where they fit the best into the landscape.

During their first year, you will observe how vigorous their growth is and how they react to their assigned locations.  Vigorous trees should be pruned and developed into cuttings to try to get them to root.  Every year, you should identify two cuttings that rooted successfully and grow them in pots for eventual planting outside.  In this way, the two trees of each type that you started with will develop into an entire orchard

3.  Establish a mulching program.  Identify sources of mulching material, including obvious things such as fallen leaves and grass cuttings.  Then establish your practice for what you will do with them. The obvious answer is to chop them finely and use them for mulch in the garden and under the trees in your orchard.  If you have extra, after gathering them with the mower bagger, stuff them into black trash bags and get them thoroughly wet to aid in decomposing leaf mold.

4.  During the summer months, spend some time on preserving the harvest.  You want to make a start on the foundation of the pantry;  things like strawberry jam, peach preserves, canned tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, homemade ketchup and onion dressing.  There is a unique symbiosis between the garden and the kitchen, and each gardener has to find a balance between what they like to eat, and what they can preserve in order to make that a reality.   There's no point in  growing what you don't eat.  For each creation, you need to find a recipe and the other tools, often specialty kitchen tools.  During the winter months, you are researching dinner menus that use the materials that you have preserved.    If you have 12 jars of preserved cherry tomatoes, you need to know exactly which pre-tested recipe will also be approved of.

5.  Find a way to make your homestead easy to maintain, less complicated with special corners that require lawn professionals to handle safely. 

6.  During the winter, the focus changes slightly.  While produce is no longer growing as abundantly, in the winter it's time to research and formulate plans.   This is the time to research new growing techniques, for example for cultivating tomatoes, or fig trees.  This is when you search your library of gardening book, and of online videos and websites, with a Word document open in front of you to take extensive notes.  Then, you compile all the information you have gathered into a growing guide that covers all aspects of the life cycle of your chosen crop, and tailored to your specific growing environment, zone and microclimate.