Honey Wall Homestead Part 1

As I mentioned in my previous post our family has been very busy. Very busy indeed, becoming homeowners.

We bought our first home! Which is actually a mini-farm! We have always dreamed of moving to the country and homesteading. And for a long time it was a pipe dream. With a whole lot of hard work and a little bit of luck we are literally living our dream.

We moved about 70 miles west, into the woods, to the area of Massachusetts known as the "boonies". Surrounded by farms, country roads and quiet. Ahhh.

With a lot of help from our family and friends we started turning our place into a farm. It took us our first month to get the homestead up and running.

It was a long process which would make for a very long post so I'm going to post in parts. I'll start with putting in the garden. About 80% of the property is woods and everyone knows a garden needs a great amount of sunlight. So it began...

Step 1: Clearing land

Before

After

Step 2: Rototilling

Step 3: Putting up a fence

We opted for a rustic fence which cost us barely anything because all the wood was free. I wanted the fence to blend in with our surroundings and be harmonious instead of standing out.

Step 4: Planting the garden

Here we have our peas, bush beans and pole beans. Our peas are will grow right up the fence and we constructed pole and string tee pees for the pole beans.

We also made a tee pee for our mini pumpkins. Those were planted along with eggplant and marigolds.

This is our strawberry patch. We have about 24 plants (3 varieties, 8 of each). It doesn't look like much this year but hopefully next year it will be bursting with fruit.

In the far back is all our squash (winter and summer), pumpkins, watermelon and cucumbers. Center is lettuce, arugula, chard, spinach and kale. To the right is basil, tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, brussel sprouts and broccoli.

After everything was planted I mulched all unplanted areas deeply for weed control and walking paths.

Our herb garden is planted next to the back deck (right near our kitchen) so I don't have to wander all the way out to the garden for herbs when I'm cooking.

Potted row, front to back: gerber daisies, mint, chocolate mint, apple mint, dill and gerber daisies.

Planted row, front to back: thyme, sage, and oregano with lavender in between each one.

Front row: marigolds

Anything that I couldn't fit in the garden and would grow well in a pot was put into our container garden. Here we have three cute cubs with our remaining tomatoes, peppers, carrots, zinnias, cone flowers and more marigolds.

That's our garden.

Did you plant a garden this year? What are you growing?

Up next: Part 2