The Backyard Farming Connection Hop #33

Our garden here in NY state is bursting into life.  Most of the seeds are planted and everyday there is always something outside on the to-do list. 

Just a quick note if you haven't seen the fabulous giveaway going on over at Farm Chit Chat on the new page, stop over and enter to win some great prizes.

This week's featured posts both discuss specifics to get your garden growing and producing this year.

If you haven't checked out the Homestead Garden - stop over and see all the great resources there, and check out this one on Pepper Varieties.

And from the Self-Sufficient Homeacre, get all the details on growing fruit trees.

  

I want to know what's happening, in your garden, on your homestead, in the barnyard, and in the kitchen.  Whatever is in your backyard farm and home, I would love to hear about it.

Each week I will share some of my favorite posts on the Backyard Farming Connection Facebook page.  And in case you haven't seen, I have a 'featured button' so if you've been featured in the past, grab a button.

For details on linking up visit the hop page.


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(If the HTML for the buttons doesn't work, feel free to just save the photo and link it back to this) page.

Beneficial Flowers For Your Edible Garden

For us food growers, it can often feel like flowers just take up space where a food crop could go.  But growing flower alongside other crops can be beneficial on many levels.  Including flowers in your garden can deter or attract bugs, create microclimates by shading certain areas, add some color to your existing vegetable beds, and can become food themselves.

Now if you know me at all, you know I would never suggest pulling up your garden and replacing it with all flowers, but there are many ways to tie flowers into an existing food garden.  Placing flowers at the end of rows, or interspersing them with the other plants can completely shift the feel of your garden space.  Traditional cottage gardens used this method and squeezed a variety of plants into a small space including ornamental, edibles and anything else that took the gardeners fancy. Marigolds are one of my favorite flowers to add to the vegetable beds to help deter nematodes from attacking my vegetables.  I also love to go through my flower gardens and stick extra vegetable seeds and plants in any empty holes.

If you are looking to add flowers to your vegetable gardens this year, here are some things to consider.

Choose Flowers to Attract and Deter Bugs

There is a bit of controversy out there as to how well flowers can work to deter bugs, but the idea that certain flowers deter bugs is an old one.  Here are some plants that may help deter pests:

• 4 o'clocks - help kill japanese beetles
• Chrysanthemums - kill and deter Japanese Beetles and nematodes
• Nasturtium - deter a variety of pests

For more flowers that deter bugs, check out this article by Greg Holdsworth at Vegetable Gardener

Not all bugs are bad, and we often want to attract beneficial bugs to our garden to help with pollination and controlling other bug populations.  Here are some tips on attracting those good bugs to your garden: 

• Plant a diversity of plants  and flowers to attract pollinators (especially those with lots of pollen and nectar)
• Choose umbrella shaped flowers that attract certain wasps that feed on other pests
• Native plants often attract beneficial insect indigenous to your area

Edible Flowers

Adding flower to your garden can also be good for the dinner table.  Flowers can add a bit of color, style, and nutrients to your table.  You do need to be careful since some common flowers are in fact poisonous, so make sure you do your research, and also only eat flowers that you know were not sprayed with something weird! Here are just a few edible flowers:

• Basil
• Allium
• clover
• Dandelion
• Lilac
• Sunflowers
• Violets
• Nasturtium

For a few more ideas for edible flowers, check out Tree Hugger and 42 Flowers You Can Eat

Adding flowers to your garden can help create a beautiful, edible, organic garden.  How do you incorporate flowers and edibles into your landscaping?

Homestead Highlight: Mary

 My greatest inspiration in my own backyard farming adventure has been to hear the experiences of others. I invite you to read along here as Homesteaders share their adventures and experiences from their own farms, backyards, and homes.
 
Want to be featured as a Homestead Highlight? I would love to hear about your experience. For more information follow the link to the information page and share your own homestead here at the Backyard Farming Connection!

Today I welcome Mary to this space

My name is Mary Woollard and I blog over at Homegrown on the Hill. (http://www.homegrownonthehill.blogspot.com/) Our 5 acre farm is located in Southwestern Ohio, and I live there with my handy husband, Aaron, and our two children.

We have been backyard farming for the past 3 years starting out with a small garden and doing more and more things each year! We started our chicken coop just last April when we hatched out our first girls. A year later, we currently have 15 hens. This spring, we also raised meat chickens to process and ended up with 19 chickens for our deep freezer. We got started on our journey, because I was reading more and more about what exactly was in our food that we purchased from the grocery store. All the unnecessary chemicals, ingredients, and the increasing of GMOs led us to grow our own food, let us be in control of what exactly we ate - to an extent.

I have a 8 yr old son and 5 yr old daughter who won't let me go completely whole foods (hahaha), but I try to substitute where I can hoping that we'll show them there are a lot healthier options than what we can buy from the store. I'd say our biggest success is just in everything we do, surprising our family and friends, and ourselves! Neither myself or my husband grew up on a farm, so we've been very fortunate to have success in just about everything we've done.

When my mom asked me last year where did I learn how to do all this, because she didn't teach me this, I felt like she was definitely proud of what we were accomplishing, and I was proud too! We haven't had any major mistakes yet, but I would say a sad setback was just recently when our turkeys didn't hatch. We received some turkey eggs from a friend, and had them set to hatch just a week ago. Unfortunately, something happened, and none of our eggs hatched. It is disappointing to all of us, the kids were excited about having baby turkeys, but I know we'll try again and hopefully have success next time.

 Our plans for the future is to just grow our farm to be more self sustaining. We're planning on purchasing some cattle this summer to start a herd for beef. I've already purchased some berry plants (blueberry, blackberry, & raspberry) that are planted, and I'd like to order some fruit trees as well. We've worked our compost for the last couple years and this year was the first year we incorporated it into our gardening, because we had enough of it! I'm looking to find a good place for an asparagus bed and growing garlic in the fall. The possibilities are endless and we just want to do as much of it as we can!

The Backyard Farming Connection Hop #32

I hope you all enjoyed celebrating mothers day this past weekend.  I was spoiled and spent the day with my little ones in the garden - just my kind of day!  This week I'm showing appreciation for all those young ones who make us mothers feel so special.

From Learning and Yearning: Go Play in the Dirt

From On The Urban Home: Train Up a Child

From Little Mountain Haven (for the second week in a row): How to Garden with Your Children

From the Garden at Oswegatchi School: Many Hand Make Light Work

I want to know what's happening, in your garden, on your homestead, in the barnyard, and in the kitchen.  Whatever is in your backyard farm and home, I would love to hear about it.

Each week I will share some of my favorite posts on the Backyard Farming Connection Facebook page.  And in case you haven't seen, I have a 'featured button' so if you've been featured in the past, grab a button.

For details on linking up visit the hop page.


<a href=”http://www.backyardfarmingconnection.com/p/the-backyard-farming-connection-hop.html” style=”border: none;”><img alt=”Simple and Joyful” src=”http://i1184.photobucket.com/albums/z321/gstuppy/hop-1.png” style=”width: 129px; height: 129px;”/></a> <a href=" http://www.backyardfarmingconnection.com/p/the-backyard-farming-connection-hop.html“ target="_blank"><img style="width: 129px; height: 129px;" src=" http://i1184.photobucket.com/albums/z321/gstuppy/featuredbutton-1.png " alt="Hop" border="0" /></a>
(If the HTML for the buttons doesn't work, feel free to just save the photo and link it back to this) page

Pass it Forward

Homesteading is a new way of life for so many people (and an old way of life for many folks as well).  If you are currently engaged in homesteading, how do you share your lifestyle with others?

Lately I've been thinking about all the ways to pass it forward.  For many it is as simple as sharing something grown on your land with a friend or relative, while for others is may be creating a community garden, or writing and sharing on the internet.  Whatever your reasons for homesteading, one of the most important things you can do is pass on the passion and desire on to others.  Today I challenge you to think how you are passing it forward?

Here are some of my thoughts on how you can share the love of homesteading:

• Share food or other produce from your homestead with others
• Invite people to see your space, give a tour, or just have folks for dinner
• Talk about your experiences with others, even if it is just the mailman at the post office when you pick up your chicks
• Start a community garden
• Teach a class on an aspect of homesteading
• Start a blog or Facebook page about your farm or homestead
• Teach a kid how to garden or care for animals
• Volunteer at an event that will allow you to share your experiences
• Sell things at a roadside stand 

This is just a starting list - how do you pass it forward?

Homeskills in the Kitchen

Have you visited the Homeskills Resource Guide here at the Backyard Farming Connection.  Come check out some great links to practicing homesteading skills in the home.  Today I have 3 features to share from the Homesteading in the Kitchen page.


How to Make Granola in a Crockpot by Everything With Carol

 How to Render Fat from Farming my Backyard

Dehydrating Strawberries by Summer Acres

 

To see more posts about Homeskills in the Kitchen, check out the link below, and if you blog, share some of your own posts here or in any of the topics on the Homestead Resource Guide.

If you are reading this on email, click through to see these posts.

Homestead Highlight: Kathryn

 My greatest inspiration in my own backyard farming adventure has been to hear the experiences of others. I invite you to read along here as Homesteaders share their adventures and experiences from their own farms, backyards, and homes.
 
Want to be featured as a Homestead Highlight? I would love to hear about your experience. For more information follow the link to the information page and share your own homestead here at the Backyard Farming Connection!

Today I welcome Kathryn to this space

We are a family of five and we have a  tiny urban farm in Portland, Oregon.  It’s a 5,000 square foot lot with a 880 square foot house.  We currently raise goats and chickens and have several gardens tucked around the house.   I blog about our adventures at Farming My Backyard. 

 

How long have you been backyard farming?  What got you started?

I first got into backyard farming when we purchased our home and I thought it would be fun to get a few chickens, so we built a little coop out of salvaged wood and raised three chicks.  Those original birds somehow expanded into a flock of 12.   I think chickens are so much fun and even my husband, Edward, (who doesn’t like animals) loves having fresh eggs and doesn’t mind (too much) building, expanding, or making a new coop.  We are building our fourth right now, I swear it’s the last one!

What does your backyard farm look like?  Where is it?

We have a 50 by 100 lot in the city with a 880 square foot house. Edward and I run our businesses out of our home as well.  We heat the home with a wood stove and our garage plays multiple roles including workshop, wood shed, hay shed, and dairy parlor.  Pretty much everything in our home is multi-purpose in some way.  In the front yard we currently grow herbs, flowers, strawberries and asparagus, and the kids have a swingset.  In one side yard I have four raised beds, potted plants on the patio and the other side yard are two long raised beds.

In the back we have two stubborn dwarf dairy goats, 8 noisy hens, and four chicks, a trampoline, the clothesline and a tire swing..  We are working on growing fruit trees and berries out back as well.  We just added a third garden this week by breaking up some old concrete along the side of the driveway.  We also have a dog who thinks he is a surrogate goat mother, a retired cat that sleeps in the middle of whatever patch of garden has the most sun at the moment and another crazy kitty that stalks the chickens from above.

What has been your biggest success and biggest mistake?

I think my biggest success has been learning how to garden.  Not because I successfully garden, but rather because it is my biggest weakness and I’m starting to overcome my black thumb.  I manage to kill about three quarters of what I attempt to grow, even when it’s mint or blackberries.  Part of that includes my biggest mistake, which is inconsistent watering.  I forget to water and then end up drowning my poor little plants, but I’m getting better, especially since I started using soaker hoses.  The trick is remembering to turn them on...and off again.

What plans do you have for the future?

I have a lot of plans for the future!  This year I plan to add meat rabbits and a lot more fruit trees and bushes and construct a top bar bee hive.  I have a humanure system all set up and it works well but I need a reliable source of sawdust.  I’d really love to have ducks someday and coturnix quail.  I certainly hope I become a better gardener and can grow more vegetables year round.  We have old windows in the garage waiting to be turned into a greenhouse and empty bed space awaiting more asparagus and strawberries.  Also on my to do list is an aquaponics system, greywater system, rain barrels, a cistern under the driveway, solar power, red worm composting, raising silk worms, growing mushrooms and growing more plants without killing them.