Living With Living Things - Part I

Planning Your Homestead Landscape

I’d like to take a bit of a break from the hard (and not hard) physical work of basic carpentry, plumbing, maintenance and repair around the homestead. We’ll get back to these subjects often enough over time, as there is always work to do. Let’s talk about living things, because one of the very best parts of choosing where you live is choosing the living things you’ll get to live with.

There are other aspects of how one chooses to live that are important if you’re planning to have a happy life without trading a majority of your time for money you have to pay to other people to keep your own life going. Ideally a committed modern ‘homesteader’ has been smart enough to seek his or her ’stead well away from the gated communities of Yuppie retirement dreams, farther out in the ‘real’ countryside where land is still reasonably cheap and little old ladies on some zoning board aren’t spending their lives making yours miserable.

Even a single acre of land is easily 4 times the space of your typical suburban development lot, offering a considerable amount of room for growing herbs, vegetables, fruit and nut trees, a few grape vines, even some useful wildings to encourage birds and which can produce useful products for the family. The very last thing you want is an acre of boring lawn to mow once a week when you could be doing something fun - or just relaxing in your hammock in the shade of the grape arbor, drinking lemonade.

If you’ve an acre or two or three, the next thing you need to do is develop a plan. What you plant, where you plant it, and how much work it requires to keep up with are all serious considerations, and these must have a long-term view. What’s the house like, what will enhance its beauty and functionality as part of the land, what your outdoor play-spaces should be and look like, how you can make it work for you as both sustenance and income, etc., etc.

Even on an acre or more, the actual yard space - the areas covered by grass that require mowing, trimming and must endure lots of traffic in nice weather - can be kept to a minimum by planning your landscaping carefully. Pathways can be paved any number of clever ways, grades can be stepped just as cleverly, beds can begin right at the edges and go up from there with native perennials (these can be shade, partial shade and sun-growing, depending on your needs) that start just a few inches tall and are backgrounded with ever-taller plants and shrubs. Pebbles, seashells, rocks, used bricks and old timbers make great edges and rises, can serve as planters themselves, and the plants can be put into landscaping plastic and covered with mulch to keep grass and weeds at bay. It looks better than a boring flat expanse of grass and adds to the value of your homestead.

If you’ve too much an expanse of treeless green when you start, you’ll want to plant trees for welcome shade and to anchor landscaped garden spaces. Sure, the pretty weeping chokecherries, Bradford Pears, redbuds, dogwoods, tulip trees and Japanese maples are lovely yard trees for purely aesthetic reasons. But if you want flowering trees, fall colors and nice shade there are some wonderful grafted miniature fruit and nut trees you could plant instead for about the same price. Then you’d get the added benefits of fresh cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, pomegranates, almonds, hazlenuts, pecans, apples… whatever suits your taste buds!

Many a homesteader will choose to put a “Kitchen Garden” in whichever part of the yard is closest to the kitchen door, hopefully on the south, southeast or southwest side of the house. Many houses already have a kitchen porch or deck, or a handy homesteader can build one. It’s definitely worth it! This smallish porch or deck should be the first part of the kitchen garden. You can grow a variety of culinary and medicinal herbs right in pots and flats on the porch, and arrange them at levels around a seating space to make a comfy spot for morning coffee or late evening tea.

If there is an enclosed porch that can be insulated with plastic during the winter, the outdoor pots can be moved there during the winter, or even moved indoors to a sunny window. Basils, sage, rosemary, thyme, parsley… these culinary herbs are pretty to look at as well as tasty in your diet. And they can all be grown in pots.

If winters are mild you may wish to just replant the annuals every season, and rely on the kitchen garden off the porch for salad greens, dark green leafy’s like kale and collards, cabbage, peas and such that will grow well in cold weather with just a little care to keep them from hard freezes. In summer things can get a lot more varied. It’s close to the house, it’s easy to get to and keep, it’s a joy to tend, the food is your very own.

Next installment we’ll look at some well-planned porch, herb and kitchen gardens and what should be grown in them. Start looking around the place with your “future eyes,” and soon you’ll be picking strawberries instead of mowing the lawn!

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Filed under Garden, Homestead, Landscaping, Porch Plants, Yard |