Three Sisters, Trailer Park Style

Like most things I've learned about gardening, I heard about the Native American "Three Sisters" of corn, beans, and squash, thought it was cool, did a little half-assed research, and went for it...probably totally wrong!

Actually, in this case, I'm almost positive that I totally screwed it up, since I got things all planted, stepped back, took a look at it, and said to myself, "Now why the heck did I do it like that?  That make no sense!"

I get ahead of myself though.  So let's look at what I did.

First off, only two of the 6 beds I'd prepared in the back of the lot will actually be Three Sisters, because I think planting more than that of beans would give me way too freaking many beans.  Plus I ran out of beans.  Okay, I have a few beans still laying around, but I want to save them in case I need to replant or in case I really, really screwed up this year and need to save them for next year.

You might ask, "Why don't you go buy more beans?" which for most people would be a perfectly normal and rational answer, except, like I said, that would be way too freaking many beans and these aren't beans you can buy at the store.  These beans are special.  I got these from a Facebook friend last year (okay, these beans' daddies and mamas.  I saved these beans from last year's harvest) who said that her grandparents brought them from Italy like a hundred years ago (not these exact beans.  The beans' great-, great-, great-....grandparents) and they've grown them in her family ever since.  They look a lot like dragon's tongue beans, but they are a pole bean that gets crazy long rather than a bush bean.

Anyhoo, here are the beds, as planted yesterday:

The first picture has corn on the outside, beans planted just inside the corn, and blue hubbard squash in the middle.  The second one has corn on the outside, beans planted just inside the corn, and pumpkins in the middle.  Oh, and that isn't "normal" corn.  That's Oaxacan green dent corn.  I don't even know how to say that, that's how cool that corn is!! 

I remembered from my half-assed "research" that there was a lot of weeding involved in the early steps of this mound building, so I cheated and used landscape cloth to keep weeds from going nuts while the squash is getting big enough to act as a natural mulch.  I think the beans and the corn will grow just fine where I put them, but now I'm worried that the corn, especially with those crazy beans growing on them, will shade the squash too much and not let it thrive!  Oops.  The bricks are just there to weigh down the landscape cloth, since I didn't have anything to stake it down really well and don't have any actual mulch handy to just kind of bury it with.  The directions said it could be covered with rocks.  Bricks, rocks, same diff, right?

I think my thought process had more to do with conserving landscape cloth (bought on sale for another project and just kind of wandered into this project) and chicken poop than the welfare of the plants.  Further proof that I'm a bad, bad gardener.  *sigh*  Hopefully it will turn out okay!  Tomorrow is another day, and I'll probably plant my remaining beds of corn and vining things with a little more thought to how the plants will like their new homes!

I also remembered that there was supposed to be a kind of staggered planting, that the corn was supposed to be planted first, then the others later, once the corn was a bit established.  That I did consciously and blatantly ignore.  I figured with this plant configuration that the beans could be laid out on the cloth until the corn got big enough to wind the beans around and that the squash was far enough away not to worry about suffocating the other plants, since by the time the squash got that far, the corn and beans would be holding their own.  So I guess I did have plant welfare in mind a little bit, even though I went a completely different direction than the pile-up-dirt-and-throw-three-different-kinds-of-seeds-in-it direction that I first thought of when I heard of Three Sisters mounds.  Maybe there is hope for me as a gardener after all!

Another Exhausting Week on the Trailer Park Homestead

I am chronically pooped out these days it seems.  In addition to all the usual "fun" of having three littles around the house and the work that entails, including but not limited to the cooking, cleaning, and continuous refereeing, I've been busting my butt trying to get this Trailer Park Homestead set up.  A normal, sane person would probably spread this enormous of a project over a couple years, but I'm determined to basically have it "done" this year...although, is a homestead of any sort actually ever done?

I'm almost "done" for now though.  All the garden beds are dug out, compost has been obtained to put in all of them, and all the seedlings I started indoors have been transplanted out into their beds and buckets.  Now, I just need to finish spreading the compost around the yard and plant my direct sow seeds. Then, it will be just a matter of sitting back and watching things grow.  Well, except for the weeding and watering and watching for pests and harvesting (which actually will start very soon for some things!) and putting up for the winter.... Yup, the fun never ends.  It's worth it though, when I know that my family will eat well, no matter what happens to the economy or our bank account or far off places.

I just heard on the news last night that the prices of corn and wheat are expected to skyrocket because of the flooding along the Mississippi and, while I feel bad for everyone that affects, directly or indirectly, I also am pretty darn proud how little that should impact me!  I'll be growing my own corn this year, for eating fresh, freezing, and making corn meal.  As for the wheat, I'm a little concerned, since I don't really have the space to grow a lot of wheat, but I'm thinking about looking into the possibility of a winter wheat crop in my garden beds to act as a cover crop, let me rotate crops without rearranging where things go next year and maybe even give me some homegrown wheat to take the edge off the price of flour going up.  In the meantime, I'll stock up, just like I always try to do!

I get ahead of myself though.  Fall and winter are still a far way off and there are a lot of exciting things going on in the here and now on the Trailer Park Homestead.  Here's what's going on this week:

My wonderful husband got me more blueberry bushes, stepping stones, a couple strawberry plants (not shown), and a netbook (also not shown, but I'm using it to write this right now...which is why he got it for me!) for our anniversary last week!  World's.  Best.  Husband!!!!  I also acquired a garlic chive plant over the weekend, since it didn't sell at the church auction and the person that donated it didn't want it back, so it was kind of foisted on me.  It is on the other side of this collection of planters.

The view from the road.  I think I may have been being a little passive-aggressive with the layout of the plants in the stone-lined garden bed--since the park manager mentioned "they" would prefer the raised bed would be toward the back of the lot if I was going to plant flowers in it, I'm kind of concealing the box, which contains broccoli (actually a flower), carrots, spinach, green peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes, by planting tomato plants in the garden bed in front of it, plus cucumbers in the hanging basket above the tomatoes.  I think that should be visually interesting to say the least, although, I don't really know that the basket is large enough to support two cucumber plants!  Other than the tomato plants, there is also a green pepper plant in that bed and some violets.  I need to plant a lot more stuff in there.  I'll probably put some actual flowers in there too.

The front door area.  Snap peas are growing right outside the door, with strawberries on the stairs.  The buckets on the left of the picture contain tomatoes (two varieties), with a planter for lettuce (not planted yet) in front of them.  The buckets on the right of the picture, right up against the trailer's edging contain ground cherries.

The view out the back door.  All the beds are (finally) dug!  The one closest in the picture is shaped like that to provide a clear path from the door to the garage on the back of the lot.  It currently contains cucumber plants and I plan on having some corn join the cucumbers soon.

This is part of the border between our lot and the one next to us, taken from the side that is not our lot.  Here I have blue jade corn (a kind of sweet corn), sunflowers for privacy, and a variety of vining plants, including squash, pumpkins, and cantaloupes to weave around their bases to limit how much weeding I'll have to do and maximize the space.

My Quest for Crap--Seeking sources of free (or at least cheap!) compost

When I was imagining how the transformation from a typical trailer park lot to gorgeous garden would go, I was dreaming of lush, dark soil under the grass and weeds found in our lot that would grow beautiful veggies without any amendments at all.  "Dreaming" is the operative word, all right!  What I dug up was worm rich, so probably not completely devoid of nutrients, but it was extremely sandy in some areas and clay-y in others.  So much for not adding anything to the soil!

I don't actually know a lot about gardening, since most of what I learn is by bumbling through and a little half-assed internet research and a book or two thrown in, so I might be totally wrong, but I figured adding some compost would cure whatever ailed my soil, so I began questing for some.  Sure, I could go buy some, either from a home improvement store in little bags of about 40 lbs each or from a landscape company that would probably deliver it in some giant truck that would freak out my neighbors and perhaps bring more of an eye to what I'm up to than I'm ready for at this point.  Buying things is always my option of a last resort, though.

I've been keeping my eye on Freecycle for free compost and/or manure as well.  I responded to such a post a couple years ago, a shovel your own kind of deal, for horse manure, but when I got there, the lady who offered it wouldn't let me shovel it myself, since I was very visibly pregnant at the time.  She shoveled it into the bags I brought for me!  Bonus!  This year, I wasn't able to get any of the offers I saw on Freecycle, so I was starting to lose hope.

At the church auction a few days ago, I was extremely excited to see "horse manure, delivered" on the list of items to be auctioned off.  I excitedly bid on it, and won it for $30, which wouldn't have even covered the gas if I went to pick it up, since I'd have to take multiple trips fairly far away in my mini-van to get it.  However, the next day at church, I was crushed to discover that there had been a miscommunication and it couldn't be delivered.  Fortunately, they didn't still hold me to paying the $30, since that price was supposed to include delivery.  Unfortunately, that meant my quest for compost continued.

A "crapload" of composted chicken poop

I had another plan though.  My source for free eggs offered me the opportunity to clean out a corn crib they had used to keep naughty roosters away from the hens, a rooster prison, if you will.  It was quite a while ago that it had been used for this purpose, so the chicken poo was well composted and beautiful.  With the help of my mom and far, far too much "help" from my kids, we got it bagged up and brought home in my van yesterday.

Yay!  Quest complete...I think.  I'll be spreading it around my garden areas this afternoon and making sure I have enough.  If not, the quest continues!

There Must Be A Easier Way...

This is tiring work, building up a mini-homestead from a trailer park lot and trying to get it basically done in one season!  A lot of days, I'm starting to wonder if this is all worth it.  Surely, there must be an easier way!

Well, I suppose some people could and would just go to the store and buy all their food, but considering the severe limitations on my budget and near snobbishness about what my family eats, demanding a high quality, all natural product at nearly no cost, that's just not going to happen for me.

I suppose "normal" people with my food budget (about $30 a week for a family of 5-6, if you are just joining me) would probably go to a food bank or two on a pretty regular basis.  Again, I don't see that as an option for us, in part because of the requirement that my family be fed good food...and because I don't know where there are any food banks around here. 

There is one other option that I know about.  No, not stealing, since that has the potential to be extremely costly in other ways, like the risk of getting caught, not to mention any karmic retribution.  I'm talking about wild harvesting or foraging.  I actually did turn to that way years ago, before I had the space and knowledge to garden in limited space.  When my oldest son was about 2 years old, I tried to live with his dad for a while and things were extremely tight then too.  We got absolutely no government help (probably only because I didn't know how to apply for it, since I'm sure we would have qualified!), not even WIC and only had about $5 a month to spend on food for the three of us.  That's right--$5 a month!  At the time, my parents' house was too far away to get help from them in the way of garden produce, so that wasn't even an option for help.  We were on our own.  Every now and then, my son's idiot dad would bring home some fancy-schmancy meat-alternative thing, since were leaning toward vegetarianism at the time, but he was not shopping savvy at all, so sometimes that was the only grocery for the week beyond the $5 I had access to.  And that $5 went toward buying milk for our toddler.  I'd sometimes snag a little for cooking too though--which helped a lot for making the weeds I'd scrounge up more palatable.

I'm sure I did a lot of things wrong on my foraging expeditions.  I had access to field guides from the library, but that didn't always tell me what I needed to know, like how to find the weeds that didn't taste like, well, weeds!  I think I have found such a book for future expeditions though.* Pocket Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants by Kathryn Higgins is a clear, concise guide to wild edibles.  Unlike a lot of the books I used at the time, this "pocket guide" will actually fit in a pocket (yes, I tested this with my jeans' pocket!) and it's spiral binding makes it easy to manipulate and use in the field.  If you are looking for a particular plant, for example, it would be very easy to leave it open to the page with the beautiful photo of that plant to make identification very easy.  Each entry also gives a brief, easy to understand and use description of the plant itself, as well as edible, medicinal, and other uses, so you can see at a glance if that is something worth picking when you find it!

Some other features I love about this book is that it gives clear warnings for a lot of plants that need them, like ones you don't want to use if pregnant or ones that may have a similar looking poisonous plant.  Another thing I love is that it has listings of further resources in the back, including to more field guides (mostly for the western US and Rocky Mountain areas), more books on medicinal uses of plants, as well as cookbooks for wild edibles and books on making medicines from the wild plants.  I especially could have used those further resources years ago!  I had to guess on a lot of things...and I'm sure I guessed wrong more often than not!  The book also has gathering guidelines in the back to make foraging trips more successful and some wonderful blank pages in the back--brilliant for keeping track of where you found things for previous years, or making notes of what worked or didn't for recipes or medicines.

Even though this book was probably written for and about more the western US and/or Rocky Mountains, there were still a lot of plants I recognized as being in Michigan as well.  This is a case where I can clearly see that the price of buying this book would well be worth it, since by using the information in it to feed your family and gather plants to make homemade medicines, it could easily save someone thousands of dollars over a lifetime!

As for me, I probably will use this book quite a bit, once I get the garden going.  However, for now, as I pull the many weeds already growing in my garden, it was also a source of frustration, as I realized that most, if not all the "weeds" I had been pulling out and tossing aside, were also food.  On some level, foraging can be easier than gardening, but I like the assurance and insurance of having fruits and vegetables I know my family likes growing right in my Trailer Park Homestead.

Find the food:  I was just trying to grow spinach here (lower right hand corner), but, if I'm not mistaken every single plant here is just as edible!

*   Disclaimer:  Pocket Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants was sent to me as a freebie to review.  I told the representative of Motherlove Herbal Company, who published the book, that I would only be interesting on doing any reviews if I was completely honest about any products I reviewed.

Baked Chicken on Rice (or how to make 1 chicken breast feed a whole family)

During my last freezer cleaning expedition, I found a couple of frozen chicken breast halves.  They weren't even big ones.  Just tiny little ones.  But, using my powers of thriftiness (and invoking some of my homemade cream of mushroom soup), I managed to feed the whole family with them in a super tasty way.

I thought about posting this recipe the other day, on my anniversary, because it was supposed to be served at my wedding reception, but because of electrical problems (my mother-in-law didn't make it ahead of time like she was supposed to and shorted something out at the old farmhouse that we had the wedding and reception at, so it didn't cook right), it didn't end up being served, so I decided to hold the recipe for another day.  Appropriate, since we had the failed leftovers from our wedding for many, many other days!

Baked Chicken on Rice

2 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves

1 cup cream of mushroom soup*

1 1/2 cup milk

3/4 cup uncooked white rice

1 cup fresh mushrooms

Cut the chicken into chunks.  Mix all ingredients in a casserole dish.  Cover tightly and bake at 350 (don't need to preheat the oven) for 1 hour.  Remove the cover and bake for an additional 15 minutes.  Let cool 10 minutes before serving.

This pairs well with green beans and/or peaches.

*if using canned cream of mushroom soup, you can adjust the amount of soup to use it up rather than letting it go to waste.  Just reduce the amount of milk to maintain the same amount of liquid. You can also reduce the amount of cream of mushroom soup if your homemade stuff is a stronger flavor than you'd like in this.  Just add more milk to compensate.