Ep 8: Homegrown Thanksgiving ‘23
A Time to Plant
This is the nineth entry documenting our 14-month challenge to ourselves to prepare a Thanksgiving meal made entirely of food and ingredients grown, harvested, hunted and produced right here on Fain-XX Farm. Regardless of the outcome, subsequent entries, photos, recipes and social media posts will be arranged into a book format for publication.
May 23, 2023
I feel like we have made progress toward future self-sufficiency, but not much toward a Homegrown Thanksgiving ‘23.
Since February, we’ve planted 15 new fruit trees to include apples, peaches, pears, plums, figs and a nectarine. We put four pecan trees in the ground, but a long period of standing water from frequent and heavy rains drowned one of them. Two, bare-root almond trees we planted about eight weeks ago are not showing signs of waking up, which is a huge disappointment, but out of five blueberry bushes, we might even get a handful of blueberries this year.
Aside from the few blueberries, we aren’t going to be harvesting bushels of fruit and nuts this year from our tree plantings. Although we have long wanted our own orchard and vineyard, planting fruit trees was not on the original timeline for Homegrown Thanksgiving ’23, but with the rising cost of fresh fruit, we needed to do something to plan beyond this year. I’ve always heard the best time to plant an orchard is 10 years ago, and since we were not here to do that, the next best time is right now. Of course, 15 trees do hardly an orchard make, but I’m hoping by next year, these trees will provide us with a decent quantity of fruit, and I’ve developed a knack for propagating from cuttings so the orchard will expand. It will likely be 10 years before we start harvesting bushels of anything, but from this day forward, every year is going to be just a little bit fruitier and nuttier than the last.
Caveat
It doesn’t take much property to plant fruit trees. Our first house in Colorado was on just a quarter acre in the city limits of Colorado Springs. We had a spruce at one corner of the property, cottonwoods lining each side, a cottonwood in the back yard and one very prolific plum at the edge of our drive, opposite the spruce (read: The Pits — Jessica’s Colorado Plum Pie). The back yard was composed of a wide wooden deck, a narrow flat space, then a short retaining wall made from railroad ties holding back a sloped planting area filled with wildflowers, grasses and hostas, but no fruit trees.
A quarter acre is more than 10,000 square feet. Subtract the footprint of a common, split-level ranch house, the concrete driveway, deck, patio, garden shed, walkways, other trees, etc., we still had more than 5000 square feet of planting space. When properly pruned to maintain a more manageable size, 15 fruit trees will effectively take up about 3500 square feet. We didn’t need 15 trees on that property, but we certainly could have had a couple apples and some pears to go with our budding plum.
It doesn’t take much to be self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency, in measurable terms, should be thought of as a scale and not as “all or none.” We are fortunate to have 30 acres of mostly forested land that we can forage from, but for our active approach to this challenge, Homegrown Thanksgiving ’23, and a self-sufficient future for our household, we are operating on less than five acres. A quarter acre may not yield enough grain or corn for flour or meal, and probably won’t support a milk cow, but after considering municipal, state and federal laws, there is much that can be done on a quarter acre. Furthermore, a person who knows what to look for — and there are plenty of materials to learn from — may be able to forage public lands for mushrooms, berries, nuts and other herbs and spices.
The Land Provides
In addition to bringing in new fruit and nut trees we are preparing to make better use of what the property already offers. Our discovery of pawpaws initially led us to this challenge and I’m taking steps to promote a sizable harvest in the years to come. As I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, the pawpaw tree is a clonal organism also known as a genet, meaning that what looks like multiple trees above ground is actually one genetically identical tree sharing one root system below ground. Because the pawpaw is not self-pollinating, a healthy mature pawpaw patch may not produce a single fruit if there is not another genetically distinct patch nearby. The easiest way to ensure fertile patches is to mix in trees from other patches or young saplings started from seed.
In our exploration of the wooded hillsides, I have found at least four pawpaw patches, but only one with a number of mature trees, and about a dozen individual saplings started from seed most likely deposited by a possum, racoon or even a coyote. As I work to clear out the competition from other trees and vegetation around these patches, I’ll take a couple saplings from patch “A” and plant in patch “B,” a couple from “B” and move to “C” and so forth until there is a sufficient mix to ensure the most pollinated blooms and thereby the most fruit. It will likely take a number of years before this is effective too, but the longer we wait to do the necessary work, the longer we wait for a significant amount of fruit, and pawpaws are definitely worth the effort.
Even before they started to leaf-out, I moved some presumably, previously identified pawpaw saplings to a spot at the front of our home hoping to start an easily accessible pawpaw orchard there made up of genetically distinct trees. Because pawpaws are not easy to transplant, I thought I might have better luck while they are still dormant. Out of five transplanted trees, two exceeding six feet tall, one 3-and-a-half-foot-tall pawpaw and an individual sapling woke up and began to leaf-out. One 7-footer didn’t make it, but the 8-foot-tall pin oak and the Ohio buckeye sapling I apparently misidentified as pawpaws, leafed-out nicely… oops!
I’ve decided to leave the oak and buckeye where I planted them just for visual effect, plus the pawpaw tends to be a bit of an understory tree anyway. I’ll go ahead and try to transplant a number of loners I’ve found to see if they take. All the young saplings will probably take a decade to start producing, but when they do, we should have a nice crop away from the forest canopy and thus more removed from the habitat of little critters that like to steal away our fruit before it has time to ripen.
Fortunately, not everything happening is solely reserved for the distant future. For Homegrown Thanksgiving ’23, blackberries are painting the hillside in snowy white, and the silverberries absolutely exploded this year with the most fragrant blooms guaranteeing a big harvest. Thousands of green, tiny black cherries are dangling from our black cherry nearest the house, and I know the woods are teeming with black cherry trees. I have about 20 domestic strawberry plants still to plant, but I’m more interested in propagating all the wild strawberries I keep finding. I’ve moved five plants so far and they are spreading fast. A string of wild cucumber I laid out in our herb garden last year is sprouting and I hope will grace the wall of our brick planter with a drape of little cucumber filled vines.
I’m keeping the ground clear around the persimmon trees, mockernut hickory, and beech trees for easy access and harvest. We also plan to harvest maple nuts this year to try a few recipes with those. I’ve found several patches of wineberry, many more, healthy young spicebush and a very surprising discovery of three fast growing elderberry bushes. Barring a hot dry summer, I expect our biggest problem this year is going to be deciding what surprising fruit or nut recipe to try first and not one thing from any of the fruit and nut trees we planted. I consider it a blessing to have so much available from our wild forest.
Into the Garden
In a more active approach, we have two fields totaling about a quarter acre tilled. We still don’t have our own tractor or implements so we turned to a local provider to help us out. On Mother’s Day, I planted one field in corn and it’s already three inches tall — knee high by the 4th of July is always the goal. I had initially planned on separating sweet and field corn in order to maintain a homogeneous stock for seed collecting, but I made a bad choice when selecting starter seed this year.
A few years ago, while still at the Greeneville, Tennessee property, we tried our luck with the farmer’s market. While Jessica focused on her candles, lotions and salves, I pulled from a burgeoning crop of tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, squash and I’m certain, the first sweet corn in the county. Not just any sweet corn either. By mid-May, our table at the farmers market was loaded with several wash buckets of Peaches and Cream, quite possibly the most sought-after sweet corn cultivar in Northeast Tennessee. We even had signs professionally printed to advertise that we had the super-sweet, bi-color variety that the locals rave about. We easily sold most of what we harvested, keeping little for ourselves, because we honestly didn’t care for it that much. To Jessica and me, the kernels seemed diminutive and gummy. Following shortly after the Peaches and Cream came to fruition, we started pulling big ears of Honey Select sweet, yellow corn from later rows. The plump, juicy, sweetness of the Honey Select really lit our fancy. Determined to plant for our own preferences this year, I chose Honey Select for our sweet corn variety. Unfortunately, Honey Select is a hybrid that will not yield like offspring — if the seed are fertile at all. The grain corn I’m planting in the same field matures much later than the sweet corn, about 30 days later, so cross pollination isn’t likely and I should be able to save some of those seeds for future plantings.
We have far more Honey Select and Incredible sweet corn growing than we can eat or store, so we will set up a stand at the road to offer to the neighborhood in exchange for a donation to our seed fund.
In the forward field, I have peanuts, sorghum, amaranth, sesame, squash, cucumbers and more corn for meal and fall decorations. Near the barn, a small patch each of rye and barley should be ready soon and next to that, the vegetable garden will soon be bursting with tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, greens and carrots. Carrots especially are a hot commodity for us. We gave up buying expensive chews and treats for our dogs. Instead, after supper every night, each of our dogs get their own fat carrot to chew on, Freyja, the alpha female, a 103-pound malamute-hybrid, often comes back for a second or third before the others finish their first. Our dogs easily go through a 5-pound bag of carrots in less than a week. Needless to say, I’m going to need a fairly good amount of real estate just to keep our dogs in a happy state-of-mind.
The desire to produce and store can be overwhelming, especially when there are so many distractions and everything comes in its own time, often when we do not have time to act. Foraging will have particular challenges, getting to the mulberries before the birds, blackberries before the beetles, pawpaws before the possums, and much more, but the garden will have its own challenges as well. I’m already nearly two months behind starting tomatoes; my pepper seeds are still in the packets they came in and I’m sure there will be more missed opportunities and even some downright failures. Homegrown Thanksgiving ’23 may not be as homegrown as I hoped, but just as the farm is going to get fruitier and nuttier every year from now, as long as we strive to improve, we will grow even more thankful every year to come.
