My Harvest Life - Episode 2: Sprouts and Bunnies

Year 1 - Spring Day 84

While adorable, these fuzzy little creatures are not your garden's friend.  They are it's deep, dark nemesis.  We have a ton of little cottontail rabbits in our back yard, and while we do have a cattle dog that loves to chase them out, they still come back often.  So in order to keep them away, I built a fence around the garden.  Problem is... the fence and garden walls are only 18 inches high... and cottontail bunnies can jump up to 24 inches high! These guys have ups!  So, the fence may or may not work, but so far none of the sprouts appear to have been nibbled.  I also made sure to get the garden fence as close to the yard fence as I possibly could and tried to eliminate any gaps between each that could be exploited.

But, the next exciting part is that despite the fence not QUITE being high enough, sprouts have emerged!  The basil, garlic, cucumber and bean plants are all showing their first leaves.  The garlic was the first to push through the ground followed by the cucumber plants and then the basil started pushing away the dirt around it.

When I first noticed the cucumber sprouts a few mornings ago, I walked outside and found three sprouts on one hill and one on the back one.  When I went later that night, there were 5 sprouts on the first hill, (which was all of the ones I planted) and three on the second hill.  Pretty soon I'll need to start thinning the garden and pick out the best plants to survive.  I'll need to do that pretty aggressively for the carrots and the basil since I dropped a ton of seeds in each location I planted them.  I could barely see the carrot seeds so I just poured them out in an indented line and then covered the up with a bit of dirt.

Garlic

Bean Bush

Lemon Cucumber

My next plans include devising a way to do drip irrigation.  I recently got a Raspberry Pi 3 for my 30th birthday and I have been meaning to use one of the ones I already had to do a project, so a drip irrigation system with moisture sensors would be pretty awesome to try out and post the information to a web server where I can track the moisture in the soil throughout the day and after watering.

Also I might need to built something to scare the bunnies away, maybe a robot owl?  We'll see about that.  But for now the things are all growing and its very exciting!

- Level 1 Gardener: Jace -
Next: Episode 3: Half a Garden of Nutritious Decay

My Harvest Life - Episode 1: Spring Planting

Year 1 - Spring Day 75

Since I'm new to the life of farming, I'm a little late to the season during the first year of living the Harvest Life, but I have finally started out on the grand adventure of farming and gardening!  Today I finished filling my garden with soil and planted my first batch of crops!  The seeds shipped recently from a little local place I like to visit called the internet, from a shop called SeedsNow.  They've got very reasonable prices and great varieties of all sorts of plants.  I built my raised garden with a bunch of wood I had laying around in my garage from remodeling the house, and ripped up a bunch of the soil underneath so that the plants can grow down into the soil below as well.  The plot is 4 ft deep x 24 ft long x 6 in tall and took about 25 bags of soil at 1.5 cu ft per bag to get a good covering over the existing dirt.

Today after filling the garden, I planted the following:

• 2 rows of Large White Garlic Cloves (bought at a local grocery store)
• 2 rows of Red Onion Seeds
• 2 rows of Green Onion Seeds
• 2 hills of Lemon Cucumbers (5 seeds per hill)
• 2 rows of Tomato Seeds
• 2 rows of Carrot Seeds
• 2 rows of Basil Seeds
• 2 rows of Bean Bush Seeds
• A row of Spinach Seeds (Got for free with the order)

And I still have a plot of potatoes to plant, which I need to pick up at a local store.  

But the garden is started!  There will still be many things left to do, such as watering and weeding every morning, and making sure that pests don't eat away my crops.  I picked up a Tier 1 Watering Can as well.  A good old green plastic can works for now!  I had started a couple tomato plants a while back and just transitioned them to outside.  Once the plants sprout, I'll need to do something called thinning.  I've planted a TON of seeds, and once they sprout if I don't pick the best ones to survive and thin out the weak ones, they'll all fight too hard to survive and I won't get the best crops.

I'm still new to all this, but reading up on each crop has been helpful.  I'm trying to do my best to follow companion planting and pay attention to the state of my soil, so hopefully pests will stay away and the crops will help each other grow.  I found a couple decent guides on companion planting: What NOT to plant near each other, and one about What TO plant near each other to get the maximum benefits.

There are many other things to do around the yard as well.  I have a wood pile to chop, but I have a low level axe and my woodcutting skill is rather low, so its taking some time getting it all chopped.  I've already got a massive stack of fire wood, but there is still so much left!  Also the grass in the yard seems to keep growing week after week!  So I keep having to cut it.  We've lived in our new home for just over a year now, so we're finally getting to working on the yard since last year was all home remodeling and indoor work.

Feeling the cool black earth beneath your fingers is a phenomenal feeling.  Although trying to research on the computer with hands covered in mud between each seed type that was planted probably was not a great idea.

If you want to start a garden as well, there are a lot of resources out there and I hope to hear about your adventures as well!  Stay tuned for more updates of my first adventure living the Harvest Life!

- Lv 1 Gardener: Jace -
Next: Episode 2: Sprouts and Bunnies