Hi, I am Carolien and I am a Dutch woman trying to build a self sufficient homestead on concrete and rubble.
Follow my husband and me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@straverhomestead9667
We cleaned up a pile of our logs. We sawed some of the logs. Some of the logs lay to long and where no good for the sawmill, so these turned into firewood. Other logs where sorted in piles of logs of the same type of wood. Al of this made a huge mess of the ground. To make the ground nice and even again my husband drove over it with our old tractor with a meadow train attached. He did this where the ground was a bit frozen. It works better like that. The end result is better as we had expected. Now the grass can grow back again. We are thinking of planting some fruit trees here.
We have with seeds, seed potatoes, onion & garlic sets and a big pile of soil
So let’s get started with preparing the site where we want to put new raised beds in. We took out a rest of an old sand heap and divided the sand in some holes around it. Also a hill bed from last year we took out and brought the compost soil to our large straw bed to expand this. We found a lot of good potatoes in this compost soil. We had not planted these; these potatoes grew out of volunteer plants and were enough for 3 meals for us.
After that my husband went over the site with the tractor and meadow train to even the ground.
Now we can start building the raised beds. The raised beds are made out of Larchwood life edge boards.
We have one bed to put between two existing beds what made filling it a bit more hand work, but the other raised beds are filled with the wheel loader directly after being put into place. This makes it a lot easier, because all we need to do is divide the soil.
On top of the soil comes a thick layer of straw. We have straw bales as a wind barrier at the short side of the Tiny House; one of which the dogs destroyed the netting keeping it together. We took out this bale with the wheel loader and put it closer to the beds, to divide it over the beds more easy.
Also I put a thermometer in one of the beds to check the temperature. I have read that potatoes can go into the ground as soon as the soil reaches a temperature of 10°C. At the moment we are at 3°C, so I think it will take a wile before we can get started with planting and sowing.
At the moment we are at 6 plant beds. The first 3 beds are one for each child, who also love gardening, especially harvesting. Wherewith we are not done jet. We will be putting up a lot more plant beds. We also want to plant berry bushes and some more fruit trees, but that is for a next time.
My greenhouse is not really a house, but only a roof. One corner sagged a bit, so we lifted it with the wheel loader and put a small beam under need. A long the entire side we put additional soil to stabilise the side and prevent it from sliding of. We covered the soil with straw.
Beside the greenhouse roof was a big pile of straw, partially rotten and sagged in. We used this straw and also divide it in and around the greenhouse roof. The old mulch layer was very broken down and hardly covered the soil any more. The straw was ratter wet and fixed which made it hard and heavy to loosen. Luckily my husband could make piles of the straw in and around the greenhouse roof with the wheel loader, which made it a lot easier. We will see if it was a good idea or not to use this partially rotten straw, but if necessary we can put another layer of good straw over it later.
Very much to my liking we found a lot of earthworms.
Next thing to do is dividing the compost soil next to the straw bed. I had a small very busy helper. We found a lot of grassroots and other weeds to sort out. Also I forgot to put cardboard under need the soil again. We will leave the soil uncovered for now and rake trough every few days. Hopefully the exposed roots will dry out and we will not end up with a bed full of grass and weeds. After a few weeks we will cover the soil with a thick layer of hay. I hope this will be enough to suppress the weeds from below.
The preparations for our garden year are not finished jet, but we made a good start and hopefully have everything in place before the season really starts.
Last week we had a storm. This storm was called Zeynep and damaged the play tent of our children, also a big tree just outside our property lost some branches. So when the storm calmed down it was time to clean up and restore safety.
With the play tent of the children one corner broke out and in the roof one metal framing broke and another one bended. So we forbid our children to play in there and after the storm calmed down we first started tearing down the tent. Of course after almost 3 years the tent tarp was not the best anymore anyhow, but the storm was so heavy that it also broke the metal frame. We had not expected this to happen, because it was a very sturdy frame.
The tent was 4 x 6 meter and did not take that long to take down. We first took of the entire tent tarp section by section and disposed of it by putting it into our car trailer to take to the garbage company at a later date.
Next thing was to screw the frame apart and put it into storage. You never know when you can use some metal pipes. Last thing to do was to pull the metal pins out of the ground we had the tent secured with, so it would not be blown over with a storm. In one corner we had to use the tractor, because we could not reach there with the wheel loader.
Now everything is cleared out, safety is restored and the children have there playground back. The only thing missing is rain protection.
The other thing to do was collecting all of the branches to clear that part of the property again. This was a quick and easy job with the tractor and collecting the smaller branches by hand.
The big tree where the branches came out of is full with beautiful big mistletoe; some came down with the branches. The mistletoe makes the tree sick, but it looks beautiful.
Beautiful Chaos 