Mavis Mail – Stacy From Ohio Sends in Pictures from the Farm

A big THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in their photographs and stories. I hope by sharing other peoples pictures and stories here on One Hundred Dollars a Month we can all have a rock star garden this year. Keep them coming!

~Mavis

This week, Stacy from Ohio tells her story, and it is a great one. They live in the coolest barn home too! So jealous. Thanks for sharing Stacy, and keep up the amazing homestead!

I currently garden in Hiram, roughly 50 minutes outside of Cleveland, Ohio. But my love of gardening began at our previous home in a nearby community, where in addition to renovating a century home room by room, my husband and I added perennial flowers and herbs and fruit, pine or deciduous trees each year to our small lot.

This is also where I started vegetable gardening, building a simple raised bed plot from 2x4s and mail order connector pieces. I worked ashes and sand into the clay soil, adding compost made from kitchen scraps, fallen leaves and horse manure. In that first garden, we grew the basics: lettuce, tomatoes, green beans and broccoli by trial and error, seeking advice from experienced gardeners along the way. In addition, I learned to can, preserving fruits, jellies, and jams from our bounty and that of nearby farms and orchards.

When our children were born, we wanted to give them the chance to grow up in a more rural setting, to learn and grow and spend more time outdoors. We wanted to move, not just for more closet space, but for more open space as well. Ever since working in a barn-turned-marketing-firm in the 90s, I’ve been in love with the idea of living in a barn.

Luckily, my husband shared this love, so our dream house became, you guessed it, a barn. So we had our barn raised, roughly six years ago. But even before the barn was built, with a preschooler and toddler in tow, we started a compost pile and established our first raised bed at the property using fallen tree trunks as borders and filled the beds with transplanted perennial herbs and flowers.

Each year, we’ve added more raised garden beds, bordered with tree trunks, courtesy of my husband’s mad skills with the chain saw. We enriched them with compost, manure, leaves, newspapers and cardboard — anything to block weeds and build up the soil. Broken pots become toad and fairy houses, and spring peas climb a rustic trellis crafted from fallen branches and baling twine. Seedless grapes climb up an old chain link “arbor” my husband refers to as Cellblock C.

During the summer months as I weed, the girls play under a nearby bush-turned-hideout or spot butterflies in the field of wildflowers. In the fall, seeds are saved, cuttings are rooted, and surplus plants and veggies are shared so that nothing goes to waste.

In our few years here, we’ve added asparagus, rhubarb, red raspberries, and strawberries. We battled poison ivy and invasive thorny bushes, and reclaimed an ancient apple orchard. Last year’s apple crop supplied enough bounty for apple sauce, apple butter and many apple pies — one of which won a ribbon at the county fair. We also forage black raspberries, blackberries, wild grapes, elderberries, and other wild edibles from the untamed areas of our yard. It’s kind of like a treasure hunt — and the rewards are delicious!

Our garden season begins outdoors in May, as we select the vegetables and flowers to grow from seed in flats on our back patio. When the plants are large enough, and the danger of frost is past, we move plants out to our rustic garden beds a good distance from the house. We’ve grown our own pumpkins, gourds and corn for holiday decorating, as well as buckets of vegetables for eating fresh, freezing, or canning.

Although the girls aren’t big fans of weeding, they help with the planting and harvesting, and are more inclined to eat what we grow (except for asparagus and beets!). But more importantly, they like spending time outside catching bugs, climbing trees, riding bikes and hanging out their furry siblings (our dog and cats).

If you would like to have your garden, chicken coop or something you’ve made featured on One Hundred Dollars a Month, here’s what I’m looking for:

• Your Garden Pictures and Tips – I’d especially like to see your garden set ups, growing areas, and know if you are starting seeds indoors this year. If so,  show me some picture of how you are going about it.
• Your Chicken and Chicken Related Stories – Coops, Chicks, Hen’s, Roosters, Eggs, you name it. If it clucks, send us some pictures to share with the world.
• Cool Arts & Crafts – Made from your very own hands with detailed {and well photographed} pictures and instructions.
• Your pictures and stories about your pets. The more pictures and details the better.
• Garage Sale, Thrift Store and Dumpster Diving pictures and the stories behind the treasures you found including how much you paid for them.

If I feature your pictures and the stories behind them on One Hundred Dollars a Month, I will send you a $20.00 gift card to the greatest store in the world: Amazon.com.

Go  HERE for the official rules.