Mary Cook

Our system is pretty simple, and very effective. I live on a ridge in West Virginia, average rainfall 40" spread evenly through the year--but we do get droughts, and I do need to water new plantings till they're big enough to mulch. Since rain takes care of it most of the time, and winters here (zone 6B) are hard enough to freeze stuff, I don't have a setup involving hoses or sprinklers.  We have a system of plastic pipes that collect the rainwater off the gutters from six of the eight faces of our octagonal roof; the pipe runs down the side of the house and barely underground to a set of three 280 gallon plastic tanks. Another, buried pipe leads to a spigot in my main garden, and another in the patch where I put corn and such. So I still have use a watering jug but it's so much easier than carrying water from the house to the gardens. This is all gravity feed, no need for a pump. And it never runs out--a little rain over a house roof equates to many, many gallons of water. My husband built a sort of shed around the tanks, though, to keep sun from deteriorating the plastic tanks, and fomenting algae. Some years I do a lot of watering--and less weeding. Of course, a system this simple requires terrain that cooperates, the house being above the garden. We drain this system in the winter.

"As much as possible" isn't very helpful if it's a small suburban lot; they'll have to pick and choose. Here's my advice from my own experience, in a one-acre clearing on a ridge in West Virginia, Zone 6B: some years I've had all the fruit needed for my two person household--this year I will have almost none, mostly, apparently because of a hard frost in April following some warm weather--it seemed hardly unprecedented to me but resulted in no redbud or viburnum bloom, which I never saw before, as well as almost no tree fruit--even though the apples bloomed after that frost!  The tree fruit is more iffy than bush fruit in my experience, and don't forget most need pollination partners, although a neighbor's tree might provide that. Squirrels swipe most of my tree fruit before it's ripe anyway, except the apples--probably because the apples are later, when the hickories and acorns are kicking in.
Strawberries are right up there among the most reliable crops, and will produce plenty of fruit one year after planting. I grow only June bearing as they are reportedly more productive and I like having a season--after crawling along the beds harvesting every other day for a month, I'm ready for that season to be over--and I have lots in the freezer by then, as well as jam if I don't already have too much.Then the goumis kick in (except this year, because of that freeze--and the only thing I've found to do with them is make syrup, be cause of the pits, but that syrup thickened on a cheesecake under a chocolate ganache...and the goumis are pretty, fix nitrogen and need virtually no care. Then there are the wineberries, an invasive I have cultivated. And blueberries, I should have gotten serious about blueberries sooner as I have macular degeneration, AND it seems the one fruit my husband is likely to eat much of. Blueberries need little care IF you established them in a good bed to start with, which means two things_ VERY acid soil--the use of peat moss is the only way I've found--and screening out the birds. The best way to do that is to create a fence with one-inch-mesh chickenwire, six feet high. Then you only need to throw the netting over the top during the season, and snakes won't get caught in it. If you use T-posts, put a tennis ball on the top of each to avoid tearing the netting. I put mine on a hugelkultur. I have thornless blackberries but have had all kinds of problems with these. Currants and rhubarb seem to need a lot of shade here. The last berry is raspberries--I have a red everbearing raspberry, unfortunately I don't know the variety as I got my starts from a neighbor who doesn't pay attention to that--he bought them decades ago and mentioned that a farm partner said he paid too much for them. I don't know what he paid but she was wrong, as he got fruit from them for decades, mine have fruited heavily for over a decade, and I have given away quite a lot. They may produce a small harvest in June, on old canes, but the main harvest starts in August and goes till it frosts, in November these days. These are good for freezing, and jam. I also have two large wild persimmon trees that usually bear a lot of seedy fruit, and several grafted ones that produce bigger, nearly seedless fruit. And five apples, three peaches, four pears, some of them not bearing yet. That includes one standard apple I just planted last year--I was determined to get one in, in my lifetime, to pay back the unknown strangers who planted four big trees on my former land, from which we got many great harvests.

The setup seems problematic to me in that it seems raised above the floor of the cage--when the chicks hatch, they're liable to fall out. Also walk right through the open spaces in that cage. Chicks can fly a few feet within a week or two of hatching. We lost two or three a few years ago when they walked through the field fence of the chicken run, their mothers couldn't pursue them but a dog could and did. So I put a 18" tall strip of one-inch-mesh chickenwire all around the bottom of the run, and there have been no more chick escapes. It also helps keep snakes out, but not entirely. We have an enclosure within our coop we call chickland, fenced off from the rest with hardware cloth so nobody is laying eggs in a nest with half-gestated eggs, or bothering the hen. It has an opening to the outside which makes it more convenient for changing the water and adding feed. When the chicks are about a week old we start letting them out. Chickland is low and pretty dark.

My opinion--it's fine to dry sliced fruit in direct sunlight, such as a dashboard--which I've done, in conjunction with using a dehydrator--but herbs should be dried out of direct sunlight. Here's how I do herbs: I have nails up and down the rafters in my kitchen--I also use these to hang onion braids on, and use the rafters to string a rope from which I hang ears of dent corn to dry enough for shelling and storing.  Most herbs I can clip a forked piece which can then just hang from the nail--if using finer ones, I suspend a clump of them from a string. After a few days, depending on the weather, the herbs are dry enough to take down and put in cake pans. If it has been unusually dry, low humidity, I may be able to strip the leaves off the stems now. Then the next time I use the oven, after turning it off and removing whatever I was baking, I put my cake pans in, at first with the door open and only a minute at a time. Usually they need a turn in the oven after being stripped off the stems to get to the crisp, crumbly stage from where I can put them in long term storage in glass jars.

I wonder what went wrong for Tanya. I found them easy to grow (except when the rabbits got at them) and easy to shell, easy to save seed. And I have clay soil, though well modified.

but Craig, aren't you worried about the pH skyrocketing in the adjacent beds?

What do you mean, "off"?
I've grown peanuts for years, I hang the whole plants until they're dry--I put them in my little attached greenhouse, but a covered porch works too, Just keep an eye out for mice. Then I pluck the pods off the plants, which can either be composted or fed to goats. I put every tenth peanut pod into a separate bowl to save for seed. That way the plants that are most productive are overrepresented in the seed stash, but most plants are in there to keep diversity up, all but the duds that had less than ten pods. If I have room I save these still in the pod. The rest I shell. I used to roast them with some oil and then salt them--but the salt always mostly fell off and collected in the bottom of the container. Then I found instructions to soak the peanuts in saltwater before roasting, and this works--I don't remember details but you can google it and find a video with instructions. It's really not a lot of trouble. I've never tried to make peanut butter, because we have an old weak blender and because dang, I can't devote that much space to growing peanuts.

I have rarely wanted to break a hen of broodiness--one time was when some idiot went broody in January. I had not read about the dunking method, but that you put them in a wire cage with no bedding so their bottom cools. The first years I kept chickens, we didn't have electricity so an incubator was not an option. Now I have it, but as off-grid solar so conceivably would worry about the drain during a long cloudy period. But in any case, as long as I have one broody hen, I'd MUCH rather let her handle it, because aside from the effort of maintaining an incubator--which is probably no more than keeping a hen fed and watered inside Chickland, the enclosure within our coop where we put a broody hen so the others can't keep laying eggs in her nest, and she's less likely to abandon the nest halfway through. But then! When the chicks hatch, she knows just what to do, and she keeps them all warm and fed and taught how to be a chicken. Once, we let a hen and her chicks out of the coop when they were 11 days old, and she led them straight to the sand pile, which I use in the garden. I guess she realized they needed grit for their gizzards, which I wouldn't have thought of.
Mostly I don't see why you'd want to break a hen of broodiness unless she's doing it off-season, or all your hens are going broody and you aren't getting eggs, or maybe you have no rooster so those eggs won't hatch. Right now I have two hens setting--which makes more of a dent in the egg supply than can be accounted for by the eggs under the hens and the hens out of the laying roster, it always seems--and someone coming to get a dozen fertilized ggs so she can replenish her flock after predators wiped out all but two hens.

Thank you Janie, now I can just leave my fennel where it is, in an improved garden bed where it has the best chance, without worrying about its effect on the flowers and peas and cumin I have near it.