Homestead Housekeeping

After a long and difficult winter, it’s time for some spring cleaning on the homestead. With a little luck, the rain will hold off. This will be the first “spring cleaning” that we have ever attempted without water or electricity supplied from the grid. Maybe those of you who have done it before can give us some pointers.
We also have more gardening to do. It takes a lot of work to turn rocky, uneven ground into suitable garden space, especially by hand.
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Greenhouse Genocide

Spent all day Saturday with my sister and my brother in law. We destroyed a greenhouse.
I think disassembled is the politically correct term, but I think the casual observer might agree that we destroyed it.
They told me that it was big, but due to wishful thinking or denial, I was unpleasantly surprised to see how big it was. It was 100 feet long! I wish I had taken a pic of it. Anyway, it’s all on the truck now, ready to be unloaded.
A byproduct of the destruction is that we got all of the gutters that we need to build our water catchment system. We also scored a lot of water pipe, and all of the landscaping timbers we need to finish our garden beds. Also got some lattice for the front porch. Good haul for us!
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Inclement Weather Policy

In case you didn’t know, our area of the state was hit pretty hard last week by the weather. My mom’s house, where we are staying while she recuperates, was without power for 3 days. Others faired much worse. Many houses were destroyed by tornados and/or wind, although TV news crews focused mainly on a church that was hit.
We don’t have a thunderstorm/tornado plan on the homestead. We learned how to handle flash floods, snow, and ice storms, but we haven’t been on the homestead during tornado season yet. We have a plan for a storm shelter, but at this point and for the forseeable future it remains only a plan. We welcome any suggestions on what to do when the weather gets bad.
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Another Garden Bed

Our garden, much like other aspects of our life, is unconventional. Our soil is more rock and clay than soil, and shade from all the trees covers most of the ground. So we decided to put raised beds wherever the soil and sunlight is best. Imagine a bunch of small gardens all scattered about. We put another one in yesterday. We started in an area that had a deep layer of good top soil, then dug down about 18 inches and put rotten wood, then covered it with the good topsoil. We had to scrape that up some more topsoil to fill the bed. This bed was strategically located to make use of the runoff from a wet weather spring. We will sow in more seeds than recomended and hope for the best. It’s our own spin on biointensive farming. Jen will try to post a pic of the finished bed for me.
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