The weather became suddenly very unseasonably warm and sunny. Essentially, we have spring weather now, and the “mud season” after the snow melted was very short. And I have spent a few days outdoors, working in my garden as much as I can. I am pleased to say that so far, I do not have any back pain, except for tiredness. After almost a year of nearly constant lower-back pains, that feels absolutely great. I hope it lasts.

I managed to de-branch all the longer and thicker wood pieces. I will probably not use any for beans this year, because I think I have found a better, permanent solution, about which I will write at some later date. Right now, I will simply cut these into 50 cm pieces that fit into my stove, bag them, and weigh them so I know how much I have.

I managed to shred, bag, and weigh most of the thinner pieces that are worth using as firewood (i.e., poplars and maples). I cut a few pieces of wood, and I weighed them fresh and then dry, in order to be able to estimate how much dry mass I have based on how much they weigh now. I know, therefore, that poplars and willows lose 60% mass when drying, maples and ashes lose 40%.

All that remains to shred now are thin twigs from trimming the hedge and the raspberries. Those won’t be bagged and weighed, they will be used as mulch on my vegetable beds.

And as the title says, I started tilling the soil. I tilled the patch where the butternut squash were last year, and I enlarged it from ca 5 m² to ca 12 m². And yesterday I tilled the approximately 21 m² patch that you see in the picture. It is in the place of one of the three Three Sisters experiments of last year. On this specific patch, the beans froze, the corn failed, and the zucchini underperformed really badly. But at least the soil was worked a bit because of that, so it was slightly easier to turn with a garden fork than if it were completely untouched.

I will need to break the big lumps with an electric hoe and flatten the area a bit. And since I finally managed to get my hands on viable seeds of naked oats, I will try to grow that in here. Oats are not too picky about soil quality, but I will probably use some synthetic fertilizers to boost it up a bit. Next year, I will plant some legumes here to boost the soil naturally. If soy beans work out well, this will be their next-year’s home. If not, then green peas or bush beans.

Technically fruits, in the kitchen usually used as vegetables – those are the things that I choose to call fruigetables, to avoid any “whell, akshually…”. This post is going to be mostly about tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, and similar.

As you can see, there are three greenhouses in the map. There is a reason for that – in a self-sustainable setting, reliance on outside inputs should be reduced, including various -icides and fertilizers. And three greenhouses would allow a three-year rotation between these:

Soybeans, beans, peppers, tomatoes, winter squash, and, eventually, also radishes and peas as pre-crops. I think with greenhouses this size, it should be easy to grow about 50 kg of these crops together, adding about 16 Mcal to our tally. But more importantly than calories, these would add other nutrients and, most importantly, flavors. With two-three varieties of tomato and pepper, a wide span of variously flavored sauces and chutneys can be made, all the way from sweet, across savoury, to hot. The soybeans would take care of fixing nitrogen and breaking the cycles of nightshade family-specific diseases and pests.

The rodent-proof raised beds could further provide, in my estimate, 20 kg of green peas (as a pre-crop), 15 kg of carrots, 15 kg of onions+garlic, and about 50 kg of various pumpkins and squash, providing an additional 42 Mcal and more nutrients and flavors.

I think these are conservative estimates, averages, that account for occasional glut and occasional crop failure. Most of these crops can be preserved in various ways – pickled, dehydrated, in compotes – and some can keep fresh for several months over winter (winter squash).

With this, we are almost there as far as plant-based foodstuffs go. The next thing to look at will be fruits from our orchard and fruit shrubbery.