ONE HUBCAP FARM | Blythewood, SC

Preparing for pigs and lettuce

I plan to put the pigs in a scrubby former pasture that we cleared during the process of building the house.  It adjoins the woods, and so I plan for the pigs to live in the pasture and destroy the sweet-gum sprouts in the spring when it is cool, and to move to the woods during the summer.  The pasture is about 400 feet from the house, and so I draped hoses through the woods this morning to see if we had enough water pressure to get water up to the pasture.  I am now feeling the fall I took when I tripped over a muscadine vine and landed flat on the ground.  The pigs will help get rid of all the viney trip hazards.  We do, thank God, and so that is one problem solved!

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Water for the pigs!

I haven’t made a proper compost pile in a long time.  Instead I have just piled kitchen debris at the edge of the garden and let nature take its course.  My soil at the new home needs all the help I can give it, and so I made a compost pile out of chicken manure and litter and fall leaves.  I was thrilled this morning when I visited it and found that it was warm inside, a sign of rapid decomposition!  I’ll add more manure and turn it, and get the contents ready to go onto my caterpillar tunnel bed this spring.  img_3448

We do plan to close on the selling of the other home this week, I pray, and when I went to the house to get out the final items, I also cleaned out the compost pile.  I got a couple of wheelbarrows full of the beautiful finished compost.  It is full of weed seeds, but I have put it in a nursery area where I can let the seeds germinate and kill them before I apply it to the garden.  For more of my thoughts on weeds, get my ebook, How to have a Weed Free Garden.

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Site of the caterpillar tunnel

Here’s where the caterpillar tunnel will go.  Caterpillar tunnels are inexpensive hoop houses that protect plants from the weather and allow an early harvest.  In the summer, shade cloth protects plants from the sun.  I expect to have a harvest of lettuce, kale, spinach, and other greens ready for sale this spring.