The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Defining the Seasons

Chapter One: Midwinter

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Soil Health and Fertility

Chapter Two: Late Winter

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Meeting Plant Needs

Chapter Three: Early Spring

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: The Lives of Poultry and Livestock

Chapter Four: Mid-Spring

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Rotational Grazing

Chapter Five: Late Spring

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Cover Crops

Topic of the Season: Honey Bee Partners

Chapter Six: Early Summer

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Making Hay

Chapter Seven: Midsummer

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Caring for an Orchard

Chapter Eight: Late Summer

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Tools and Equipment

Chapter Nine: Early Fall

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Weed, Pest, and Disease Control

Chapter Ten: Mid-Fall

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Managing Your Woods

Chapter Eleven: Late Fall

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Restoring Biodiversity

Chapter Twelve: Early Winter

Seasonal Chores

Topic of the Season: Quality of Life

Tracking Your Year

Resources

Acknowledgments

Index

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Copyright

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Preface

When my family and I first moved to this farm, I wanted to do it all: garden, keep an orchard and bees, grow field crops, raise livestock and poultry, have my own firewood and timber. It was a steep learning curve, though my job as a reporter for a weekly farm newspaper helped a lot, since it took me to several hundred farms and introduced me to many farmers and agricultural professionals. There were plenty of mistakes and some outright failures along the way, but I did learn, and my husband and I are still here and still happy, rejoicing in homegrown food and even making a little money most years.

The three biggest things I've learned over the past 25 years are:

• You can't do it all at the same time if you have a small budget, a family, and outside job obligations — not if you want a decent life and good family relations.
• You don't need to do it all. What does work nicely is to try different enterprises — pigs, bees, timber harvests, whatever — over the years to discover what you like best, whether they fit together well, and what most benefits your family, your land, and your budget. Keep what works.
• Doing a thing in its proper season — when it would naturally occur, or when conditions make the job most efficient and comfortable — is how you spread the work more evenly through the year. This is what makes it possible to get it all done and still have some leisure time.

This book is about timing, as important an aspect of raising plants and animals as any other. Bits and pieces of information on when to do farm-related tasks are widely available in gardening calendars, vaccination schedules for livestock, discussions of when to prune trees and plant crops, and so on. This book combines all of this information to create a seasonal calendar for the most common enterprises found on small diversified farms, in a way that spreads the work appropriately and more or less evenly and can be understood and applied anywhere in the temperate zones of this continent. This book assumes that you wish to work with natural processes instead of against them, and so the calendar of seasonal tasks in each chapter excludes the use of synthetic chemicals.

Every rural acreage is different in what and how and when to do things, because every piece of land is different and so is every landowner. For that reason, no one else (and especially no book) can possibly tell you precisely what and how and when you should do things on your place. A book tells you what to look for and which questions to ask. You have to figure out the answers.

This book is just a beginning; it gets you to the starting line. From there you have to run the course: do the thinking and planning and experimenting over the years to fill out the details of your own personal farm calendar. The people who do that — think and plan and experiment — are the ones who thrive.

Introduction

Defining the Seasons

Seasons vary a lot, year to year. They're wet or dry, cold or warm or hot, early or late. Just now we're in the middle of the most drawn-out mud season, otherwise known as late winter, that I've ever seen, and it's been a challenge to keep the cattle even reasonably dry.

The timing and length of the seasons differ strikingly across temperate North America, but the seasons themselves are similar enough that we recognize the same broad characteristics. Winter is a time of cold and no plant growth; summer means heat and long days. Spring is the transition from winter to summer, and fall the transition from summer to winter. Each season slides into the next; only rarely is there a sudden shift. In the most southern states, winter almost disappears and summers are hot enough to keep cool-loving plants from growing; in the northern tier of states, summers are short and relatively cool and the growing season isn't long enough for tomatoes and other long-season plants to mature when started outside.

As a culture, we've gotten into the habit of looking at the calendar to determine planting times and other such decisions, no matter what's going on outside. But a few generations ago, instead of looking at the calendar, farmers and gardeners looked at what the local plants and birds and other wildlife were doing — a much more accurate indicator considering how different seasons are from year to year. Using plant growth and wildlife activity to identify how far along you are in the year is called phenology, and it is a highly useful study for anyone who grows crops or raises animals.

But phenology is a very local study, since seasonal indicator species vary widely across various regions. Spring in the Southwest has a different cast of native characters than spring in the Northeast. The signs can vary even across small areas. Our friends just 15 miles to the south know that sprouting skunk cabbage means winter is coming to an end, but I've never seen it in our neighborhood. I watch for returning red-winged blackbirds instead. Phenology cannot define what makes a season across the entire temperate zone of the continent.

Useful Seasonal Indicators

There are, however, some precise and fairly universal indicators of the different seasons that apply no matter where you live.

Soil and air temperatures. These can be measured with air and soil thermometers (soil temperature is measured at a depth of 3 to 4 inches) or by keeping an eye on what local farmers are doing. There are three crops grown throughout North America — corn, wheat, and alfalfa — that, no matter where they are planted, germinate and grow best with specific soil and air temperatures. Wherever you are in the country:

• Spring wheat goes in the ground in early spring.
• Most farmers plant field corn in the middle of spring.
• The first cutting of alfalfa for hay occurs in late spring into early summer.

Rate of growth in warm- and cool-season grasses. This is a second good and widespread indicator of the season. Except for the first cutting of alfalfa, harvest times are not reliable indicators — crops get harvested when farmers judge that they're mature, more so than according to the season.

In this book, I have used soil and air temperatures and grass growth as indicators to generally define 12 seasons: an early, middle, and late period of each of the 4 major seasons. This level of detail allows for a much more specific discussion of what should best be done at a particular time of year, and why.

In Season and Out

If you have enough money, labor, equipment, and infrastructure, it's certainly possible to do many things out of season. We can grow tomatoes in North Dakota in winter with a warm and well-lit and expensive greenhouse, calve beef cattle not just in spring but in August or January, and cut firewood during the worst heat of summer. But why? For the small-scale diversified rural acreage, this is neither practical nor enjoyable. I don't want to work that hard. Doing things at the right season requires less money and labor, and it produces better results.

On the other hand, it's a rare year when I get even most of my work done at exactly the right time. Sometimes the weather just won't cooperate; other times some other project demands all my attention, or there's a major family event involving travel that I don't want to miss. Sometimes things have to get done at less than the best times, and sometimes they wait until next year, like getting those grapevines off the field fences. I've realized that if I shoot for the best and am willing to settle for what works, we'll get by okay.

Average Timing and Depths of Frost in the U.S. and Canada

When you're mapping out a work schedule and organizing your equipment and supplies for the seasons ahead, it's helpful to know the average dates of first and last frost in your area. But bear in mind that the dates in the calendars below are only averages, and the actual dates can vary by several weeks from year to year. The average dates for field work in your state can be found online in the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service Handbook #628, "Usual Planting and Harvesting Dates for U.S. Field Crops." Especially useful for planning purposes are the dates for planting spring grains and field corn, respectively, and the first alfalfa harvest. Again, bear in mind that these dates are only averages and will also vary by a couple of weeks or more in states that have big changes in elevation (Arizona, for example), or that are very long from north to south (such as California and Minnesota).

Chapter One

Midwinter

Soil is frozen or subject to intermittent freezing. Air temperatures are continually or often below freezing. There is no plant growth. In USDA climate Zones 1–7, the soil is on average frozen in winter; in Zone 8 it's subject to freezing. In Zones 9 and 10, the soil does not normally go below 40°F/4°C, and air temperatures only rarely go below 32°F/0°C, so that these areas can be said to have no real winter.

Midwinter is the season of short days and long nights between the winter solstice and when the first warming trend starts sap moving in the trees — the coldest time of year. The soil is cold or frozen, and nothing grows. Aside from livestock chores and filling the woodbox, there isn't much that needs to get done around the farmyard; it's a traditional time to make and mend tools and pursue other indoor crafts. This is also the traditional time to pour a cup of coffee and do the annual recordkeeping, taxes, and ordering of seeds, supplies, chicks, bees, and equipment parts.

Midwinter is conference season, too, since it's when farmers have some spare time on their hands. Watch for multi-topic conferences on gardening, homesteading, and sustainable farming, as well as workshops on everything from sheep shearing to fruit tree pruning and beekeeping to rotational grazing and direct marketing. Besides the information you gain, these sessions can be a great way to meet other people interested in the same things you are.

The one big outdoor project of the season is woodlot harvests and improvements. This is traditionally the height of the logging season in regions where the ground freezes, though in areas where the ground doesn't freeze, no heavy woods work is done unless the ground is dry, in order to minimize soil compaction and erosion and maximize safety for the workers. Woodlot owners can always find plenty to do: thinning and pruning trees, piling or burning debris, making firewood, and harvesting timber for various purposes.

Midwinter Seasonal Chores

Garden

By this time of year, you should have a nice pile of seed and plant catalogs or have identified some promising seed companies on the Internet. Good catalogs will describe each variety's preferences and tolerances for heat, cold, and drought as well as number of growing days to harvest, growth habit and mature height, disease resistance, and other important details. When deciding which species and varieties to plant, start with the following checklist:

• Choose varieties suited to your climate and length of growing season. For example, ­summers in the Southeast are blisteringly hot and humid, in the coastal Northwest it's cool and moist, and where I am, in the upper Midwest, the average summer is warm and humid, with a relatively short growing season.
• Look for varieties that are disease resistant if you have persistent disease problems (fusarium wilt is a common one).
• Note how the seed is produced if you have opinions about this. Note whether it is open-­pollinated, organic, hybrid, or genetically modified (GM). This is especially important if you plan to save your own seed (for more information, see Deciphering Seed Labels).
• Match perennials with your hardiness zone or provide a microclimate. If a perennial, tree, or bush is rated for a zone warmer than yours, it's probably not going to thrive or survive, though you may have success by utilizing a microclimate: try planting it against a wind-protected south-facing wall and mulching the root zone after the ground freezes in early winter.

If you planted last year, use your notes to plan the details of this year's crop rotation and cover crop plantings. Assess how well the previous year's varieties, rotation, and cover crops performed in terms of:

• Quality and productivity
• Resistance to weed competition, disease, and insect pests
• Ease of harvesting
• Contributions from the roots and above­ground residue to soil protection and health