Creating a Micro-farm

I am not sure if the term “micro-farm” would be the correct one or if another word would describe our venture better; my husband and I keep calling our place a micro-farm because we’re jumping into a bit of agriculture. Nothing on a large scale but just a few chickens, rabbits, and raised beds with fruits and veggies.

Of the many lessons the pandemic last year taught us, the importance of a little self-reliance has never been more clear. Even when we were living in an apartment while our house was being built, we had potted plants for a couple of veggies. Mostly it was to keep my kids occupied with plant watering and observation for when tomatoes were ready for picking, but the general idea was still there. There may come a time when we can’t get what we use to so readily and we will have to rely on ourselves a bit more when it comes to necessities like food.

We are fortunate to live in a rural area so having livestock is not uncommon. Heck, my in-laws raise beef and we bought a half-cow last year to put in the freezer. This year, since we’ve mostly moved in, we decided to up our game a little bit and try our hand at gardening. I have already figured out that we’ve made a few mistakes that I hope to not repeat next year.

Lesson One: Don’t plant too early. We had meticulously started a variety of seeds inside. The kids watered them, watched them grow, helped me prop the tiny plants upright with toothpicks and forks. After we built our raised beds, hauling in sifted topsoil mixed with compost, we eagerly planted our fledgling garden residents and waited with excitement to see how they flourished. This was done shortly before Spring Break, so mid-March. This is Texas. We have had several rounds of colder temperatures since then that caused some of our poor green babies to die. I bought more plants. Some have since died because again, the colder weather was more than they could handle.

Lesson Two: Wind is not your friend. Within a few days of the planting, we had several fronts blow through and the wind was not kind to our plants. I tried to create windbreakers with landscape fabric and dowel rods; my husband used rebar in some of the corners. His upright supports fared better than my dowel rods. The wind snapped those like toothpicks while shredding the landscape fabric against the rebar. I am debating about the practicality and cost of doing hoops over the raised beds; you’ve probably seen them online made of PVC pipe and clear plastic sheeting. Maybe that would protect my fragile plants from the winds that make it sound like my house is actually oceanfront property. (If I stand out on my porch and close my eyes on windy nights, the only thing missing is the tang of salt in the air with a smidge of humidity for me to feel like I’m in Port Aransas.)

Lesson Three: Cats will view your raised beds of wonderful topsoil and compost as large litterboxes. … I will let your imagination fill in the details of what that removal entailed (multiple times at that) but I now have landscape fabric laying across the fabric in two of the raised beds while the third is interspersed with pieces of chicken wire and an attempted fence of more landscape fabric and chicken wire.

As I type this, yet another front is blowing through so we shall see how the garden fares but I am hopeful that we shall see something grow. I am very excited to see whether or not we can get squash and melons to grow over a cattle panel trellis. I have cantaloupe and two types of squash planted at the base of the panels with the hopes that if I can get them to grow on the trellis, the subsequent fruit and veggies will be easier to harvest. It is exasperating to find a squash that was hidden in the leaves and grew so large that it really isn’t good for much beyond shredding for zucchini bread. I saw this on social media so we shall see how well it actually works.

In a future post, you might get to meet the livestock that are making up our micro-farm. They’re cute. Noisy, but cute.