Springtime Planting & Buckwheat Banana Muffin Recipe

Reader Contribution by Rosemary Hansen
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We are so busy on the homestead! This is our first year living outside of a big city, in a rural wilderness full of big predators and also hummingbirds, squirrels, and foxes with the occasional bald eagle.

Our big plan for our first year is somewhat boring: fencing. An underappreciated topic for farming and homesteading, fencing is essential for growing food, protecting livestock, and in our case, protecting ourselves and small children from bears and wolves.

We are also busily planting a lot of tree seedlings. We picked for this year to plant hazelnuts, oaks, edible pine nut trees, and a few heartnuts. With the latest heat wave, it’s been challenging to keep up with watering them all but we’ve noticed that once they get into the ground, they have opened their leaves and already some have grown about 1.5” in two weeks! We’ve noticed that hazelnut trees are quite tough. We learned this after getting some big seedlings from a friend who chatted with us while the trees dried out in the back of the truck for about 2 hours in the hot sun. They still survived just fine and are about to open their beaks (the flower on hazels), with lots of new growth. The wild hazelnut (called beaked hazel) is shown to be an “aggressive colonizer” of disturbed forest and forest edge areas, so that corresponds with our experience.

I’ve also been starting my tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, onions, cabbage, and other annuals out on our balcony. It will be nice to bite into that first tomato and harvest a basketful of lettuce from my acreage garden.  

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