Home Garden - Food Forest
A collection of stories from our urban homestead in Portland Oregon.
Our Home Garden Food Forest Stories
Peach Harvest in Urban Food Forest
We are harvested tons of peaches from our urban food forest in our front yard. We thin the fruit trees in order to make sure the fruit that grows gets large and ripe. The peaches started to ripen up last week and there is a faint smell of delicious peach when you get...
Harvesting Marionberries in our Food Forest
We harvested marionberries, raspberries, and blueberries in our food forest for the past several weeks. We love growing lots of berries. There are few things better than vine-ripened fresh berries. We grow our marionberries on a simple trellis in order to maximize...
How to Thin Fruit Trees in a Food Forest
Learning how to thin fruit trees in a food forest is important for anyone interested in growing a thriving backyard orchard. This is an important food forest task that most people don't think about when dreaming of growing a big backyard orchard. Due to the large...
How To Use Tomato Clips
Today, we are going to go over how to use tomato clips to trellis your indeterminate variety of tomatoes on a string. There are other ways to trellis tomatoes and we do those techniques to such as the Florida weave or just simply wrapping the tomato vines around a...
Native Plants Should Be Part of Your Food Forest
Native plants should be part of your urban homesteading food forest design. We are using some native plants such as elderberry, western red cedar, red flowering currents, and more as a hedge in the front of our yard. We have intermingled flowers and ground cover...
Florida Weave for Tomatoes in Community Garden Plot
We use the Florida weave for our sauce tomatoes growing in the community garden plot. This is a great way to trellis indeterminate tomatoes. Together with T posts or wooden stakes, you wrap the string around all of the tomatoes. By weaving the twine around the plants...
Garlic Scapes: Why We Grow Garlic
We grow our own garlic so that we have garlic scapes in the late spring to enjoy. The garlic bulbs are of course enjoyed throughout the year, but is the scapes that we enjoy the most. The garlic scape is the stalk that forms at the top of the hard neck garlic when the...
Planting Cucumbers Against The Back of our Garage
We put in a short row of 10 cucumbers in our backyard against the garage. This is a small space that we have sectioned off from the rest of the area we allow our ducks to roam and forage. Given that we have used so much of our garden for fruit trees and perennials we...
Sweet Onions: Harvesting and Drying
We were harvesting and drying the sweet onions today grown in the community garden plot. The sweet onions that we grew this year were Walla Walla and Alisa Craigs. Both of these varieties get very large and are excellent for making onions rings and for slicing to...
Letting Artichokes Flower for the Bees and Pollinators in your Food Forest
Do like to grow artichokes? Consider letting your artichokes go to flower in your food forest garden to help bees and other pollinators. We allow the majority of our artichokes to flower. An artichoke produces huge beautiful purple flowers. Consequently, if you let...
Harvesting Potatoes: Toddler Finds Taters
Our little toddler loves yummy taters and he helped with part of our potato harvest this year. We grow potatoes in a variety of methods. These were a few extra seed potatoes of a red potato variety and Yukon golds that we had after planting our main rows. We tossed...
Havesting Garlic from Raised Garden Bed
We planted a large raised garden bed full of garlic last October. This is our entire year's supply of garlic. We feed the plants a couple of times during the growing season and kept them watered. We have harvested all of the garlic scapes and it's time to pull the...
Trellising Marionberry Vines
A simple system for trellising our marionberry vines to keep them off the ground to avoid plants rooting in the ground. Marionberries grow on second-year vines. It is important to remove the previous vines and manage the growth for the production of future fruit. A little management goes a long way for fruit production.
Propogating Marionberry Plants
Marionberry plants are super simple to propagate, even a toddler can help out.