Month: September 2024

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Indoor Growing Season Begins

As the outdoor growing season starts to slow down, we decided it was time to bring a little food production back inside. While we are not full into winter yet, the nights are cooler, the garden is winding down, and fresh greens will soon be harder to come by outdoors.

We picked up two small indoor hydroponic garden systems and set them up with lettuce and a mix of herbs. Hydroponics itself is not new to us. We ran a large aquaponics system back in Florida and learned a lot from it. This setup is much smaller and simpler, but the goal is similar. Keep fresh food growing year round in whatever way makes sense for the season.

The systems are already doing well. The lettuce is taking off and the herbs are settling in. It is been nice to watch steady growth again after the outdoor beds started to slow. Even small harvests feel meaningful when they are fresh and close at hand.

While these will never replace the garden or orchard, they fill an important gap. They give us fresh greens through the colder months and keep us connected to growing food even when the land outside is resting.

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Goodbye Orange Extension Cord of Doom

This month we tackled an important infrastructure upgrade for both the house and the shop. I installed a new electrical sub panel along with a generator interlock breaker to give us safer and more reliable power across the property.

The generator interlock gives us the ability to run the entire house on generator power when needed. We brought several generators with us from Florida and used them regularly during hurricane season. Having that same backup capability here in Tennessee gives us peace of mind. If the power goes out, we can still keep the essentials running and stay comfortable while we wait for service to be restored.

The new sub panel is dedicated to the shop. Until now, the shop had been powered by a long extension cord run from the house. It worked, but it was far from ideal and definitely not how things should be long term. With the sub panel in place, the shop now has proper, stable power with plenty of capacity for tools and future projects.

It feels good to replace temporary solutions with permanent ones. These upgrades may not be exciting to look at, but they make daily work safer, smoother, and more reliable. Little by little, the property is becoming more functional and better equipped for the kind of work we plan to do here.

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Protecting the orchard

It did not take long for us to learn that we are not the only ones excited about our new orchard. As the weeks passed, we started to notice signs that the deer had discovered the young fruit trees. A few nibbled leaves here and there quickly turned into a clear pattern of nightly visits.

After all the work that went into planting those trees in July, we knew we had to act fast. So this month we installed electric fencing around the entire orchard to give it the protection it needs to get established.

The setup was a learning process, from laying out the posts to setting the proper height and making sure the charger was strong enough to do the job. Once everything was in place, it finally felt like the trees had a fighting chance.

The goal is simple. Give the orchard time to grow without constant pressure from wildlife. The deer will always be part of this land, and we respect that. But for now, the trees need a little help if they are going to survive and thrive.

With the fence up and running, we feel much better about the future of the orchard. It is one more small step toward protecting what we are building here.