Old-Timey Gardening and Homesteading Tips

Some gardening tips haven’t changed in over 100 years, while others definitely have! Here are some old-time tips for your homestead and garden.

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Old-Time Homesteading Tips

Reading through some of my grandmother’s books on farming and gardening has been surprisingly full of things that have been helpful as we shifted from being suburban homesteaders to rural homesteaders. There’s some level of critical thinking needed when reading older tips, sometimes the advice is risky and had been replaced with safer alternatives so if you happen across old gardening books in the thrift store, yard sale, library sale, or elsewhere, just know that some of the tips are best left on the paper rather than being practiced in the garden.

I’ve been reading books from the 1900s, 1920s, 1940s, 1970s, and the not-quite-yet-vintage, 1990s. Some tips have been the same and others have changed quite a lot! Here are some tips learned from those who have been gardening and homesteading before us!

Plan For Emergencies

As a homesteader, I can’t put enough emphasis on having some level of emergency supplies. This wasn’t something I ever thought about in the UK. But something we heard about from talking to farmers and other homesteaders nearby.

Emergency supplies are things like

a well-stocked first aid kit
good torch or flashlight and extra batteries
hand crank or battery-operated emergency radio
water
canned shelf-stable food for you, your family, and any pets or animals

Nothing overly crazy but know that what you might want in your emergency supplies is going to differ depending on where you live. If you are in Alaska your kit might have more cold weather and heating type of supplies, maybe you live somewhere with tornadoes or hurricanes. What do you need for those?

Savings

No emergency kit is complete without an emergency fund. Save it for a rainy day and it seems that an emergency is a rainy day indeed. If you are wanting to be a homesteader and don’t have an emergency fund of savings then I urge you to start putting some money aside to build your emergency fund.

Our puppies have been in and out of the emergency vet and the regular vet for over a week and the bills are astronomical. A good emergency fund helps take some of the worry and headache out of what needs to be done. The emergency fund isn’t for a vacation or a new spring wardrobe so you are on trend with your mates, it’s not for that I have to go on a night out so my coworkers don’t think I’m lame, or the new cell phone released. It’s for emergencies some emergencies that we have been through on the homestead are:

the freezer broke
car tire punctured and replacement needed
dog ate something they shouldn’t have
you or your kid need to visit the ER
the water heater died
the pipes froze and burst

The emergency fund is something we always rebuild and maintain. This is one old-timey homesteading tip that’s right up on the top of my list.

Have A Garden

There’s an interesting frugal movement I’m starting to see from easy-to-do frugal things like cheap batch cooking, free activities for you and your family, how to fix things yourself or DIY, visible mending of clothing where you patch and mend clothing in a way that it becomes unique and the repair is a feature of the clothing, all the way up to extreme no spend frugality. Growing a garden is a common old tip to save money and most homesteaders have a garden.

The no-dig garden beds are going in one at a time as the availability of cardboard and woodchips allows me to make a section. I think it will be a couple of seasons before the no-dig garden beds are all in and that’s the buy-off.

Time vs money.

It takes longer for me to do it for free, to gather the materials to make a no-dig bed. Or I could spend a bunch of money to buy in materials like yards of compost, paper weed block, or kraft paper rolls to make the garden beds quicker.

I know for many of you, the homestead garden came from a desire to have that fresh, home-grown fruit and vegetables without pesticides or GMOs. You wanted to save money at the grocery store and have good, fresh food for you and your family. Your starter garden is only as expensive as you make it. You can start small and very frugally and take time to build it bigger or invest the money upfront and have the beds how you want them sooner. It’s up to you and what you are comfortable with.

Old-Time Gardening Tips

Compost, compost, compost. The biggest frugal old gardening tip is to compost practically everything. Compost is the cornerstone of improving and feeding the soil which helps your plants to grow and thrive. If you don’t already have a compost pile, do a bit of research and see what will work best for you, and start gathering kitchen scraps for the compost.

Vegetable Growing Tips

When sowing onion seeds, spread a little well-composted chicken manure or an organic chicken manure fertilizer and bonemeal and work into the garden bed with a garden fork just before sowing. Thin onion seedlings that are growing too close together for green onions or spring onions for the kitchen.

Regular watering of tomatoes helps prevent cracking and splitting, so fewer tomatoes are wasted and rotting on the vine. Regular feeding with dilute compost tea can help your tomatoes have steady growth over the season.

Don’t overfeed cucumber plants with nitrogen in fertilizers or composted manure. Don’t let your cucumber plants dry out, make sure they have moist but not waterlogged in the soil. Too much nitrogen can make cucumbers taste bitter.

Regular watering of potatoes can help increase the yield but avoid watering the foliage and splashing soil onto the leaves to reduce the spread of blight. I would add to this tip and say that using a thick mulch will help give a barrier between the soil and the potato foliage as well as keeping potatoes that are close to the surface from being exposed to the light and going green.

When harvesting broccoli, pick the entire center spears first to encourage side shoots which prolongs the harvest period by producing more smaller spears.

Zucchini will grow well if planted out on old manure that is 2 or more years old or on the remains of the previous year’s compost heap. They can also be grown as an intercrop in between Brussels sprouts maximizing the growing space. Watch out for soft growth of the fruits and blossom end rot from too much nitrogen in the soil.

If growing fava or broad beans, once picking and harvesting the pods has finished, dig the whole plant into the soil as green manure and use the garden bed for next year’s cabbages.

Using cloches, polytunnels and cold frames is an invaluable garden aid. Place on the soil 7 to 10 days before you plan on sowing seeds to pre-warm the soil. Then lift to sow the seeds and place them back over the soil and leave in place until tall tender plants like beans are touching the glass. I’ll add that make sure you cover the plants if cold or frosty weather happens so you don’t lose your crop if they are not hardy! If timed right, with the right crops, you can be planting and sowing 6 weeks earlier or even more in mild climates than your average last frost date in spring.

Save seeds from plants that grew well.

Don’t be afraid to try different varieties. There is likely a variety that you like more and others that you like less.

Use your common sense and think carefully about your garden plan. Adapt other garden plans to your circumstances and requirements, grow more of the things that you like to eat, and don’t grow the things you don’t like to eat!

Mulching or using the garden hoe is the best way to tackle weeds.

Pay back your soil every year for what it has provided. Feed your soil with compost, green manures, or well-rotted manure.

Don’t try to transplant beet seedlings that you thin from the row, they usually only bolt or run to seed. Use them in a salad or put into the compost instead.

Celery grows best in fertile, moist soil. Work in plenty of compost or well-rotted manure, or even rotten leaves into the soil before planting. To avoid tough celery, provide regular watering. If digging a celery trench, don’t dig too deep, and make sure to add in the compost or well-rotted manure to add the fertility the plant needs from the soil.

Everyone has a bad year or things that don’t grow well. Don’t expect everything to always thrive.

In cooler climates, you can start your corn seeds indoors, transplant them into 4-inch nursery pots, and transplant them outside after the last frost in spring. Lightly hoe weeds in between plants and don’t hoe too deep to avoid damaging the shallow roots of the corn.

Plant corn in blocks or squares of at least 12 plants long and 12 plants wide so 144 plants in total. Corn is pollinated by the wind and this will help your plants have better pollination than planting in rows.

Don’t try to grow too much at once, it is better to start slowly and work your way up to a bigger garden.

When Brussels sprouts have finished growing, pinch out the leafy center of the plant at the top. This can be cooked like cabbage.

To avoid carrots and parsnips that have legs or lots of whiskery roots, sow the seeds in a garden bed that was used for a heavy-feeding crop like cabbage or winter greens like broccoli, cauliflower, or kale.

Sow lettuce, radish, carrots, peas, spring onions, and salad greens every 2 weeks to extend the growing and harvesting season.

Don’t water hot peppers too often, the peppers lose their heat and spice.

To reduce soil pests and diseases, don’t grow the same vegetable family in the same garden space each year. Rotate your crops around your garden each year.

Dig In and Learn More

If this post has started ideas for your garden, be sure to check out these related posts and helpful books:

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