Growing Olives: Garden Planning

Headless Frank Farms, season two.

At some point last year, we tried to change the name of Headless Frank Farms and acquired a St. Francis with a head, but then forgot him in the frantic post-Christmas car packing, so here we go again. Season two.

The top question I get about my little urban homestead is how to get started on your own. While I could tell you that homesteading is mostly vision, the truth is that you just have to decide to give up some of your lawn to food and follow up on that plan accordingly. Even though I seemingly dropped into homesteading on a whim, I’d been planning and experimenting for probably close to ten years before we took the leap on a larger acreage and a formal home garden.

Finding Vision

Beyond any other advice I can give, its best to have a somewhat coherent plan in place before making any major purchases. Raised beds are expensive and not everyone needs them. Chickens are great but not every major city allows them. Bees are ideal but everyone knows and is traumatized by how My Girl ended.

We went big. We have just under a half an acre, which is massive for a city plot, and a unique feature of Nashville’s east side. At some point in the 1920s, the Riverwood plantation was subdivided and Inglewood, our neighborhood, was born — all generally similar lots, ranging from .25 to .5 acres with enough room for a foursquare house. I’ll get into the joys of owning a 102 year old original structure sometime later, but it’s not all bad — thanks to the handiwork of some previous owner, a faulty fridge did not, in fact, fall through our kitchen floor. So that was a major bonus.

Although we had a grand vision, we did plan to give ourselves some breathing room on timeline. No one is rushing a project in a home you don’t plan on leaving anytime soon, so there isn’t a rush to do everything all at once.

Our priorities included a food garden, a kitchen garden, a shed, and chickens. Once those were mostly in place, we added a rotating crop garden and a compost pile. This year, expansions include a plot for potatoes and corn, an upgraded chicken coop and run, an Appalachian survival garden, a pollinator garden, and if all goes well with our first major remodel (yeah, the fridge took a lot out even if it didn’t fall through the floor), we plan to add an outdoor kitchen.

Future projects include an olive grove — hence the name of this newsletter — a small vineyard, improved crop rotation, the removal of a random pine tree that someone planted directly in the way of everything else in the yard, a beehive, and a greenhouse.

Once we get all that in, it’ll be time to upgrade to a large place with livestock.

I kid!

I will absolutely petition the city of Nashville to let me have a miniature Highland cow, and that seems easier than moving anywhere. Because I never plan to move again. And if I have to. I’m just going to dump everything on the front lawn and light it on fire and start over when we get to some new place.

It’s also important to understand how you want to grow things. Permaculture is a great option for backyard gardens, as is mini-farming. We practice a form of permaculture that relies on a miniature ecosystem that we maintain in our own backyard — but that’s also a major project in and of itself and it impacts our ability to self-sustain. If you want to live off your land, it will look differently than our supplemental garden.

Your garden can also just be a work in progress — there’s no pressure to decide every detail now, and its amazing what you learn as you go. Although we had a good idea of what we wanted to do with our backyard, we ended up taking a hard turn into some Appalachian and indigenous farming practices that we found worked better for our land (and for justifying our enormous expense as a “teaching” and “learning” project).

Plan Ahead

There were two major things we did wrong when we started phase one: we didn’t fully prepared for livestock and we didn’t have a plan for what to do with what we grew — partly because we didn’t think we’d grow anything.

The livestock question was quickly solved by joining a Backyard Chickens Facebook group and buying a couple of books at Tractor Supply. We bought chicks, so we had time, while they grew inside and got their feathers, to figure out what we needed outside. Food and water had to be available, obviously, but did you know that very few veterinarians will see chickens? Even if they’re fully pampered house-pets, my birds forced me into a crash course on avian veterinary medicine. I know my way around Ivermectin now, but a year ago I would have assumed you were making a joke about COVID.

The second problem — what to do with what we grew — was more complicated. If you’re going to eat the food you grow, you need to know how to preserve it. That’s an easy thing to learn, but if you have to learn it on the fly, a lot of the food you grow will go bad in the meantime, or you’ll end up sneaking cucumbers into your neighbor’s yard through a fence. There’s an entire industry of covert zucchini disposal in some areas.

Be prepared to learn how to can, dehydrate, ferment, and dry safely. That’s a subject for another day, but a lot of these methods of food preservation are dying arts. The Firefox Guides, which is a project of college kids in the Appalachian mountains designed to write down what is mostly institutional knowledge, helped us a lot in learning how to, say, figure out what to do with a seemingly endless amount of beans.

Oh my God, we still have so many beans.

Take it One Step at a Time

Over the next few weeks, as I start season two of my little homestead, I’ll be taking you through exactly what I’m doing and what’s happening more broadly. We’ll need to order our seeds in the next couple of weeks so that we can start them on an auspicious day in February per the Farmer’s Almanac. The week after, I have to order chicks and hatching eggs. There’s no rush aside from what the calendar demands.

This week, I’ll be looking into improving some of our existing growing operation: buying a more permanent seed starting system, begging a neighbor to use her strawberry pots, and pretending I know what I’m doing while expanding our garden on two sides to grow fancy French potatoes, Okinawan sweet potatoes, and a Three Sisters Appalachian survival plot — also something I’ll talk about as I get into the more, shall we say, government averse parts of homesteading.

Here’s what the garden looked like going into fall of 2024:

Here’s what the garden is slated to look like in spring of 2025:

Notice that we expanded, but we also pivoted a little. Roma tomatoes and Cherokee Purple tomatoes (a local indigenous hybrid) worked the best of the tomatoes we experimented with last year. They get a bigger market share of the space. They’re also, to a large extent, replacing a lot of the squash we failed miserably at growing last year, helping to focus our growing season on what we can process as we produce, and eliminating, somewhat, the desire to take a flame-thrower to squash plants affected by the underwhelmingly-for-their-disgustingness-named “squash borer.”

Did I feed their ugly little larvae to the chickens while they were still squirming? Yes. Will the revenge I enact on their disgusting soil-borne offspring ever suffice to have served justice?

No.

On the other side, we’ve replaced part of the pepper patch with cabbage and other cruciferous pursuits, and swapped our carrot-and-okra garden out to the other side, where the chickens kept eating the greens we planted, for an Asian ingredients garden. That serves our cooking habits better, and limits our encounters with okra, which continued to grow well after we pulled it out of the ground. No one wanted it and even the chickens refused to eat it. We pickled it, and its still really intimidating.

With the plan in place, we can shortly move on to our next episode, and the most optimistic of them all: trying to buy seeds to start so that we don’t have to spend an ungodly amount of money on nursery starts. This is where I failed miserably last year — not everything I do turns out great! — so prepare to fail with me.

Above, I’ve included a photo of my core books for homesteading and I highly recommend them all. Feel free to comment below on what you’d like to learn, more specifically.