Aaron,

Thank you for your reply: it encourages me to keep the trees. In our city, many people pay thousands of dollars to remove beautiful old trees as nuisances/insurance risks! We hope to work with the property, not against it.

Hi Michelle, thank you so much for following along through the years and congratulations on being a new homeowner! It is a very exciting time for you indeed! As far as our old property is concerned, we planted far more trees than we ever removed. Are you referring to the large tree that was next to our house? If so, that was a hopseed bush that was pruned into a tree and unfortunately they have a lifespan of only 10-15 years, so in all, the tree actually died on us and we had to remove it. We then planted a California pepper tree in its place which we loved. Hope that helps and reach out if you have any other questions.

I have been following your blog (and occasionally commenting) for a couple of years. I was looking back at posts you have made about the early steps you took with your first house. I was curious about why you decided to remove the large tree in your front yard.

Thank you so much for your wonderful blog! I never thought about homeowning, but your blog is one of the catalysts for my move!

Hi Gloria, thank you for the kind words! The tanks you see on our property are rain water catchment tanks that are their own stand alone tank. We used these to water seedlings and plants that don’t have edible leafy greens. How uneven is the land you are working with in Missouri? I would try and create a space that you can slightly elevate with gravel or something of that nature to set your beds on, however, with this you would likely need to create a border of some sort with metal landscape lawn edging or concrete pavers to keep the gravel in place. The surface doesn’t need to be 100% flat and even although it helps to get slightly close to that. As far as increasing the moisture holding capacity of your garden in Daytona Beach, using drip irrigation will help a lot but it is also a tricky situation as you get a lot of rain there so you still want to have some drainage. If your soil is too sandy you can work in sphagnum peat moss which holds moisture really well, maybe add in a little compost with it as well, just be sure that you wet the peat moss fully before working it in as it can become hydrophobic when it is dry. Heat and humidity can wreak havoc on a lot of plants so I would suggest growing plants that do best in that climate and you will likely see better results as well. Hope that helps and we appreciate the support! Good luck and let us know how it works out.

Thank you so much Sue, we appreciate the support! Congrats on starting your own homestead as it can be done on any size property, let us know how it progresses along the way and good luck!