Dear Chickens...

Here's the deal. 

I don't know what you've heard, but we are not running a chicken sanctuary. 

You serve several purposes on our little suburban homestead. 

1 - weed and bug abatement.

2 - fertilizer factory

3 - EGGS

4 - entertainment

We expect that you will preform all these duties on a regular basis. Failure to preform said duties will be dealt with accordingly.  As you have both been extremely sub-par the last month on the aforementioned third duty please consider this your official notice. 

Should you continue to not produce eggs you will find out for yourself what the inside of a potpie looks like.

No, I don't care how pretty you are. 

Think I am bluffing? ... I already ordered your replacements.

They'll be here at the end of the month. 

You have until they feather out to change your ways. For now you can thank her for your temporary reprieve:

In fact, I recommend you take notes, as Lucky has not missed a single day since she started laying. Perhaps if you ask nicely she'll share her secrets. 

Should you have a valid reason for the recent drop-off in performance you have the same previously mentioned time-frame in which to present your excuse for review and consideration. 

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely, 

The Management

Prepping the Garden

It occurs to me that I should mention that we tied the knot. 

We were married on the 5 year anniversary of our first date, in February. Sentimental and one less date for Bri to forget remember - win-win.

And now back to what the title implies this post is about - growing things (or at least endeavors in such):

Fantastic friends of ours were in town visiting family for a week last month. They live on a farm in Maine (yes I'm envious, but that is not the point of this post) so we don't see them often and as soon as we found out they were coming we invited them over for dinner. They said yes, but only if we let them help with something involving dirt. See why we love them? 

When we put in the raised beds we brought in soil - a 50/50 mix of compost and topsoil. It turned out okay, but it is not as rich as we'd like and it is quite sandy, so before planting for spring we decided to amend it. Since we need to amend all of them, and since we've only had the compost bins going just about a year, we bought amendments. 

If you are thinking that my gardening habit is looking expensive, so far you'd be right. Please don't let that dissuade you; it can be really inexpensive. Bri and I are trying to get stuff set up and established ASAP, and are willing to throw some money at it to help us along at this point, while we are both still working. Anywayyyy...

This was the garden pre-workday. 

The borage was out. of. control., the radish, arugula, and cilantro had bolted, and the earwigs had set up house in the lettuce (have I mentioned how much I do NOT love earwigs right now? Yes? Oh, well, just in case it was not clear)..

We have 13 raised beds total. I ended up leaving two mostly alone, since there was still good stuff growing; we'll amend those two when we pull out those crops, so on the work day we did 11 beds.

Left alone bed #1: kale and swiss chard. 

I pulled the cilantro that had bolted (that fluffy looking brownish stuff), but left the rest.

Left alone bed #2: green and purple cabbages. 

I'm really glad I left these in, as they are heading up beautifully despite the slugs and earwigs (have I mentioned how much I do NOT love earwigs right now? Yes? Oh, well, just in case it was not clear).

Amendments staged for use. 

Each bed got one bag each peat moss, steer manure, and chicken manure. 
Confession: we got the peat moss at Walmart (the hippy in me is weeping). It was the only place we could find un-"enriched" peat moss - because no, I do not want miracle grow in the peat moss, thankyouverymuch. Also, we looked for coconut coir, but just could not find it available in quantity at a price that we could justify. I take consolation in that this claims to be sustainably harvested.  

Step 1: Weed the beds and pull out the spend crops. 

This bed has an onion that had sprouted in the compost bin from an end I threw out. Bri found it and I stuck it in the garden to see what would happen a couple months ago. It grew, so we worked around it. In another bed we worked around a row of garlic that had also been transplanted from the compost bins.

Step 2: Add one bag each of the amendments.

Step 3: Manually turn the soil.

We tried just tilling in the amendments, but found the tiller did not get down far enough to incorporate them into the soil sufficiently, so we ended up turning the soil onto the new stuff by hand. Well not by hand, we used shovels of course. It was a good workout.
 

Steps 4 & 5: Till and rake. 

We borrowed our neighbor's small tiller to do this job. I am learning more and more to appreciate our community resources - something I shall expand on in a future post. 

(Aside: because I am not sure that the steer manure is was fully composted we did this a couple weeks ago and have let them just hang out for a bit while we grow our seedlings. I do have a volunteer squash of some sort that has come up in one, so I'm taking that as a good sign.)


Then we all went inside and had beer and wine and cheese and fruit and homemade pizza. And lemon-ginger pound cake with strawberries for dessert.

Then later I made out with my husband, because I can. 

This whole journey is so much more fun with him.

Growing Things

While I have direct-sowed a number of crops in the garden for the past couple years, this is the first time I've grown plants from seed that need to be started before being put in the garden. I'm excited, as starting from seed will allow me to grow a much greater variety of plants. I'm also hoping to use this to method to allow me to succession sow more intensively. 

A Few Starts

 Greens (I don't know what kind... I may or may not have gotten tired of labeling at that point and just thrown seeds in pots...)

 More greens.

 A herb, I think.

 Nasturtiums

 Cucumbers

 Tomatoes

We're using a variety of pots, including saved ones from previously purchased plants and peat pots I found at the dollar store, but the majority are in paper pots Bri made for me. They are a bit delicate at first, but once you've got everything in and watered a couple times the paper stiffens, almost like paper mâché and holds up well. 

Where the Seeds Grow

 Bri built me a fantastic set of seed starting shelves. Right now I'm starting everything outside and seeing how that goes. It was very promising, however I am in a vicious battle with earwigs, and I think they are now viewing the seedlings as snacks. If you have secrets for dealing with the evil little living tweezers, please drop them here.

Bri is now working on a cold frame (upcycling some of our old windows), as the peppers and eggplants seem to be cooling their toes until it is warm enough for their liking. They are the only seeds yet to sprout, besides a couple of herbs. Anything that doesn't come up in the next week I'll reseed.

Bees

The bees are making more bees! 

Spring has sprung! What's growing at your house?

Fruity Fun



Almond in bloom

Clearly the new year’s resolution to blog more often is going swimmingly...

So instead of agonizing over where to start I thought I would just hop right into the middle and work my way out. We’ve done a lot around the house in the year and a half since we bought it. Today, inspired by a post on Northwest Edible Life, I’m going to share with you what we are doing in the way of fruit production.

Bri and I both love fruit and eat a lot of it, if left to our own devices, so establishing fruit was (is!) important to both of us in our efforts in  building our suburban homestead.  Most types of fruit take several years to come into full production, so we want to get them established as soon as practical. Our goal is to be 90% fruit self-sufficient in about 5 years.

After much discussion and graphing, we decided to make the front yard into the main "orchard". Because we wanted to get at least some fruit started as soon as possible we made this decision early on. The front yard is 40’x60’ plus there is what we refer to as the “yardette” directly in front of the house with the walkway to the front door, a little grass, and bushes that were in when we purchased the house.

The Front Yard - a.k.a. The Orchard

When we purchased the house nearly the entire front was given to grass. We wanted it gone, but were unwilling to use chemicals so this is what we did:

We laid out our plan.

Bri drew the graph and I filled in the trees.

In the 40'x60' space we have 27 trees with one remaining empty spot slotted for a quince when I find one.

(Yes, this is to scale. Yes, the trees are in a nearly palindromic layout. Yes, we are both mildly OCD...)

Then we used wooden stakes to lay out the plan.

 This was mostly for me, as I don't conceptualize well. This also garnered a lot questions from neighbors!

 

On to actually getting it done! First we tilled the entire front grass area.

We watered the whole mess then tarped the entire lawn.

 This know as "soil solarizing", although we didn't do it exactly as a lot of sites direct.

This won us even more strange looks and questions.

Four weeks later we removed the tarps and tilled again.



Planting day! June 2010.



 Trees in and irrigation run.



10 months later and the trees are bigger and starting to bloom! Sadly, that is not grass, just mowed weeds :)

One of the spots has an experimental 2-in-1 planting of pluots.  We have one almond tree and the rest are fruit: three peaches, two plums, two nectarines, two apricots, two cherries, four apples, three avocados, two figs, a persimmon, asian pear, pomegranate, and loquat. Our front yard project for this spring is to replace the couple of trees that didn't make it, bury the irrigation lines, retill the rows and seed it with a mixture of orchard grass, clover, and dandelion.

The Back Yard

When we bought the house there were two established citrus trees in the back yard, so we decided to keep the theme and put all our citrus in the back. We ripped pretty much all of the plants the previous owners had and put in 9 more citrus and a bay tree.


These four are in pots on the patio:

Bay Tree



Kaffir Lime



Kumquat



Satsuma Tangerine

This tree was an extra "mystery" tree that was double labeled as a tangerine and a grapefruit. I stuck it in a pot and hoped it was a tangerine. I got my wish!

The remainder of the citrus are in ground:

Lemon

This was established when we got here. It was a surprise, I didn't realize it was a fruit tree when we were purchasing the house.

I also thought it was a lime tree until about a month ago, but we don't need to talk about that.

Satsuma Tangerine

Honey Tangerine

It's smaller and more balanced now, we removed the tall scions that you see here.

Blood Orange

Meyer Lemon



Navel Orange



This is the other tree that was established when we moved in. It's in the critter area, the enclosure to the right is the poultry run.



Tangelo



Rio Red Grapefruit

Since the tree I thought was a lime is really a lemon we still need a lime tree. Also, we'd like a valencia orange; they flower at a different time of year from the navel, so between the two we'd have oranges nearly year-round. We just have to find room for them.

A couple weeks after the trees were put in our neighbor told us about some enormous pine trees the city was taking down a few blocks south of us. We asked the tree trimmers if we could have some of the chipped trees for mulch. They said yes:

Truck full of pine mulch.



And on our driveway.
(The neighbors love us...)



All the trees got a wheelbarrow full around their base, a couple of neighbors took some, and the rest was spread around the citrus tree, rose bushes, and paths between the garden beds. It has been so great as a weed suppressant, moisture conservation cover, and soil amendment. There is beautiful fungi structure developing where the much comes in contact with the ground! All for FREE, because we asked!

Looking Forward



Two blueberries in the "yardette".

We are interplanting the blueberries with the rose bushes we are keeping from those that were here when we purchased the house. 

Blueberry bushes in pots.



There are four more blueberries in pots on the driveway waiting to go in the ground as soon as the rain lets up.



Strawberries

These are going in the planter under the citrus in the back. I'll be ordering more crowns this week.

Strawberry Flower!

Boysenberries, raspberries, and perhaps blackberries will go up the fence along the driveway - we are already referring to it as "the berry patch". There is a substantial hedge between the orchard and our neighbor's property; we've talked to them about ripping that out and putting in elderberries or grapes. I would really like rubarb, but that will be an experimental crop since it really needs a good long freeze to do well, and we don't have that kind of climate.



Back Patio.

Our back patio cover is the open, slatted kind so the plan is to put grapes and/or kiwi's at each post and trellis them up so that they hang thorough and are supported by the patio cover. This picture was taken at the time we did our home inspection. The established lemon tree is just out of the picture to the rear right of the photo. All the other vegetation you see in the rear along the wall has been ripped out and that is where the tangerines, blood orange and meyer lemon trees were planted, and where the strawberries will go. That gawd-awful fountain will eventually be removed and we will build our wood-fired oven in that place.



Baby blueberries

There is little more satisfying than watching all our hard work bear fruit, so to speak.

What are you working on to make household and community more sustainable and self-sufficient in the long term?