Category Archives: progress

damp

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chicken in apple tree

I was surprised to see this Buff Orpington try to roost in this young tree.  She stayed up there a long time.  When she got down, the other chickens got in her face about being a show-off.  I’m sure a few others will try to get up in the trees this week.

The weather is really slowing us down over here.  It’s like Mother Nature hit the pause button in the garden, and everything is in suspended animation.  Very little growth.  It’s almost June, and we’re still dealing with nights in the 40s and dreary, gray days. 

I don’t mind the rain so much since we haven’t had time to set up a permanent irrigation system, but the plants and the gardener would appreciate a few sun breaks.   I’ve been pulling weeds in the rain and trying to restrain my seed-sowing thumb that can’t figure out why it isn’t allowed to push squash and cucumber seeds into the dirt.

 

a double-dug bed at work…

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Here is garden bed #2, hard at work.  The first photo is looking east…

bed #2 05/10

And looking west…

bed #2 05/10 looking west

This is what I meant when I said that the garden is producing enough to sustain us if we’re happy to eat greens and more greens.  We’re thinning this patch regularly for dinner, making room for more growth.  There aren’t weeds because there isn’t room for them.  This bed is a nice mix of lettuces and brassicas.  In a month, it will be mostly cleared out, and we’ll plant something else here.  We hope some beds — like this one — will produce at least three rounds of planting.

Yesterday I planted some pole beans in a few places — along a couple of fences and against some homemade structures.  This one I’m calling a “bean bridge,” and I really don’t know how it created itself or how well it will support the beans.  It just grew organically a couple of days ago.

bean support

My hope for the “bean bridge” is that it will let me grow some pole beans in the middle of that bed and a row or two of bush beans on either side of that vertical support (there’s room…  the angle is off in the photo).  Or maybe I’ll plant something else on either side.  It’s the middle of May, and we’re still deciding where to plant some things.  This new system of beds gives us a lot of flexibility.

I’ve been working hard to clear out the garage because we’ll put a refrigerator out there soon so that there’s room for eggs, pickles, and tender greens that need to be put away carefully.  I need a place close to a big sink for prepping greens.  I’ve *really* been working hard on the garage — scrubbing, cleaning, painting. I can’t re-do the space the way I wish we could, but there’s a big difference out there already.  Thankfully, David has been extremely flexible and cooperative and even hung up some sheet rock at 6:30 this morning in his pajamas.  He is a good guy.

turning an important corner…

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peas growing in may

As of this week, there are enough leafy greens growing in the garden to support our family.  This is a big deal.  It means that — if I have the pantry stocked with good grains, beans, olive oil — I don’t have to go to the store.  It’s a relief to just keep working outside and know that dinner is covered by what we have. 

Come August, we’ll have eggs and a much wider variety of vegetables available to us (and to you!), but I’m happy to have turned this corner finally (later this year than in other years because of the weather and because we’ve been so busy building up other parts of the farm). 

So the big grocery shopping shut down begins now.  Our goal is to grow 90% of our own vegetables this year and to keep that going for as long as possible by extending and preserving our harvests.  If we sell a little surplus this year, I will count the year as a huge success. 

And we already are planning new systems so that we can have more greens available in our garden earlier next year.  We’ve had some stuff growing all year — but not enough to support us.  Now we do!  Yay!

 

hard day at curious farm

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chicks in the run

We lost a chicken this evening.  We searched all over for a long time.  We assume she got taken by a neighbor’s cat or a wild bird.  We still don’t have a screen on top of the chicken run, and the chicks were in there most of the day (their choice).  We feel sad.  I realize that this may happen sometimes, but we’ve invested so much heart into these chicks that it still hurts to lose one.

Also, I hit my knee pretty hard with the shovel.  I’m hoping the swelling will go down tomorrow.  I had to sink down into the dirt and commune with the worms for awhile (wriggling against my cheek, in fact).  No one heard me yell.  I couldn’t walk or see for a long time, but I didn’t lose consciousness completely.

rototillerAnd I shamefully admit that I finally gave up on the double-digging for this year…  I feel awful about this, but I couldn’t get my body to dig this morning.  There really is some sheet of rock or hardpan down about 18 inches.   Every single push with the shovel or fork caused my arm to bounce back.  In desperation, I even tried to use the rototiller.  No luck.  Sadly, I just don’t have the strength or time to break through the rock this year. 

After rototilling the unfinished half of bed #5, I built up the soil with ammendments and reshaped the bed.  Although half of this bed isn’t as deep as all the other double-dug beds, I hope the extra ammendments and raised height will improve the vegetable growth in this spot — which has been problematic in the past, as I have shared.

Here is a photo of the east side of the garden — with 4 1/2 double-dug beds and 1/2 bed that was massacred with a rototiller:

beds on the east side of the garden

I won’t use the rototiller again.  I know it won’t work to break through the rock.  I still have to make 4 beds on the west side of the garden:

west side of the garden

These won’t be as long, but they’ll match up with the beds on the east side in width and placement.  I’m going to use a lasagna-method to make these beds so that I can retain more control over how the ammendments get worked into the soil.   They will be a lot of work, but I won’t have to dig into hard clay.  I’ll use straw on the bottom and build layers with compost, ammendments, and the already-excavated pile of (previously-ammended) top-soil that’s in the foreground of the photo above.

Also in the two pictures above, you can see the coop and run in the background.  The chicken run is larger than needed, and we’ll be fixing it up with roosts and a more sheltered area for when it rains.  But right now the birds are loving it out there because in the middle of it is an old pile of yard debris.

After the coop is done, we’ll paint it white so that it matches the house, and we’ll modify the shed you can see in the left background of the east part of the garden — to support that shed better and to square up some visual lines.

If you’re wondering about the big mass of green on the east side of the garden, that’s the raspberry patch.  We need to add more wire supports there so that they stand more upright.  Last year, we had berries all summer — enough for breakfast most days, not enough for jam.  I think the plants are robust enough for me to harvest a lot of raspberry leaves this year for medicinal teas.  Kids like raspberry leaf tea, and the chickens seem to like eating them, too.  Raspberry leaves taste like lemony rose petals (and they’re related to our friend rose, in fact).

Aside from the missing chick (really sad about this), my sore knee, and having to cry uncle about the digging and use a rototiller (ick), I felt really happy to work outside this weekend.  I loved watching the chickens mingle.  I saw more peas surface.  David and I planted a first group of potatoes.

I’ve been trying to get the chickens to wander over here to this sweet spot so that I can get a nice photo, but they’re more interested in the dead leaves in the chicken run.  Oh well…  I’ll share some of this good spring energy with you anyway!

tulips and blossoms near the play house

And here is one of my special crabapple trees in bloom and a view down to the seasonal creek (the dark ditch in the middle-left of the photo):

crabapple, hill and creek

Do you understand why this two-thirds-of-an-acre is so important to us?  

We are rich in this spot of dirt and poor in other ways.  We are breaking our backs, knees, and hearts to grow or shepherd vitality of all kinds here. 

cleaning up

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Where have we been?  In deep with the chickens!  Man, it’s been intense…

We’ve had the chickens for three weeks.  All 16 are still here with us.  Two days ago we took the four Australorps and four Buckeyes out to the coop, and we let the Black Barred Rocks and Buff Orpingtons stay in the new, improved brooder until they’re bigger.

We’ve had a lot of angst, but we’re into a better rhythm all around now that the chicks are in two groups.  Everyone seems happy.  I have new gray hairs, but who’s counting at this point?

What we really need now are a few sunny days so that everyone can range outside together.  Even the little ones are good at catching worms, and we want them to have that freedom to explore. 

The digging?  Do you really want to know?  What a sad situation… the weather has been impossible.   I need a day-and-a-half of sunshine or two days of cloudy/no rain weather in order to dig without ruining the soil.  I also need to have my child happy outdoors with me or occupied with someone else in order to dig.  The stars haven’t aligned.  I am woefully behind.

In theory, I am still digging the 5th bed on the east side of the garden.  I have no idea when the weather and life-circumstances will allow me to return to this adventure.  In the meantime, it’s *April*, and I now have only 1.5 beds free for planting now.  I’ve planted 2.5 beds to capacity with early season veggies.

So…  after lots of discussion (fun!), I agreed with David that we will use the rototiller (ack!) to help blend in new ammendments into the west side of the garden.  I’ll raise and shape these beds, but I won’t double-dig them until next year (if we discover that the double-dug beds produce well).

Timing on the rototilling is everything.  I also want to get the 5th eastern bed double-dug.  I keep looking at the weather forecast and wish we had some sort of helpful farm report here on the local news…

I think it’s going to be another week before I can begin either project.

I still want to talk about the digging, even though I’m not doing it.

I realize how obsessed I have become about the digging.  All of my issues play out while I’m digging.  I rarely get time to do it so I have to put every bit of my energy into the work.  It’s concentrated, deep, and hard.

With the endless rain, I realized I was sinking into despair about the digging I wasn’t doing so I had a therapy session with myself:

Is there really nothing you can do out there besides digging?

Well, no, there’s a hundred things to do out there that I can do in the gruesome rain.

Well, can you do some of those things?

Do you mean I’m being a baby about the digging?  Well, I can see that…  I’ll get busy…

So I have gotten busy about the other things.

I moved two compost piles into a new space, integrating them in a strategic way.  I moved a bunch of landscape timbers.  I unwound and uncreased a lot of fencing and rolled it up.  I arranged some drainage pipe in a visually-okay way (give me an A+ for this, please) and wound up some irrigation tubing in the best way possible.  I not only emptied the old, useless compost container with just a shovel, I broke down the old, useless compost container and stacked its parts neatly in the center of the drainage pipe. 

And I am now in the process of moving David’s family’s heirloom rocks that have been moved and moved and moved again.  They’re beautiful and precious to us, but right now they’re in the way of us building a run for the chickens so I’m moving the rocks to a place near the house.  They’ll be protected there, and we’ll be able to use them in landscaping projects.  Beautiful obsidian, quartz, petrified wood…  we love these rocks, but we’ve been moving them from here to there for a long time, and I’m sure the rocks would like to just relax for awhile.

We are alive!  16 chicks and 3 people!  Happy Easter to you!