Spring is emerging from the sleepiness of winter and showing signs all over the homestead. What seeds are popping up in your garden? The snow peas above won the race on first to emerge. Our cherry tree is in full bloom and the squirrels are all licking their paws waiting for the fruit to set. The tree is in decline and barely scrapes through each
Our Homestead Plan
We moved into our homestead back in 2006 when it was just a blank canvas of lawn, with a couple old rose bushes here and there. After six years of major landscape changes, it’s about time I got around to making a decent planting plan of the homestead. I used AutoCAD to create the above plan showing what we currently have growing on our 1/10
New Fruit Trees
We have three new additions to our homestead! No, the baby is not one of them – yet. This past weekend we purchased three new, bareroot fruit trees to fill in some holes in our garden. Nothing makes me happier than adding new, exciting plants to our food forest. We lost two fruit trees during the two years we rented our house, so it was
Winter Morning Garden
There are little treasures of beauty peeking out of our winter garden. It takes some searching between the skeletons of fruit trees and shrubs to find them, but they are out there quietly shivering away. With a warm mug of chai, I bundled up to capture some of those lovely corners. Artichokes, my favorite vegetable, make pretty winter flowers – little memories of their perennial
Problem Solver: Strawberry Tree
In late fall and winter, you may start to notice a lack of anything looking alive in your landscape. The trees lose their leaves and there’s nothing left behind but a skeleton of plantings. That is when you know you need more “evergreen structure” – something to give life to your garden year round. Here is a plant that may just solve multiple problems for
Garden of Plenty
We visited our house in Portland this past weekend, which we are renting out while I finish my grad program. We planned on spending all day there working on weeding and pruning. The garden is in such beautiful shape though that we spent the morning doing light pruning and admiring what a healthy, lush garden it has become. It’s amazing how a few years of
Problem Solver: Evergreen Huckleberry
Planning and planting typically keeps my mind on the garden even in winter. As I have learned, it can take years and years for a garden to really come into it’s own. The process I chose for my home garden was drawing out a planting plan for the trees, large shrubs and structures. As time went on, I have begun to fill in little bare
Back Home
I spent a recent morning working in my garden back at our house in Portland, which we are renting out while I am in Eugene going through grad school. Summer is long gone and I wanted to check in on the permanent plantings. It was a mixed experience. It felt good to be back home, even though it’s not my home right now. The familiar
Harvesting January
Everything outside is either dead or sleeping (well, except the chickens of course), but we are nowhere near empty here on our little urban homestead. The last year of canning, drying, freezing and cold storage has left us with tons of options still for eating local, organic produce. I wanted to share just a couple of the super-simple things we’ve been eating this week. First