Everyone has their favorite color combination and mine is blooming around town this spring: chartreuse and purple. For me, chartreuse is a beautiful hint of spring – something new, young and vibrant. Purples feel soothing to me, calming and tranquil. When it comes to my backyard haven, I would love to lounge around in a place that feels fresh and calm. It’s funny that I
Impatient Spring
The seeds I planted a few weeks ago are sprouting all over the raised beds. The seedlings all have their first set of leaves, but the “true” leaves are just barely growing in. At this point, it is hard to tell the weeds from the intentional crops. Hopefully another few days of warm sun will get them going enough to tell me what to pull
Poultry-Proof Garden
We love having our chickens free-range in our backyard. They eat a wider range of food, which saves us some money on chicken feed and also makes their eggs taste ten times better. But they can be really destructive in the garden beds – trampling seedlings in search for the next great worm. It’s even more important for backyard ducks to have some free-range access,
2011 Vegetable Varieties
It is always fun to see what fellow urban homesteaders have growing in their backyard. After carefully sorting through my many seed packets, I narrowed down the list of what we are growing. Here is a recap of the varieties I am planting this year: Arugula Beets, Early Blood Turnip-rooted (from Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants) Beets, Gourmet Blend (includes golden, Chioggia, Detroit Dark)
2011 Vegetable Garden Plan
We are working with a small space for our garden this year, which is always a fun challenge. I have plans to plant potatoes, summer and winter squash, onions and more in flower beds next to the house. The garden beds are reserved for everything else and I felt like we needed a plan to make sure we maximized that space. I did an inventory
Garden Design
I have been carefully prepping our garden bed in anticipation of the growing season for months now. Back in the fall, I sheeting mulched an area of lawn at the rental house we are in. Over the last couple weeks I started finishing the prep for spring planting. The sheet mulch layers consisted of dried leaves, used bedding/chicken manure from our hens and some compost.
Another New Herb Garden
An herb garden is usually the first thing I plant at a new home. This is the perfect time of year to plant cuttings because the weather will stay mild for several more months. Their root systems should be fairly well-established by summertime, so they should be fairly self-sufficient. What looks like an empty, barren part of the front yard is actually a patch of
Planting Season Begins
Well, I didn’t get my peas in by President’s Day… but I was damn close! I woke up to a sliver of sunshine outside, stuffed seed packets in my pockets, and made today the first planting day for our new garden. I decided to let my never-ending to-do list just wait while I got some dirt under my nails. The recent winter rains have really
Winter Garden Chores
Planting season is just around the corner and it’s time to prep the beds that will soon hold spring crops. You can hardly make out the spinach in my beds through all the chickweed right now. As the winter rains let up for a couple weeks, the ground was nice and soft for one of my favorite winter chores: weeding. Weeding is not everyone’s favorite
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