in the garden :: spring 2024

The spring has come to a close, and it has been my favorite spring on this property so far. This was just our third spring here, but it was the first time that we’ve had capacity to do some of the extra things simply for the sake of beauty and pleasure, rather than focusing solely on utilitarian needs. The kitchen garden feels established now. I know my soil and how it varies from one corner of the garden to another. I know what grows well here and what grows well there. I know what some of my pests are and I know what thrives. And while the kitchen garden still consumed much of my spring, it wasn’t as all encompassing as it was the past two years and that has felt great. Having a one-year old baby rather than a newborn has contributed to this as well. He LOVES the garden.

It’s been a VERY rainy spring, which has been refreshing for the land as we come out of a drought, but also challenging as a gardener to get things planted and keep them weeded. I’ll take the rain over a drought anytime, though! The children have also thoroughly enjoyed the mud!

The garden is much the same as last year. I rotated a few things, but others I left right in their same places with hopes of adding more compost as the season progresses. Last fall I planted a larger garlic patch than I have before, with hopes of having enough garlic to get us through until next year’s harvest! We made it to April this year on last years’ bounty, so I’m hopeful this year will get us into the summer. I planted 20 tomatoes again, but went with more paste tomatoes and fewer slicers. We made it through the cold months with canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, pasta sauce, and salsa, but I’d like more tomato sauce and definitely more ketchup this year! Who knew that homemade ketchup was ABSOLUTELY worth the effort?! It is. My family agrees.

The biggest change for this year was that my sister-in-law and I started all of our plants ourselves! I’ve always purchased plant starts for the hot weather crops such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and basil, but this year we started these under grow lights in our basements. I wish I could say it was a raging success, but alas, I learned an important lesson that not all potting soil is created equal as I happened to buy the crappy stuff with no nutrients in it. This meant that my plants started off great - everything sprouted quickly and was thriving, but then they just stopped growing and started looking sad. Thankfully, I ran out of that soil and what we bought after was much better, so a few things I started did very well. The plants that I started in the poor soil are still working to catch up. My peppers have hardly grown, even though they’ve been in the ground for a month! Oh well. Hopefully they still produce a decent harvest and now I know better for the future.

Another change to the garden this year is that we added two raised beds along our chicken yard fence. The soil and drainage were very poor in that section of the garden and because of that it’s been unusable space. The raised beds not only remedied that, but they also provided me with space to grow annual herbs like cilantro and dill where I can let them reseed and come back year after year and also where I can grow a few cool weather crops like beets, carrots, radishes, and lettuce mid-season in the shade that the beans will provide.

The last change for this year is that I added a cut flower bed along the outside garden fence. While the cut flowers will be a lovely addition, the bed will also provide a barrier for the vegetables that I grow up the fence. You see, the geese and chickens LOVE to come along and snip the peas, cucumbers, and squash vines that I grow up the fence and the cut flower bed will hopefully help prevent that. They may still snip a few cut flowers, but I’d rather lose those than a whole cucumber vine! For cut flowers, I planted hollyhocks, zinnias, cosmos, poppies, and calendula. I got them in a couple weeks later than I would have liked, but I think they’ll still have enough time to shine in late summer.

I hope your gardens are planted and thriving whether they are in pots on a patio or in an acre in the ground. Cheers!

in the garden :: april, may, and june 2023

Wow! It’s been over a year since I posted here! Turns out creating a bunch of draft post ideas doesn’t count as posting. Ha. If you follow me over on Instagram, you may have noticed that we’ve been up to a lot! We had a huge garden last year during our first summer in our new house. It was a dream, but also a lot of work, especially when it came time to preserve, store, and use it all. We also raised a flock of geese, which was incredibly fun and a good learning experience. We butchered most of them in the fall and kept a male and female for breeding. Our female, Emelia, sat on a clutch of eggs this spring, but must not have sat consistently enough because she then abandoned them after about 30 days, which is about how long it takes for goslings to hatch. So, we now have two pet geese for another year and we’re all a little unsure about that. They can be so fun, but also so loud, obnoxious, and rather intimidating for the kids. We’ll see how long they are allowed to be apart of our homestead.

Our biggest news is that we had a baby in April! Ash Adrien was born at home, in the water, surrounded by his daddy and brothers on April 23rd. He’s happy and healthy and just starting to coo and giggle. We’re all enamored. I’m excited to write his birth story here in the coming weeks.

This year’s garden is up and running! It is not an easy feat, though, prepping and planting a garden in the same season as giving birth to a new baby. Dan has been a huge help to me this year, though. We use a broadfork to prep our garden beds and he did all of that work for me so that I could focus on planting. We had a long winter with many inches of snow remaining into the first week or so of April. But a sudden hot streak in the 80’s quickly melted what remained and dried up the ground enough for me to get most of my cool weather seeds into the ground before Ash was born. Cool weather the end of April and beginning of May also bought me time before I needed to start planting the rest, so I was able to enjoy a few weeks of slow postpartum days without feeling too much of the itch to get down to the garden.

As last year was my first year planting here, I worked with whatever soil I had. This meant that my garden actually had about 4 different types of soil in the different sections from sand loam, to forest loam, to forest clay, to thick red clay. I was so happy this spring when I found all of my soil improved and I hadn’t done much to it other than plant in it last year, add leaves and chicken bedding in the fall, and then let our chickens use the space over the winter. This year I rotated my crops a bit to work the soil in different ways and hopefully prevent tomato blight from occurring again. It was pretty bad last year.

The garden is now giving back to us with radishes, peas, green onions, strawberries, and an array of greens coming into the kitchen weekly. It has been very hard to keep up with the weeding and succession planting of radishes, herbs, and greens. Ash has had a few naps in the garden while I’ve worked and I take any little opportunity I get to pull weeds - whether its during a nap, when Dan is home, or when I’m down at the barn feeding chickens and geese. I’m not getting the hours in the garden that I love and it’s not the prettiest place right now (as my pictures humbly show), but we are growing food and working the soil and that’s what matters most.

in the garden :: april 2022

Garden season is upon us and I am so excited! If you’ve been around this space for the past several years, you know that I love gardening and that I made the most of our little urban lot in Minneapolis, but this year is different. Our new garden space is 1,600 sqft!!! That’s larger than the finished square footage of our old house! Ha! This garden is large and I’ve filled it full - at least on my garden plan. This year I am planning to grow a lot of things I’ve grown in the past like tomatoes, peppers, herbs, peas, summer squash, green beans, lettuce, potatoes, beets, strawberries, and herbs. But I’m also trying my hand a quite a few new things like winter squash, cabbage, melons, kale, and spinach.

The garden area is next to the old goat barn that we are using as a chicken coop and garden shed. We had the chickens work the ground for us in a portion of the garden over the winter and recently we moved their fenced in yard to the other side of the barn and prepared the garden area for a bigger fence that will hopefully deter the deer. (We may need to add some electric fencing to keep them out, though.) When we bought the house last fall, there were remnants of a burn pile in the clearing next to the goat barn. It was quite the burn pile and the clean up was long and laborious. I think I filled 3 5-gallon buckets with nails, hinges, door handles, and other random metal remains. I’m a little concerned about the toxicity of what was burned on this soil, but as we live in a rather dense forest, this is the best location for the garden, so I’ll work to restore the soil over the next several years.

Speaking of the soil…there are several variations of clay throughout my garden plot and it has been interesting planning what to grow and where in relation to that. I could have brought in fresh top soil, compost, or more organic matter, but it wasn’t in the budget this year and so we are making due with the bit of compost our chickens turned for us this winter and some somewhat rotted goat manure from the neighbor. The ashes from the burn pile have helped make the soil in that section of the garden a bit more loamy, so that is one plus to the potentially toxic burn pile.

We were able to use two garden gates from the original homestead, which I love! Our house was built in the 1970’s and the original homestead was a total of 20 acres. After the owners past away, the land was subdivided into two 10 acre lots. Our neighbors who own the other 10 had two old metal gates on their property - one from the original owners’ garden and one from an old animal fence. We have this gate pictured below and will have the other one opening into the chicken yard by the chickens’ automatic coop door.

So far we have some cabbages planted, peas, beets, spinach, kale, and lettuce. The boys each got to plant their own row of peas, which they were very happy about. Next week we’ll hopefully get some onion sets in the ground, along with early potatoes and some calendula and zinnias. We’ll also be adding our wedding arbor next to the gate and hopefully cleaning up some of the burn pile remnants that are now just outside of the garden fence. This property has so much clean up to do, but little by little we will get there!

country living chickens

Chickens! It’s been so long since I’ve written about them here or on Instagram, but we managed to keep our flock even though our crazy move and they are now happily settled into their country estate! When we sold our house last June, in 2021, our wonderful buyers agreed to foster our chickens for a few months as we floated around until we found a house to buy. They were extremely gracious with us as we didn’t end up closing on our house until the end of October! The seller of our new home was also wonderfully gracious and he allowed Dan access to the property before we closed so that he could fix up the old goat barn and turn it into a chicken coop. He and my brother Jake tore off the rotting old roof and replaced it with tin. Then Dan built a coop inside the barn on one side and then the other side will be used as a garden shed and a chick brooder. I love the doors he found at a selvage store in Minneapolis! It’s going to look so fun once we put finishing touches on it this summer. The coop also has an automatic door for the chickens that opens and closes on a timer and lets them out into their fenced yard each day. It is awesome. The barn is quite a ways from the house, so the automatic door frees us up to just check on them once a day, instead of twice a day. It will also make it much easier to leave them for a few days.

We moved our seven hens up from the city about a week after we moved ourselves into the house. They were surprisingly easy to move and settled in really well! My brother Tanner gave us a rooster to add to the flock about a month after that. Since the barn is far from the house, we wanted to get a rooster as soon as possible in order to offer our hens a bit more protection from predators. Our ratio of hens to rooster is still a bit low (roosters do better with a larger harem….), but the protection was worth it until we have more hens to integrate into the flock.

Which brings us to chicks! With so much more space for chickens, we knew we wanted to add quite a few to our flock this year. After doing a bit of research on raising chicks in the winter, we decided to order day-old chicks from a hatchery at the top of February. They came by USPS and arrived at our local post office for pick up early one morning. We ordered from Hoover’s Hatchery in Iowa and were very pleased with the selection, availability, and health of the chicks. We got 15 female chicks of assorted breeds. Five of which lay colored eggs and the other 10 lay brown eggs. Since we got them in the winter, they should start laying eggs by the end of June, which will be fantastic! We have them in our mudroom right now and will likely move them into the garage in the next week or two and then down to the barn after that. We’ve had colder than usual overnight temps, reaching down into the negatives most nights still, so we are having to keep them in the mudroom a week or two longer than we’d hoped. Once they reach 6 weeks, though, they will be fully feathered and will be able to withstand temps down into the 30’s. We will then move down to the barn, where we’ll keep on the garden shed side so they can get used to the rest of the flock and the flock can get used to them. Integrating chicks to an established flock can be very challenging, but I’m hopeful that having more space for them all will make integrating easier than it’s been for us in the past.

Oak has been taking charge with the chicks’ care and has been doing such a good job! He feeds them once or twice each day and he’s so sweet with them. It’s been fun to watch him grow in responsibility by caring for them.

We are so excited that we will soon have enough chickens to actually provide enough eggs for our family! We’ll likely cull most of our older hens this fall, which will leave us with 15 or so chickens going into the winter. I’m planning to preserve some of the summer bounty in order to extend our eggs more into the winter (more on preservation later!). My hope over the next year or two is to completely supply our eggs needs for the whole year. We are also hoping to raise a batch of meat birds this summer and also add a few geese to the homestead for meat and eggs! After so many years of making the most of our little city lot, it is incredibly fun to now have land on which we can truly homestead!