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!

happenings 'round the homestead

Fall is here and it is lovely!  Our days have been full of great things, both in and outside, both with friends and family, and a good balance of play and work.  We've really been enjoying this fall so far! 

Things around our little urban homestead are going well too, for the most part.  We are down to 8 chickens, from 11 earlier this year.  We lost 2 of our pullets this summer - one to sickness, one to a hawk, and one of our older hens to sickness or egg-binding, as well.  And while all of that is not great, we are happy that the 3 remaining pullets are starting to lay and our egg production is slowly increasing - just in time to drop off for winter! Ha!  Out of the breeds we got this spring, I'm loving our Golden Sexlink!  She is an egg-laying machine!  She's been laying for several weeks now and I don't think she's missed a single day.  We will definitely be adding more sexlinks to the flock next spring.  As for Oak, that boy loves his chickens.  Yesterday he played outside for about an hour and a good portion of that he spent sitting on a stump by the chicken coop, just talking to his chickens.  They have good talks, he and his ladies. 

The garden is slowing down, just as it should be at this time of year.  We had our first frost this week, but my sheltered garden seems to have been spared.  I think I'll pull the tomatoes and peppers this weekend, though, and try to get a cover crop to sprout before the hard freeze happens.  The temps are cool enough now that the remaining green tomatoes are unlikely to ripen.  All that will remain, then, will be the green beans, a few carrots, and the cover crops I planted in early September.  Not bad, for the middle of October!

We added a few new structures to our little backyard this summer and we've so been enjoying them!  Dan built us a shed, a firewood rack, and a fantastic sandbox for Oak!  The benches of the sandbox fold in as a lid, in order to keep all of the neighborhood kitties out - as well as any free-ranging chickens.  It's so fun to see the backyard become more and more of what we need/want for this season of life.  Our backyard may be small, but we're making the most of the space and I love it.