Tag Archives: garden

Can’t come to the blog right now, busy in the garden!

Posted on April 21, 2012 by | Comments Off on Can’t come to the blog right now, busy in the garden!

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In the Garden: Wool!

Posted on April 16, 2012 by | Comments Off on In the Garden: Wool!

That’s right!  This year we have a wooly vegetable garden.

I was lucky enough to be able to grab a bag of skirting after the sheep were sheared at Juniper Moon Farm the other day, and I am thrilled to be using it in the garden.

“Skirting” is the icky bits of the fleece that are so soaked in urine and feces that they cannot be sent to the mill for processing into yarn or roving (such as the wool surrounding the animal’s back end).  It’s the waste bits and they are pretty much garbage.  Thankfully, they can be composted or used in the garden directly as mulch.

I’ve been using some straw to mulch the areas where I have sown seeds directly into the soil (beets, carrots, onions, chard) and the little sprouts are still fragile so I didn’t use wool there.  With some of the hardier squash transplants I have made a light circle of wool around the base and spread out enough to discourage weeds close to the plants.

But where the wool is making the biggest difference for me is at the borders of the beds where the weeds like to encroach and I can’t properly weed-whack them.

The best part is (actually, there are so many “best” parts it’s ridiculous) that the manure-y stuff stuck to the wool will help keep the soil and plants fertilized.  AND once the growing season is over you can till the wool mulch right into the soil.  See? It’s brilliant!

My garden looks pretty funny and  odd right about now – I’ve not completed the mulching process entirely.  I have only mulched around the edges a bit and around the current plants that are growing.  I have a lot more transplants waiting to go outside once it stays reliably warm enough (tomatoes are pretty delicate and we’re still getting down into the 40′s at night), and once they are in the ground they’ll be mulched with the wool as well.

For now it’s a patchwork of wool, mud and straw.  But it’s getting there.

 

 


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March Catch – Up

Posted on April 2, 2012 by | Comments Off on March Catch – Up

If you’re a farmer (even a small – scale one) you’ll know that spring is the busiest time of the year.  Garden patches need tilling, seeds need to be started, coops and run – ins need to be cleaned and aired out for summer, and baby animals need to be prepared for.  This year I have felt the busy-ness and anxiety more acutely because we’ve had one of the warmest Marches on record.  The bugs have exploded in population and things are sprouting and blooming well in advance of normal.

One of the things keeping me busy (and exhausted) is my new vegetable garden project.  I’ve mentioned before I fenced in a plot out front that’s just under 1,000 square feet.  Since we have really terrible soil, and since I’ve had issues in the past with too much moisture pooling around the root systems of my plants, I’ve followed the example of Juniper Moon Farm and made raised bed rows to plant in this year.  They are raised and rounded so that excess moisture flows off.  I have 5 long raised beds to plant in now, thanks  to weeks of digging, a load of compost, and a day of tilling.

Right now there are three kinds of onions, Rainbow Chard, two kinds of beets and little finger carrots sprouting out there.

An onion peeking through the straw mulch.

Now that it is April things are getting a little more exciting because it means it is almost our safe window for planting the seedlings we started indoors, such as our tomatoes, squash and herbs.

They’ve had a nice sunny spot in the house waiting to be garden – ready.  Soon we’ll be receiving blueberry and raspberry plants that I ordered along with sweet potato and purple potato plants.

If all of this isn’t enough, we’ve got plans for a honeybee hive this spring to help pollinate our plants and increase our vegetable yields, and we have landscapers coming out next week to start clearing our woods for fencing. The goat shed is slowly being cleaned out to be ready for its once and future occupants.

The chickens are in full egg – laying mode and we are seeing about 2 dozen eggs a day now. I’ve been giving eggs away to anyone who’ll take them and even sending dozens off to two local restaurants, and I am still drowning in them.  I am thinking I will make a bunch of freezable quiches and cookie doughs one of these days to use up some of the surplus.

Unfortunately we won’t have fresh goat milk this summer – Milkshakes aborted her babies.  It turns out she had in fact been bred by the sheep in the fall and was therefore unable to carry the pregnancy.  They were tiny, amorphous blobby things that were never meant to live.  As I said, goat/sheep crosses aren’t viable.

Most likely I will try to breed her again this fall, for babies and milk next spring.

As you can see it is very busy outside right now in preparation for summer.  Once the hot weather hits I hope to be able to spend some time indoors fixing the wallpaper Oona destroyed and touching up paint and other things we’ve been neglecting.  But let’s hope the hot doesn’t come around too soon.


Tagged: Farm, food, Garden, Pets

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The Beginnings of Something Wonderful

Posted on March 21, 2012 by | Comments Off on The Beginnings of Something Wonderful

Happy first day of spring!  I may not be a fan of summer or very-warm weather, but I just adore spring.  My sinuses aren’t too thrilled, but that’s another story.

This first of spring is even more exciting and special for me because I am finally seeing the ideas and desires I have held for so long come to fruition.  Especially with regards to the new garden.

I’d been wanting to move the vegetable patch closer to the house and make it bigger (with room for a beehive) and so a few weeks back I got outside and started making it happen.  I pushed the kids’ giant wooden swingset about 15 feet from where it was (by myself! And yet I wonder why my neck and shoulder is bothering me so much lately??) and started staking out the outline for fencing.

Then I got to work digging.  By hand.  Again, by myself.

I’d had the idea that we really needed to move things along if I was going to get the early spring seeds and bulbs into the ground.  Our only machinery with a tiller attachment is currently down (and ancient).  I didn’t have the funds to hire someone to come with a big tractor, so I grabbed a shovel and went to it.  The finished area is just under 1,000 square feet.

I decided I wanted rows of raised beds in this garden because I’ve lost so many plants over the years due to excessive moisture pooling at the roots.  In a slightly rounded and raised bed the excess runs down the sides and away.

To do that, I started digging furrows, or trenches.  I probably made them too wide and too deep (stubborn digging without a plan isn’t the best idea) but there are now 5 long raised beds out there.  They still need to be tilled, since the dirt is nearly solid clay.  Thankfully I still have a whole shed full of composted llama and goat poo to mix in.  Still, I am concerned I may need to order up some dirt due to the extremely poor quality of the soil I dug out of our ground.

The clay is so hard I had to use a mattock to break it up.

There’s space in the shadier back – side of the garden for the bees to go so they have free access to keep our plantings pollinated.

Soon the onions will go into the ground along with the beets and once they are ready, all of the vegetable seedlings that are currently germinating in the dining room.

This is not nearly as impressive as Caroline’s seed selection!  But this represents about 2/3 of what we are planting this year.  I’ve ordered onions, seed potatoes,  and blueberry and raspberry bushes as well.  Come fall we’ll do another crop of late summer vegetables and some things to overwinter.

The biggest challenge in all of this?

This:

Keeping these insatiable scratching and digging and eating machines out of the garden.  I’ve got the woven wire up: I just need a gate.  Paul has a friend coming out to plan out the logistical part of clearing our wooded acres here and fencing it all in.  Hopefully giving the poultry a wider ranging area will make the vegetable patch less of a lure for them.

Hopefully by fall you’ll be hearing me say how sick I am of preserving so many fresh veggies!


Tagged: Farm, food, Garden, Pets, Seasons

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Quilt Sneak Peek

Posted on March 14, 2012 by | Comments Off on Quilt Sneak Peek

Remember that quilt top I was working on with Caroline when Lizzy House was at Susan’s?

I finished it.

Just the top.  But it’s beyond gorgeous.

I don’t have any wall space where I can hang it for a proper picture right now, so bear with me.  This is just a peek.  The color is off and I realized it’s also upside – down.

More details and better pics to come.

For now I am back out to digging garden trenches.


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Seed starting

Posted on March 13, 2012 by | Comments Off on Seed starting

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Signs of Spring

Posted on March 12, 2012 by | Comments Off on Signs of Spring

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Flower are coming

Posted on March 8, 2012 by | Comments Off on Flower are coming

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Despite the crazy warm winter, it looks like my daffodils are right on time for a mid-March bloom. The honeysuckle is all set to take over the world and other garden beauties are not far behind. Meanwhile I have that lovely red braid from SPA already on the wheel. It’s a merino/nylon blend probably meant for socks but I am undecided if I will use it that way since it’ll need to be a two-ply judging by the thickness of my singles. I have yet to spin fine enough for a 3 or 4 ply sock yarn but I’m sure I”ll get there. Perhaps I need to try out that lace flyer sitting patiently in my spinning bag.

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Osmia sp.

Posted on March 7, 2012 by | Comments Off on Osmia sp.

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Ah, windows open weather = cat bliss! I’ve set out my mason bee house. The top lifts off so you can see inside. There’s cotton for nesting in one chamber and it’s set up on bricks to keep it from rotting. Mason bees are a gardener’s best friend as they happily pollinate all sorts of things in the garden. I do need to move my little house to a shadier spot. It calls for partial shade but I suspect this area that bakes in the afternoon sun is less than ideal.

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Let’s Start a Magazine Together!

Posted on March 2, 2012 by | Comments Off on Let’s Start a Magazine Together!

This is the post where I steal an entire bit from Susan’s blog and pass it on here.  She and the crew at JMF are starting  magazine.  A beautiful, lovely, useful magazine centered around all things done by hand.  Cooking, sewing, knitting, building…..you name it.  I’m super excited about it (and having a hard time not boasting that I’ve known about it for quite awhile and have seen some of what’s going to go into it…..it’s too exciting to keep to myself!).  Here it is in Susan’s words. There’s some lovely prizes to be had for those who can help get it off the ground.

Very Big News!

by Susan on March 2, 2012

So for months now I have been alluding to a big secret I’ve been keeping. I am thrilled that today I can finally share the news with all of you.

Juniper Moon Farm is starting a magazine called By Hand. By Hand will be a lifestyle magazine for people who make, with departments for cooking, crafting, DIY, gardening, and do-gooding, with a bit of travel and profiles of makers every month.

The idea is to celebrate creating things with our hands, and to explore the motivation to make things in a world where there are cheaper and immediate alternatives. It will be both practical (patterns, DIY projects, etc) and thoughtful, with a lovely and gentle aesthetic.

We have lots of amazing contributors and editors on board already, and the first issue is well underway. But before we go any further, we need your help!

We are holding a Kickstarter campaign to raise the rest of the money we need to make the magazine everything we want it to be. And as an added inducement, we have commissioned so amazing rewards! Our art director Michelle Lukezic has designed posters and t-shirts that are going to be incredibly popular with people who make things with their hands. Here’s a sample:

There are posters and t-shirts for each of the sections in the magazine!

If you like what you see and want to support us, great! If you can help us get the word out about the Kickstarter and the magazine we will be forever in your debt!


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