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Summer Garden Recap
My food growing was a disaster this summer. At least that’s how it felt as I surveyed the mass of weedy overgrowth this evening. I put all my energy into the new pond and quail keeping, and I let the weeds run amok and didn’t feed the plants or top off compost as I should have. For my future self, I’m documenting the season and will start with the positives because no one likes a whiner. Wins One apple tree out of three and one pear tree out of two finally started producing just a few but still very exciting fruits. One really good peach tree yielded 35lbs of peaches.…
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Conversations with Nature
This fire pit garden has absolutely blown up with green growth. I was listening to Urban Farm Podcast the other night, and an ex-reality TV personality turned geeked-out gardener (his words, not mine) kept referring to his garden as preppy. I took out fresh eyes to gaze on this space decided this mess is definitely not preppy. It nearly took my breath away, not because of its beauty or anything like that but simply the boldness of its existence. In the winter, there was hardly any evidence of all this life hidden under the ground. Its just a mess of wood chips and rocks and a few crunchy stalks. All fall…
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Duke Gardens with Friends
At the end of March, the kids had a day off school for a teacher workday. After seeing an Instagram post about a “Bloom Walk” in Duke Gardens, I gave the boys a heads up that we would be making a trip, and I tagged my friend Erika on the post, hoping she would see it and hadn’t already booked her day. Friday morning she messaged me and we made plans to pack snacks and hit the road at about the same time. I have never seen the garden as busy as it was that day. The weather was perfect and the lots were completely full. We were directed a…
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An Evolving Rock Garden
We have a little tradition in our family of bringing home rocks from camping trips or special times in the mountains. We don’t always remember to do it, but the times we have it usually involves picking one out and seeing if Joe is able to lift it and get it into the car. We also regularly dig up rocks in the yard. Nearly every time we have planted a tree, we’ve unearthed rocks of varying sizes. This has resulted in quite a collection that we had been using to create a border around the firepit garden. Last summer the firepit garden was looking pretty lush. It’s interesting looking back…
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Worker Bees
Sometimes I envy bees because they know what to do and they know how to do it.
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She Got A Snake!
Yesterday evening we let the chickens forage in the garden, which has a 4′ picket fence. Chickens are definitely rough on the veggies beds and sling dirt all over the paths. However, they sure can find the bugs! There were particularly many bugs under the pole bean teepee, which had a large piece of decaying cardboard on the floor to stop the weeds. It stopped the weeds and created wildlife habitat. The chickens were in there tearing it up, when one girl darted out with a thrashing garden snake in her beak. She carried it over to the flower and rock garden corner and proceeded to greedily devour her spoils.…