Gardening. Farming. There’s no difference to me right now because it all seems so overwhelming. There’s so much to learn, and I’m so determined to learn as much as I can. I wish I had a gardening mentor who lived next door so I could just peek over the fence and watch what they were doing. My fall garden would have done amazing if I’d remembered I HAD a fall garden. It grew so well that I had to thin it out several times, and then it got really cold and I went into hibernation. By the time I remembered about the garden it had frozen over. I did end up picking everything and composting it. The crows love my compost area…I’m hoping it will keep them away from the garden!
Right now I’m preparing the beds again for the spring this year. (You can read about the building of the beds and fence here!) It’s been so warm that I feel like I could just go ahead and plant but all the old timers have been telling me it will get cold again before spring is officially here. I picked up compost and soil from Country Road Farms in the neighboring town of Dillsboro. I love just wandering around and looking at all the jars of seeds and dreaming of what I might grow. Today I discovered the apple trees and I think I might plant an orchard while I’m at it this spring.
All my weight lifting has paid off…I moved 1200 pounds of soil and compost by myself today. Can you spot my little assistant Max?
I have so many gardening books and homesteading books I could open my own bookstore. But I’ve started to listen to podcasts while I work around the house and I absorb the information so much better! Especially Gardenerd Tip of the Week. Short and sweet and I always remember the info! The Gardenerd website is here and the podcast on iTunes is here.
So this is big news: we will have baby chickens the beginning of April! We are still figuring out where we want to coop. My idea is to repurpose Brett’s wood shed into a coop. I found a few examples of people using a wood floor and they just painted it with roof paint to protect the wood:
I’m so nervous because baby chicks are so fragile and I’ll just be devastated if we lose one but that’s the circle of life. The woodshed is right across from the garden so I can let them roam around in the afternoons when I’m working so they can enjoy the sunshine. I already know they will all have names. I hope they live into old age, so we’ll eventually be a chicken nursing home too. I can see it now: Diary of a Wimpy Chicken Farmer.
I read Once Upon a Flock a few years back and it was just the most endearing memoir about the author’s, Lauren Scheuer, experience raising chickens. She details their every move through her writing and illustrations:
This weekend they are starting a local beekeeping course. Oh my gosh… I am so tempted. But maybe I should wait until next year to even start thinking about that.
So this year my plan is basic vegetable garden, berry vines, chickens and starting an orchard. Even an orchard opens up a huge can of unknown. I never knew you needed different types of apple trees so that they can cross pollinate. I’d love a greenhouse one day…mostly because of my long time dream of being Mr. Miyagi with his bonsai trees. Baby steps.
I love this process of learning about nature and the landscape. It’s my tonic. It’s so easy to be completely oblivious of it all as well. There are so many lessons to be found in nature, if we are sensitive to its blessings. There is this enormous strength in a big oak tree, but there is also enormous strength in the tiny threads of a spider web. And have you ever noticed how animals build their nests just big enough for their families? They don’t try to outdo each other, they don’t take what they don’t need, they aren’t embarrassed by the size of their home.
We need the tonic of wildness. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because the unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. –Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Books I love:
Once Upon a Flock: My Life with Soulful Chickens by Lauren Scheuer
“This charming story of Lauren’s life with her quirky flock is filled with moments of humor and heartbreak. Enthusiastically immersing herself in the world of her flock, Lauren discovers that love, loss, passion, and resilience are not only parts of the human experience, but of the chicken experience as well. Throughout it all, Lauren documents the laughter and drama of her flock’s adventures with her own whimsical photos and illustrations. At once humorous, poignant, and informative, Once Upon a Flock is a feathered tale like no other.”
Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long by Eliot Coleman
“Eliot Coleman introduces the surprising fact that most of the United States has more winter sunshine than the south of France. He shows how North American gardeners can successfully use that sun to raise a wide variety of traditional winter vegetables in backyard cold frames and plastic covered tunnel greenhouses without supplementary heat. Coleman expands upon his own experiences with new ideas learned on a winter-vegetable pilgrimage across the ocean to the acknowledged kingdom of vegetable cuisine, the southern part of France, which lies on the 44th parallel, the same latitude as his farm in Maine.”
I have been using the deep litter method, by dumping 5+ inches of wood shavings into the chicken house. That stuff makes amazing fertilizer. Put it into your garden in November, let it rest all winter long, then grow Tomato and Basil trees the next summer.
Start beekeeping now. It takes a while for the bees to make honey and you don’t have to do much until it is ready. Check http://www.theprairiehomestead.com Jill has some good advice about chickens. I wish I had a garden!
Have you read Chicken and Egg? I loved the stories about her chickens and she also provides lots of egg recipes (the banana cupcakes with browned butter cream cheese frosting are the best!)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004ZQZ8J8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1
I’m not next door but I own a small urban gardening business in Houston, TX and would be glad to help give advice if you ever need it. I’ve followed your blog since Boo was little and am now so excited to see your garden grow. Therootedgarden.com or on Instagram @therootedgarden
I am way older than you Ashley and am just becoming interested in gardening!
Shall I send you some links to making your own mealworm farm (for the chooks (NZ slang for Chickens) and for a Sprouting station? My tiny quail go crazy over their daily sprouts.
Also here is a link to a cool beehive system I found recently – I think it’s Australian but I imagine they ship to the States. http://www.honeyflow.com/
I want to have a hive once we move
Another good idea is to grow rosemary around the coop as it helps keep flies away in summer
There is a big difference between gardening and farming. Gardening is usually for fun. Your livelihood is at risk every year with farming. Weather, prices, government regulation (EPA, ESA, Bureau of Reclamation, USFWS, NMFS…), biological opinions, lawsuits over water lasting decades, water rights, legislation (state and federal) and employees impact farming every year. One freeze at the wrong time and you may be paying to replant part of your crop (hundreds of acres). Think of gardening 4000+ organic acres. With much respect to you, I do believe there is a difference.
I wish you much success and enjoyment this year with your new endeavor. Your house on the hill is situated in a beautiful spot and you have a wonderful view from your garden! Your beds and depot can’t get any cuter can they? You always seem to add just one more thing that makes it even more picture perfect.
Oh I completely understand the difference. We have many friends whose lives are large scale farming. It’s scary at times. We are slowly working toward a small homestead which would make it a more of a livelihood and with chickens that’s more than gardening I think. I do hope to have enough to sell at the local farmers market…so that would make me an amateur who sells to the public. That’s the only reason I chose the word 🙂
my dad has hens, he got them for the girls when they go to visit so they can have fresh eggs, they are old ladies now, but it never fails every single time the kids are visiting the “girls” start laying again. Oh I didn’t mention that they are tame, yes they are, they eat right out of your hands. My kids can’t figure out why all hens aren’t like this. good luck, it’s the best
Don’t be scared of raising chickens. I had never done it before either and I ordered 1 day old chicks from MyPetChicken.com about 4 years ago and it has not been nearly as scared as I first imagined. Everything went off without a hitch and I didn’t have a expert to help me out either. They are much more resilient than you think. Dive in and be confident. They will do just fine. 🙂
Hi, we repurposed my daughter spacious playhouse into our coop! It had wood floors that were painted. We chose to use inexpensive linoleum on the floors for easy cleanup. We use Pine shavings and clean it every day and once a month a huge cleanout. The linoleum has worked great! Good luck we love our girls, Hot and Mild!
We raised chicks and chickens for years. We never painted the wood floor in the coop to protect it, but did use pine shavings… Easy to clean and wonderful for the compost! One word of caution to you though; the chickens WILL scratch up every plant in your garden if you don’t shoo them away. Also, if you keep the chicks indoors with you through most of their tiny chickey life, they bond with you really quickly and will even fly up on your shoulders/head and stay perched there while you walk around the yard and do your gardening! (I totally have pictures of our chickens doing just that!) They are definitely worth it! (Also, I recommend Buff Orpingtons, Australian Orpingtons, and Americaunas for egg layers… Best chickens I’ve ever had. White Leghorns are not smart at all, and Rhode Island Reds can be mean sometimes, though most of ours were fairly nice. Brahmas, Bantams, Silkies, Polish, and Sultans are just plain fun, however Bantams and Silkies lay really tiny eggs – which are pretty darn cute, though not useful unless you want a 1/4 of a scrambled egg!)
Ashley, I too have raised beds and you can really produce a lot out of those little boxes. My dad turned me on to the idea of just taking the bag of soil and opening it on top of the bed and leaving it. It serves as a weed barrier and he had great success doing this. Check out Jerry Baker, he was on PBS for years and is a wealth of information on fertilizing and pest control. I have used his recipes until I moved to a house with a smaller yard! Best of luck on your endeavors. My dad is also a bee keeper and if you are interested, go join the local beekeeping club. There you will have lots of info and resources to start with! Boo could start 4H and the chickens could be her project, everything from the coop to the brood. Great way to get your feet wet plus find all the local resources of who has what chickens and what breeds have they had the most success with. I had aracanas which had green legs and laid green eggs. They were cool birds and did well, they were hearty layers for us. It depends on what you want, meat or eggs or both. Have fun, I too will be going the whole homestead thing in 3 years when my hubby retires. I am looking forward to having critters around as well as other plants and trees that will supply our needs. Lots of resources at the county extension office. We have master Gardners and Canning instructors here.
We used leftover linoleum flooring for the bottom of the chicken coop and the nesting boxes. We add straw on top of it, to make it comfy for the hens. Every few few months we replace the straw, sometimes we take out and spray of the linoleum. The linoleum cleans super easy and is still in very good shape after 4 years. I wouldn’t paint the floor, since it’ll get scratched one way or another and chickens shouldn’t eat paint. 😉 Our chicken run is a deep mulch one, with just a dirt base and a very strong steel wire to keep out raccoons, weasels, etc.
Have fun on your new adventure!!!