Long winter coming to an end...

Well, it's a fact, we've been pretty lax about doing much work in the backyard farm over the winter, but Spring is in the air and the Bluebird Farm team is getting back into the swing of things.  We have big plans for the farm this season, but we'll save the details for upcoming posts, as you will get to see things happen along with us.  For now, here's a couple pics of a neighbor's urban garden near my cousin, Kimberly's home in West Seattle- I found it very inspiring to see someone making the most of a very limited space, which others might not even realize could ever be so productive.  Get out there and look around, you may have space in your life for a farm right under your nose!

I absolutely love raised beds, especially Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardens, like those pictured above.  You put down some weed barrier under your own soil mix, and plant different complementary plants in the divided squares, and get ready to have an abundant, virtually weed free garden in no time.  If you are sharp, you may have already inferred that these raised beds got my brain going and may have some influence on our upcoming season's garden configuration.

We'll sign off for now with a pic of our lovely laying hens, and their protective Rooster, Julia enjoying a bit of a drink in the freshly mowed backyard..

Fall season update Pics

Fall season update-  Sadly, Peggy the giant bunny can easily surmount our little fence and has raided the fall planting of lettuces and baby Bok Choy more than once already, putting some of them at a severe disadvantage. I'm not sure if they will all pull through or if Peggers won't get them all before I kick her butt out of the garden.   We'll post pics of the fall planting including bunny damage soon.  Pics include shots of a soup made from the Delicata squash and Basil from the yard, homemade pesto, and Fried Green Tomatoes, which were de-lish!  Though we didn't grow them, Nicole and here Dad Phil made tons of awesome homemade "Cold Packed" Dill Pickles.  Yum!
 

My next projects on deck are revamping our composting system, and setting up the rainwater barrel.. I also made a firewood bin for our winter wood supply and will post some pics of that soon..

Eggplant update and other produce from the garden

So while there are tons more pics from various stages of this summers construction of both animal habitats and the garden, I won't be getting into sitting down and going through them all in an organized fashion for a few more weeks yet. Once the weather deserts us for the year and I am trapped inside I think that task will appeal a lot more. For now however, I wanted to post a few more pics of the produce from the garden. The Bun-galow is interfering with afternoon sunlight on the tomato plants, slowing down the ripening of the front and rearmost plants in particular. Somehow despite this we continue to get lots of great tomatoes off all three plants, particularly the middle one! I harvested 5 beautiful palm sized fruits today, and if the warm weather predicted for the next ten days holds to it's promise, we will certainly get a few more of the dozens of of fat but green fruits still on the vine.

One of our two pumpkins vines died, though the pumpkin itself looks great, albeit smaller than i had hoped we could grow it before harvesting. Nevertheless I am proud of my very first pumpkin and look forward to carving it soon and making pumpkin seeds with its guts.

Also sad, our green peppers seem to have had a hard time taking off and also have some kind of blight/vitamin deficiency that is inhibiting healthy growth. These were a very late starter for us having picked them up on sale at the local nursery for a late summer planting. I also don't weed AT ALL, and did a shoddy job mulching and I'm sure that the interlopers are taking some of the resources out of the soil. This is the biggest reason that next year the entire garden will be converted to raised bed planting boxes with weed cloth floors. I'm looking forward to building the boxes slowly over the winter after I harvest the entire garden and compost the skeletons of the plants.

Now the peppers of all other kinds seem to have had no problems at all producing prolific fruit and I am starting to wonder what we will do with them all since most of them are insanely volcanically (is that even a word?) HOT! We have Super Chilis, Red Dragons, and Hot Lemon Peppers.The eggplants continue to grow and are starting to look like they will be pretty decent sized if they have the time to get there before the growing season ends..

I am having trouble figuring out how exactly to format my posts here so that the photos show up where I want them in my posts. Bear with me while I learn how to work this blog, please!

Mobile Test Post

Testing a mobile blogging app for the iPhone..