The chickens eye the tomatoes, the dogs walk all over the bean bed, and the squirrels want into everything. What’s a space intensive gardener to do? Fence around the beds. Yet every spring I resist. Fencing is ugly and expensive. It is a pain (literally, I have a hole healing in my finger from a wire poke) to install and remove. Grass is hard to cut around the edges. This year I was intentional about [...]

This week has been the essence of spring. Ohio has felt downpours of rain, blustery days so chilly Alex lit the wood stove, and sunshine that made me weak in the knees. Best of all, it is the growing season! In the spirit of Friday Five, here are spring scenes from the homestead this week: 1) Backyard hens soaked to the core during Monday’s rainstorms. It isn’t true that a chickens are so dim that [...]

We weren’t in a gym, but Alex, Lil and I exercised our bodies this weekend!  We were outside almost all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  We’re exhausted and exhilarated.  Here’s what happened: The deck was torn down.  Lucky for us, the builders were poor at concrete setting and posts came out fairly easily.  They also used subpar techniques for covering the crawl space and we got to replace wood on the sides of the house; [...]

Now that you’ve decided what to plant and where to plant, it’s time to build your beds! The most basic technique for creating a garden bed is double digging.  As the name implies, double dug beds are carefully turned with a garden shovel once over the whole surface.  Some peat moss and/or compost can be sprinkled on top and then the whole bed is dug again.  Each round of shoveling should be at least four [...]