They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
Evie actually likes weeding. So here she is weeding row five in preparation for putting in more brassicas. The weeds themselves will be fed to the cows and sheep as a tasty treat. I think this was Tuesday of last week. I had hoped to get the water line finished, but we ran into a… Continue reading Food Forest Irrigation, Part 2
The Garden Fence on the yard side has ceased to be a fence. Originally it was an 8 foot tall "deer net." Note to self, and anyone else who might be listening, never build a fence out of deer netting. The first snowfall will rip it to shreds. The first dog will rip through it… Continue reading Food Forest Irrigation, Part 1
Busy Friday at the Farm. We are running so far behind schedule in the garden this year, it isn't even funny. Actually, it's probably a little funny, from the correct perspective. However, we can't really get to the garden because other projects keep popping up that take precedence. For instance, all the trees that we… Continue reading Irrigation, Seed Starting, and Comfrey
I have so many pictures backed up, waiting for get put into a blog. I have given up on a detailed update on all of it, but as this blog is our primary record keeping mechanism (for big picture stuff, anyway) they still need to get updated. Good Friday (April 3rd) planted two new apple… Continue reading Three Week Update Post
Everything is homeschool. Even a muddy former driveway that the pigs rooted through for a couple of months. This becomes a vehicle for talking about healthy and unhealthy soil with the kids. Think of it as a "before" picture. The "after" picture won't be for a couple of years, but ideally that same former driveway… Continue reading Spring Buds
It is that time of year again. Spring is intermittently springing. It is February. Time to prune our trees for Summer. We started with Raspberries. Those should have been pruned in the fall, before the leaves dropped, when we could still have figured out which canes had fruited and which had not. We did the… Continue reading Pruning 2026: Part 1
Earlier this year we put plant protectors around a bunch of our orchard shrubs and pasture trees. This was in order to facilitate letting the sheep and cows pulse through the orchard to mow the grass down for us, without letting them browse all the leaves off the figs, mulberries and currants (I'm looking at… Continue reading Protecting the Orchard Plants… more.
Here in the good ol' Pacific Northwest, getting ready for winter is more about getting things ready for rain than it is prepping for snow or ice. This means cleaning out the gutters (before and after the leaves fall). We had gutter guards, but found that we grew too much moss under them and the… Continue reading Winter is Coming
This was the first year we have gotten a decent crop of elderberries from the farm. So far we have only been harvesting from the black elder shrub, and have already gotten a huge haul. These are the elderberries we pruned back to the stump in early 2024. They grew out shoots in 2024, and… Continue reading Elderberries.
Our Hollywood plum tree produced like crazy this year, unlike the past two years (the tree is only three years old). It is the earliest blooming plum we have, and as such, is subject to late frosts, while the other two plums have a tendency to miss the late frosts. This year, however, we had… Continue reading Plum Juice
