Our Little Homestead...

front to back: chard, beets, carrots, lettuce, spinach

  No, I can't yet raise chickens; though I realllllllly want to.

Letting the basil go to seed...maybe we'll get several volunteers next year

And no cows or goats or anything like that either.

broccoli....lots and LOTS of broccoli

We have, however, been working on improving the garden and planning it out for next season.  We use this awesome, free, online tool called Smart Gardener.  It allows you to plot your garden layout, will calculate how much of each plant you need for the size of your household, and will even layout your plants according to companion plantings, height, and sun requirements.  Love it.

left to right: fig, pom, orange, plum, peach

We're still trying to figure out where to put trees.  Matt decided to do a compact planting of the apple trees in the front yard.  I don't think it's compact enough, but it's a little late now.  We still have a peach, plum, pomegranate, fig, and citrus that need to go in the ground...soon.  But we haven't been able to agree on the where.

We also got a quote on having the siding replaced.  Our current siding is wood, which is easily penetrated by the super squirrels in our area.  The soffits need to be replaced as well because they are beginning to deteriorate with all the wet weather we've been having.  It looks as though we'll need to wait on the replacement, though, at least until May.  We hadn't anticipated it costing THAT much.

Oh well.

On a great Happy Note.  We've been doing the Back to Eden gardening method, which requires LOTS of mulch/wood chips for success.  The movie says you should be able to get them for free, but everywhere we called was going to charge us by the truckload.  So we've been purchasing mulch from the Do It Yourself Place.

Anyhow, the other day Matt noticed one of our neighbors had a tree service over to trim their trees.  And they had a wood chipper and were chipping it into a dump truck.  Well, he got the brilliant idea to go over and talk to them to see if they would dump it into our driveway...and they DID!

Free mulch!  This makes me soooooo happy.  I realize it needs to cure for one season before we can put it on the plants.  But we currently have empty beds that we're trying to build up for next season, so this will work perfectly.  They said they could dump more whenever  we needed it.  Fabulous!

The offensive piles of mulch

So while I worked on homework and took care of the kid, Matt started moving the mulch to the backyard.  Apparently, our neighbor is concerned about the piling of mulch near the fence line (it's a garden bed...6inches of mulch).  He seems to think it'll cause his yard to flood.  Um...it's mulch.  It's penetrable.  And your yard drains into ours...not the other way around.  But, to keep the peace, we'll be installing a French drain along the fence line.  That'll throw all the water out behind our back fence, where there is a HUGE drainage ditch.  See, happy all around.