Where Do We Start?

At long last, the saga of our quest for land has come to a conclusion, but that also means that the real work is just beginning! The Gardener and I have purchased a new home about 12 miles from our old abode, and with it comes plenty of space for creating a real homestead. We now have almost 4 acres! About 1/3 of that is currently wooded, but it leaves at least an acre for sheep pasture, and more than enough space for growing tons of vegetables and fruits.

The chickens are already loving their new Eglu and have really taken to scratching around in the grass and looking for bugs. There's a lot of overgrowth that needs to be cleared, but we have found some raspberries, wineberries, and a mulberry tree that we'll definitely be leaving. We also have a huge old neglected apple tree that we're going to try to prune back into shape. This weekend we're going to be renting a sod cutter and getting our garden beds ready. We're planning on having 5 separate beds, which should be just right for rotating crops and having one permanent one. We'll probably only use one or two for Fall crops and plant the rest with cover crops. The first thing we need to do is plant our pumpkins so that they're ready for Halloween! I'm also really excited about planting more peas since our spring crop did so well and were so easy to grow.

Meanwhile, over at the borrowed veggie plot, we have plenty of kale, bunches of green tomatoes, some baby peppers and eggplants, and squash galore. Our Yukon Gold potatoes should be ready to harvest in the next couple of weeks, and the Yellow Finn and German Butterball to follow shortly. Our corn is also starting to tassel. I know our garden is suffering from our inability to tend it on a daily basis, but I'm confident we'll still end up getting plenty of goodies!

Now that life has settled down enough for us to start getting some real work done, we'll be posting up a storm about all of our new projects. The only question now is where do we start?

The Summer Harvests Have Begun!

This June has been one of the rainiest I can remember, but the rains have finally let up and it seems like summer is now in full swing. The veggies in the garden are growing fast, and so are the weeds, which we're struggling to catch up with. We're also getting to harvest the first crops of the season. We pulled all of our spinach and got three bags worth to freeze. We have peas coming on, and we have bunches of kale to be picked. And today we harvested the garlic. All of our softneck garlic rotted out over the winter, but the Romanian Red hardnecks grew pretty well. For some reason, some of them grew large scapes, which we cut only two weeks ago and made pesto out of, and some of them did not. When we dug the heads up today, the ones which had had scapes turned out to be very small, with apparently only two or three cloves each. But most of them grew to a respectable size, and they're all hanging in the kitchen to cure. I can't wait to taste them!

We've been meaning to put up some photos of the garden, but we keep forgetting to take the camera. It's been great having our big 20' x 40' plot to grow in this year, but it's also difficult to find the time to tend it since we can't just walk out the back door to it when we have a few extra minutes. Since it's also difficult to grab a few leaves of kale or a few pea pods for dinner, it's making more sense for us to harvest as much as we can when we're there and then preserve it.

Our good friend Pragmatiste surprised us this weekend with the awesome gift of this classic book on preserving, which is a complete reference on everything you need to know to can, freeze, cure, dry, and cellar, with plenty of scientific rationale. Now we should have no trouble keeping all of our veggies delicious and nutritious!

Just Hatched!

At 7:10 this morning the phone rang, just as we had been hoping it would. The lady at the post office was calling to let us know that our little baby chicks had arrived! We got there before they opened, but they were more than happy to let us in to claim our box of fluffy peepers. The Gardener got to take them home (as I grumpily had to go to the office) and he was given the responsibility of introducing them to their new digs, feeding and watering them.


We spent the day thinking up names for our eight little layers, and settled on Lorraine, Benedictina, Florentine, Frittata, Tikka, Pot Pie, Buck Buck, and Begok. All of them seem to be doing quite well, even though Frittata gave the Gardener a bit of a scare at first. Now she's even pushing the bigger ones around. The lighter colored ones (Flo, Lo, Bennie, and Fritta) are Rhode Island Reds. They get the fancy names because they behave more like ladies. The dark ones are Barred Plymouth Rocks, and they are plucky to say the least.

The coop should be arriving this week as well. It's travelling by boat from England and then into Philadelphia via Greyhound where we'll have to pick it up at the station. Kind of ridiculous, I know, but we've chosen the Omlet brand because their coops are particularly suburban friendly in their Ikea-like design, and we're hoping to stay on our neighbors' good sides.

In the meantime they'll stay warm, cozy, and safe in their custom built brooder. We've even rigged up a "chickam" so that we can keep an eye on them from our computers at work!

Homemade Snack Attack

We spent a good bit of yesterday out of the garden and in the kitchen (though we did find time to plant a few replacement tomatoes). The Gardeness baked up a whole wheat batard, attempting a tricky technique that we found on the Artisan Bread in Five blog. I have to say it turned out quite nice, though perfecting the crust is still giving us trouble. Earlier in the week she had picked up two quarts of strawberries from the West Grove Farmers Market. After finding a recipe for strawberry jam, we finally had a chance to play with our newly loaned canning gear and promptly turned the kitchen into a makeshift sauna.

The latest Mother Earth News has a little blurb about making butter and I remember doing something like that in elementary school with a mason jar filled with cream and marbles. So when the kitchen got a bit too hot, I tried to whip up a batch. I didn't have any marbles or cream so I filled a mason jar 3/4 with whole milk. About an hour of shaking later we had decent little chunk of creamy butter. Adding a dash of salt gave it a nice earthy richness.



You can't beat little homemade snacks like these... Unless you're really into lime-like stuff and giant Cheetos.

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A Practical Experience

So today on our trip to the milk store we decided to stop by a rare and used book store in Kennett owned by Thomas Macaluso. Hoping we might find some cool old tome of conventional wisdom on gardening we stumbled upon a gem.


Ten Acres Enough: A Practical Experience by James Miller (7th Edition) was published in 1865. The book covers the real world experiences of a gentleman farmer making due with just 10 acres of land near Philadelphia in the mid 19th century. It's hard to think of a more fitting guide to get us started. I mean this is a pre-industrial agriculture DIY manual written about a "garden farm" less than 100 miles from home. Check out a New York Times review of the first edition from 1864. We'll be sure to share bits of advice over the next few weeks.

In other news we'll be stopping by the borrowed plot to plant our heirloom Bartels family corn later today. Fingers crossed that the critters don't ransack the seedlings this year.

Garden Heartbreak

Last Saturday was the Big Day of Planting, and all of our little veggie sprouts finally got nestled into their new garden plot. Things were looking good for a couple of days until a late and unexpected frost hit on Monday night. We knew it was going to get cold, but there was no frost warning, so we trusted everything would be ok. Tuesday afternoon I got an email from my dad - bad news. All of the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and basil were gone - shriveled up and dead. It was a pretty heartbreaking sight.

As I was pretty sure there wouldn't be time to start from seed again, and to avoid a total loss, I went down the street to the Amish farm and purchased some replacements. No, they're not open-pollinated, organic heirlooms, but in the end, the point of the garden is to have something to eat. We're going to try direct seeding some of the tomato varieties that we were particularly looking forward to, and hope to get at least a few fruits before the fall frosts come in.

On a brighter note, our peas, spinach, and lettuce are growing strong, and our other greens, tubers, and crucifers appear to have survived as well. Yesterday we planted some carrot and beet seeds amongst the onions. Next weekend we'll be planting beans and corn, and the week after that our baby chicks arrive!

Yay for Farmers' Markets!

Farmers' market season has finally arrived! This afternoon I stopped by my local market on the way home from work to meet this year's group of farmers and see what they had to offer. New to the scene was North Creek Nurseries, specializing in native perennial plants. I asked Erin what she would recommend for attracting pollinators, and her suggestion was Nepeta, which has small blue flowers that bloom all summer long, and leaves which have a really lovely sweet and spicy fragrance. It wasn't until I got home that I realized Nepeta is catmint, but this variety (nepeta x faassenii) is more attractive to bees and butterflies than to cats. Also new this year is Long Valley Farm, selling organically raised free-range chicken meat and eggs, and Swarmbustin' Honey with their ten types of local honey including "Totally Raw", Buckwheat, and Hot Garlic. Rounding out the offerings were Jack's Jams and Jellies, R & R Teas, and and assortment of Amish produce and baked-goods stands. I came home with chicken, oyster mushrooms, and bibb lettuce for making asian lettuce wraps for dinner tonight!

All this fresh local produce has us itching to get out and plant our little veggie sprouts, which are more than ready to be liberated from their little paper pots. We've been given a generous sized plot of land to garden in my dad's backyard, which was freshly tilled yesterday afternoon, and our seedlings are being hardened-off on the back deck in preparation for the Big Day of Planting this coming Saturday!