Volunteer growth...

I went out to the garden yesterday and found a cute little sprout. I am pretty sure it's a volunteer pumpkin - a giant pumpkin - since it is growing right where I had pumpkins 2 years ago! I suppose I need to re-think that garden box plan and leave it there. It may get huge!

I also have a huge tomato vine growing in another box, I planted it last August hoping I would get more tomatoes but it hasn't taken off until now. Now it is full of little flowers that are getting fat with fruit. I am so excited about tomatoes, I love growing them! Rebekah eats them right off the vine...red or green, she doesn't care. So I grow a lot of tomatoes every year and make tomato sauce, salsa and put them in salads for most of the year. mmmm...

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Lundy Sweet Lundy...

Every year my family has taken a summer camping trip to Lundy Lake Resort in the Eastern Sierras. I have probably been going since the late 1970's...phew! Long time! But we still go and it is so beautiful every time that I thought I'd share pics from our trip last summer.

Here's a caterpillar who will be a swallowtail butterfly. We were thrilled to spot it, but then couldn't find it again.

Here we are fishing on the famous Lundy Lake.

The girls hanging out in the hammock...a very popular spot to play, hang out and just relax.

The crew...

Rebekah and Bella (she loves Bella)

We walked to the Tufa with all the kids this year. We have to do it every few years because it's beautiful!

We visited Travertine Hot Springs outside of Bridgeport, CA. What a fun treat for everyone.

We took a ferry boat across Saddlebag Lake and went on a beautiful hike. This was our lunch spot. After this hour of rest and lunch it hailed ferociously on us, we got drenched and cold. But it was a hike we will never forget!

Ben with Bella at lunch.

And my kids cooking up some breakfast at camp. They love camping!

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Edible weeds...

We have lots of weeds on our property and many of them are edible, some are not. We have not identified all of them all but we are in the process of it!

We have dandelion pictured below. It's the leaves that are long and jagged. The leaves are good in salads and they are chock full of nutrients. It is a diuretic and is a stimulant to the system, in particular the urinary organs and most use it for kidney and liver disorders. Many decoctions or teas are used in combination with other herbs to help these ailments.

We have sour grass (below picture). I used to eat this when I was a kid. My kids sure like it now. I find bits and piles of it all over the house.

We have nettle (below). This grows in certain areas of the garden not everywhere. I am sure it has to do with the soil composition and shade availability. This is an awesome 'weed' to have or use in cooking. It is a powerful herb to fight allergies and it can be used to help when you touch it and get all itchy. Just put some of the leaves in your mouth, chew and spit the whole glob on the itchy-ness and it should go away.

This one looks like wild chamomile (below), but I really have no idea what it is. It grows low to the ground and has little white flowers. I'm not sure if that's what it is but it sure looks like it!

This one is NOT edible and is considered a deadly weed. It is called Nightshade (below picture) and is of the tomato family. When it grows larger it has black berries that kind of look yummy but beware, even though some websites say that it's edible and others say that it's not, we will stay away from this plant. We are cautious.

We have little mallow. Many people add this to their salads or use it as greens for soups. We have not ventured that far in our culinary travels.

We have horehound (below 2 pics). I am pretty sure this is the one that is edible but we are waiting to view the flowers. If the flowers are white then it's safe but if the flowers are pink/purple we are pulling it up! It is better to be safe than sorry!

These are only a few of the edible (& some non-edibls) weeds that we have, there are so many more out there! What do you have in your backyard? Have you been adventurous and eaten them? I think it's kind of important to know what you can and can't eat...especially with kids!

Here are a few books available to read more about foraging! Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods From Dirt to Plate, The Wild Wisdom of Weeds..., Backyard Foraging: 65..., and Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants. 

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Hiking trail...

We live in a suburban neighborhood with hiking trails for people, dogs and horses. One thing I love about it is that we can cross the street or walk around the "block" and find a trail to hike on that takes us to the tops of the hills around us. 

This hike is one of the kids favorite, you can see the boys and Rebekah running ahead. The dogs love it too because there is a huge flat section at the top where they can run and explore the hills and bushes. At the top we can see into El Cajon, we spot the playgrounds we go to, the area that the library is in, and the stores in the shopping centers we frequent, they like to play "I Spy" and find Michaels or Kohls.

This was taken on a different morning. Same hike. Same kids. Same dogs.

The dogs like to walk together. We have tried to have two people walk them separately, one in front and one behind but the person behind gets dragged up the hill to join the other. They want to be side by side...silly dogs.

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Garlic...

Last October, Hannah, Rebekah and I went out and planted a bunch of garlic. We use garlic a lot in our kitchen and it is super easy to grow.  So we dedicated an entire box to it. We first divided the box into square feet with twine so that we could have guidelines for clove placement.

Then we divided the garlic bulb into individual cloves and put them out where we were going to plant them.

Then we dug a hole for each clove and dropped it in about 4-6 inches down. When we were all done we had planted 96 cloves of garlic and 8 elephant garlic cloves. Phew that's a lot of garlic!

Since then we have had to protect our little box from squirrels or raccoons so we enclosed it with chicken wire. I also had to add a plastic snake to the box and we haven't had any little critter hands digging any more cloves up lately. I talked about that in this post last week.

So we are hoping to have a lot of home grown garlic in a few months! Stay tuned!

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Oranges....

We have several types of citrus trees on the back third of the property. We purchased the house with five full grown trees: 1 mandarin (we call cuties), 1 navel orange, 1 bearss lime, 1 lemon and 1 other orange tree that never really survived after a year. The last orange was bitter and no one really cared for it, and then one day we noticed that it had died. Not really sure what happened with it. But in the meantime we were planting more trees and (kumquat, rio red grapefruit, yosemite orange and a honey mandarin). We love the citrus trees!

Our trees bloom at different times of the year and start the cycle of growth and it is beautiful to watch. There are tons of flowers that bring in the bees to pollinate. The little buds start to grow and they grow! The mandarin (I think its a mandarin) tree that came with the house overflows with fruit every year around Jan/Feb. We start picking them in December and are still picking in February/March. It's wonderful! Sometimes we get outside and pick a bunch of oranges and juice them for later. We simply put the juice in pint jars and freeze.

When our mandarin tree is empty of fruit we move on to the next tree and sometimes the fruits are ready simultaneously. The mandarin are so sweet and juicy, the peel just falls off when you start peeling. But as you can see in the picture below it is not empty yet!

Our goal is to have our trees bearing fruit year-round. We started with 9 trees and now have over 25, including peach, plum, apricot, nectarine, apple and cherry. I'll have to write about them when they are bearing fruit. Being able to go outside and pick fruit for your family for the next few days or while you are just working around the yard and want a quick pick-me-up is fabulous. We always have some type of fruit!

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Garden workers...

We put our chickens to work while we are working in the garden. I would never be able to let them just roam around free because they pull up plants and eat what we want to eat. So while I am out there, I allow them to come in and work the soil. They do a fantastic job of tilling and eating all the white grubs, pill bugs and such but they also eat the good stuff like the worms. And I don't want them eating all the worms so their work day is limited.

I love them working around the boxes to get the bugs we don't want. We put down a couple of bales of hay for Thanksgiving (we ate in the garden) as mulch because it was all dirt. Hay was so much prettier and then it started to rain. It rained a lot. But then we started to get some green "grass" in the garden sprouting from the hay and the ground was green! Wow it's beautiful! The chickens like to eat and peck at the hay sprouts a lot.

Here's one looking at me, wondering why I'm bothering her work.

Working in the box. Lots of white grubs in there. Ick!

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Garden veggies...

Here's a little snippet of what is growing in the garden right now. We have a couple of collard green plants that keep on giving. I planted these about a year ago and they seem to be thriving still. It hasn't been too hot for them to bolt to seed yet so that's a good thing, we have lots of greens.

Here are the little bell peppers we have, they are about 2 inches long and growing very slowly. I planted them last July/August and they aren't really liking the cold weather so they don't produce very much right now but they will! The awesome part about bell peppers is that you don't have to take them out of the ground at the end of the season, you can leave them in year-round and continue to get fruit. I had a plant (until the dogs recently dug it out of the pot) for 3 years and still got nice bell peppers.

These are Noah's snap peas. He has a 4 x 4 garden box and has several things in there at various growing stages. Aren't the flowers beautiful?

Here are the snap peas he is growing. We have to keep the dogs out of the garden or else they will sit by this plant and snack on these until they are gone...and then Noah would be mad.

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Chicken coop...

Today we are going to take a quick tour of our chicken coop. As you read this you will quickly realize that we are lazy chicken keepers. But they are happy and healthy and give us plenty of eggs, so it all works out!

We have a solar powered chicken door (in yellow) that opens at whatever time we program it to open and close. It's awesome and a necessary thing to have on auto pilot because chickens get up before the crack of dawn and want out of the coop. They will tell you, believe me! the brown coop attached to the green one is where we put our new pullets. They hang out in there for a while to get used to the area, hear the older hens and grow bigger. If we let them out while still small they would get pecked by the bigger ones.

Here is the waterer, it is great because it gives the chickens fresh clean water that they need and we don't have to re-fill it for several days, sometimes a whole week! The bendy tube goes down to the PVC pipe which has some nipples attached that the chickens use to get their water. They are so handy to have! We love the waterer.

This is the feeder that my handy husband made. I found a picture of something like this a few years back and I was getting tired of going out every day to refill food and water that he built it pretty quickly. It holds almost 25lbs of chicken feed so we don't have to go out and re-fill every day any longer. We have 9 hens right now and we might fill it twice in a month. Sweet!

Below you can see the feeder in action. The chickens just jump up on the front lever and the lid opens up for them to eat. This keeps the critters out...mostly. The chickens make a huge mess with their pecking and swishing the food around that pellets are usually all over the ground too. They eat them but we may need to add a little edge to the feeder sometime...maybe.

Here is one of the side doors to the coop, this is where they lay eggs and perch at night. The blue boxes are the nesting boxes that they lay in. The two wooden perches are their perches for nighttime.

The above picture is taken outside the far door of the picture below. You can see the inside of the coop. Below the perches are frames filled with sand as litter, this is the best for picking up and cleaning the coop. I just use a cat litter scoop and scoop the poop since they poop all night (we use that poop in the compost!). Super easy.

The nesting boxes are on the floor of the coop. We used to have 8 boxes (we also used to have 21 chickens...) but I found that the chickens would knock the top boxes down and fight over them so I limited the number of boxes and left the 4 on the ground level available for them. The four boxes low to the ground filled with straw works very well. And we collect the eggs through the back of the coop without disturbing any one.

Here is the back of the coop where we collect eggs.

Top boxes are "closed for business" and the bottom ones are the ones they use.

EGGS. We get lots and lots of eggs. These are hard boiled. Yum.

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Compost...

I don't know if they are still the big rage now or not but a few years back it was all the rage to make things with wooden pallets. Check out Pinterest and all of my suggestions came up as re-using pallets...perhaps it was because I was searching for ideas. I saw a compost bin that someone had made with 3 compartments and wanted to have one here on the homestead. To me, it seems to be a good design. We have been composting with our two Earth Machines (they look like this one) for many years but they are small for the property and yard waste that we now have.

So we went to the local feed store and purchased some additional pallets since we had some already but not enough. They sell them for $2 each, cheap! The project needed 5 pallets and we had 3. We (or I should say my husband) re-designed the bins that I saw to open from the front and on top. We did need some 2 x 4's to construct doors and lids. The bins are lined with chicken wire to keep most of the critters out but I do open the doors up while I am working out there to let the chickens in and let them eat bugs and drop some chicken poop in there. It's good stuff.

So... many of you might be wondering how to compost. It's really easy actually. We put all our garden waste in, the stuff we pull out of the garden and we just make sure to cut the pieces into smaller ones so that we can turn the pile easily. Garden waste consists of tree or bush trimmings from pruning, fallen leaves (brown), all of our kitchen scraps (veggie peels, apple cores, egg shells...) and every once in a while I will add some shredded newspaper but it isn't very often that we need it. Then once a week I get a pitchfork and turn the pile and add water. This part can be difficult if you have a huge pile but it is definitely something you need to do! Just get in there and muscle through it. They do sell some augers and turners to help with this and someday I will have one of these pitchforks but for now I have a shovel (like in the picture) and a tiny pitchfork that gives me muscles when I use it. Watering the pile is important, you want to keep the pile moist not drenched. You should never put fish, meats or dairy into the compost bin.

So add greens, browns and water, turn, turn, turn! In a few months you should have beautiful compost!

We keep our kitchen scraps in a compost pail like this one but there are lots of different types out there. Ceramic or stainless steel (like ours) seem to be the best kind, they don't rust. Here's another ceramic one...a handle is a must for ease of carrying to the bin outside. There are aluminum ones and wooden ones too. Just look around for one you love to keep on the kitchen counter. There are plastic ones too that you can store under the sink but I would forget about it under there. Other kitchens are compost ready with a bin built-in to the counter. Tons of choices! Happy shopping!

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Keep critters away...

I'm going to take the next week or two to give you a tour of our homestead and show you what we have going on over here. We have about an acre of land and there are lots of little pockets of it that have a lot going on. Today we will start with keeping the various critters away. We have so many uninvited guests to our property that we have become creative in mostly controlling them.

Bugs and insects. We have seen a lot of different kinds of these here. We have aphids, tomato hornworms, cutworms and grubs, mealy bugs, grasshoppers among some that I can remember. There are more. Believe me. We keep an organic garden so we use organic methods of controlling these. I pay my kids $1 for every tomato hornworm that they find, pick and feed to the chickens. The kids are so driven to go out and find those bugs and the chickens get a tasty treat. We also use a homemade insecticidal soap and spray on our veggies and fruit trees. We spray with a hard stream of water from the hose to knock the bugs off the plants too. We have used this organic neem oil as well but it is quite strong and may burn certain plants so we try to do other things first before resorting to that.

Gophers. We hate them. We have millions of them. They are so frustrating.We built raised beds lined with gopher wire so that we could grow veggies and plants in the garden. We have lost about 6 fruit/nut trees to gophers gnawing on the roots. We have been planting a few new trees and lining the hole with gopher wire about 3 feet down and 6 feet out of the ground. We got 2 dogs so that they could help..but all it's done is made a bunch of holes in the back yard. We can't use poison, we have children who like to dig, lots of wild animals around including rabbits and neighbors cats that we'd hate to poison. We have also trapped them, we use this trap. It has been the only one that works. This has been the most successful but they breed and multiply faster than we can trap them. So it's a vicious circle.

Crows and ravens. We have crows that live in the trees. They make a lot of noise some days but for the most part they leave our stuff alone. They do make the chickens nervous every once in a while when they fly overhead, the chickens freeze and turn their heads to see above them.

Skunks. We have skunks and they are sneaky! We have trapped a couple of them but they are smart and seem to remember where the trap is and move around. So these have been difficult. We have this live trap and caught a skunk in it last fall. It's still winter time so they may be taking a little break.

Squirrels. We can't control these but they don't bother the garden too much. We saw a lot of digging going on in the garden boxes in the fall but I read somewhere that plastic garden snakes can help keep them away. So far it's working! I move it around every once in a while but I'm not very regular with it. I haven't seen any little holes in our garlic bed lately.

I can't think of anything else that we "fight" around here but if I think of anything else I'll be sure to write about it! What critters do you have around your place? What do you do to control them?

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