Composters

 Introducing Master Horatio...

...and Miss Amelia.









Our new composters! Sure is a lot faster to compost this way than to wait for a pile of veggie waste to compost. We can put their waste right into the garden (most other animal fertilizer is too hot and has to be composted first). We can use their waste to feed the tilapia when we get around to raising them. We could also have a worm bin right under their condo to feed worms which in turn could feed our tilapia. Yes, many reasons to keep rabbits. But the real reason? They're just so very cute. :) They don't do well in temperatures over 85, so when it gets that hot outside, we'll move them in to live with us. The kids don't mind, of course. The rabbits shared the same condo for the first time today (neutered male and spayed female), and they got along great. They even snuggled! They also ran around with the chickens for most of the afternoon, and the chickens seemed to think it was quite amusing, but not nearly as amusing as their evening snacks of pasta and cockroaches. Apparently, cockroaches are a premium treat and there is a lot of fighting over who gets to eat them.

Farm Dog

Every farm, even the urban ones, needs its own farm dog. So here is Basil Rathbone (long "a" in this case!) who came home with us from a rescue organization today. He's an English Shepherd mix and just look at those paws!

Irrigation

The northeast quadrant of the garden has its own drip irrigation system now! Bit by bit. This now relieves us of a good 30 minutes of near-daily labor, and I love seeing the small amount of water it takes to water everything now.

Flea Beetles

This Flea Beetle is my new nemesis. They sprang out of the ground with a vicious appetite, destroying several perennials I had in the flower bed in a single afternoon. They seem to attack a single of variety of flower, decimate it, then move on to the next. At first I thought they were Japanese Beetles, but those were supposed to be half and inch long and these were quite a bit smaller. Perhaps they were just a juvenile form? But I researched it further and finally discovered it was a Flea Beetle.

The beetles are black with an irridiscent green color and are only a few millimeters long. They jump just like a flea when you touch them. They are a bigger problem after a very mild winter. Diatamoceous earth added to the soil and on the plants will help get rid of them and prevent them from eating all your plants! I have to do a thorough inspection of the garden to see if they are lurking elsewhere. UGH!

Side Yard in April

The Indian cobra melons are surpassing the much smaller Japanese sakata melons

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Here are the cobra melons close by, and the sakata melons at the far end of the bed.

Delicate pink soybean flowers

Prolific pinto beans

The nasturtiums have bloomed since I took this picture. Looking forward to pickled buds (a substitute for capers).

The soybean (near) and pinto bean (far) bed

The winter squash is another group of plants that really greened up after the blood meal application.

Cilantro

The big tomato bed! It has 25 heirloom tomatoes (I think!), 3 jalapeños, 12 bell peppers, 3 tomatillos, a long row of basil, a short row of Thai basil, a short row of cilantro. These and the cucumbers all got trellised this evening. In the pot in the middle of the bed is a fig tree just hanging out. We should really get that planted!

Here are the eggplants (Walmart) and little eggplants closer in (my slow-growing seedlings).

Basil

cucumber flowers

Titan sunflower

Our first harvest of beets, three different varieties

The future tilapia pond is returning to duty as a swimming pool until we can save up the money we need to start up the tilapia and get the kids a different pool. They had fun scrubbing out the bottom!

potato bushes

The corn - nearly six feet tall!

cucumbers

I was worried about my still-microscopic eggplant seedlings, so I bought three Japanese eggplants at Walmart for insurance. Couldn't risk not having eggplants, last year's star performer. Meanwhile, my little seedlings are finally coming around.

The miserably failing Bloomsdale spinach. It's a heat-tolerant variety. Maybe it's just not cool-tolerant too!

The bok choy is flowering, but it does not affect the taste.

swiss chard

The purple shiso! I found a recipe for making shiso salt. It's a condiment used like gomashio (a roasted sesame salt) and should be really good on rice and salads. I've added a couple of leaves to a salad and it gives it a great flavor. I can't describe the taste of shiso since it's unlike any other green, but I do love the flavor!

the beet and the carrot bed, some of it ready for harvesting

The mesclun bed. This grew so fast that it went from very tiny to huge just during the two weeks we were away. The kale part of the mesclun (mesclun is a mixture of all kinds of salad greens) is a pretty caterpillar-eaten. I think I'll just pull the kale and give it to the chickens. I've tried, many times, to like kale, but I just can't.

One of the triple crown blackberries that replaced the berry plants we lost when the hooped bed froze.

Either cauliflower or broccoli... I'll have to check my bed map!

the gestalt (north end)

the gestalt (south end)

Our flock, and my favorite thing in the garden!

Front Yard in April

Here at last are some pictures!

An arugula forest near the front door. We're letting some of it go to seed, some of it go on our pizza, and some of it go to the chickens. Then I'll replant with another crop of arugula. Arugula is probably my favorite salad green. Lightly peppery, it works as a salad unto itself with just lemon juice, salt, and olive oil, or as an accent in a mixed greens salad. Oh, yum.



The onions and garlic are hanging out for a while longer. I also really, really need to weed that bed. I do kind of like the look of the weeds growing in between the flagstones.



We gave the sugar snap peas and snow peas a shot of blood meal, and they began flowering a little more. I think they're just about done for the season, though. We didn't get a ton of these. That's one part of the garden that has pretty poor soil.


The happy herb spiral. I just used some of the fresh oregano on our pizza tonight.



We're swimming in salad greens right now. There's this plus several more beds!


I think my hulless oats may be a great big failure. I think putting the wood chips on top probably wasn't the best idea, and I probably should have worked the soil more. Oh, well. That's the nice part about growing from seed. A failure only costs $2-3! There are a few oat sprouts in there, but probably not enough to warrant watering it any more...



The flower bed next to the driveway, planted with various perennial seeds. This bed also hasn't had much in the way of amendments, and the sandy soil doesn't have that much to it. It seems to be coming up all right in spite of that, but I can't tell yet how thickly the seeds I put in will actually fill in. I may add a few more to ensure greater coverage (and cutting flowers!).



The summer squash bed with some donated eggplants in the corners of the nearest part of the bed. I need to cover the stems of the squash with toilet paper rolls to hopefully defeat the horrible, terrible, no-good vine borers that decimated our summer squash last year.



The glorious snapdragons that have taken over the asparagus bed, with lots of lettuce in the space that is remaining. I hope the first-year asparagus doesn't mind this much sharing. Someone just told me that asparagus is very hard to grow here, so I guess this bed now falls under the category of Great Big Experiment.



The watermelon is developing many more leaves now, especially since our garden-wide application of blood meal.



The kiwis are starting to send out longer shoots.


The blueberries! We did learn that one can't leave for a vacation and think that your newly-planted one-year-old (AKA extra-puny) blueberries will be okay being watered every two or three days. They won't. All the littlest ones died. I replaced them with rabbiteyes from the local grocery story. I was shocked to find such a good price for such big plants. Supposedly these will grow 8 feet tall, but I think we'll keep them a bit shorter than that for easier picking.



The amaranth is sprouting up very nicely! Another Great Big Experiment.



Cabbage ready for picking. I wish I had planted twenty times as much! I planted this in the late fall and it has slowly plugged along. We only have a few to enjoy... this time!



It was a bad year for loquats. The loquats went from green and hard, to barely yellow, to black. I have to look into whether this is fire blight or not... Very sad not to have loquat sauce on my meatballs this year.



Taking advantage of the kiwi not being on top of the arbor yet, I planted a few tromboncino squash. They're coming up nicely here. Not sure how long it will take for the kiwi to take over the arbor, but hopefully not before these have done their thing.


This picture shows 3 tree circles, 1 tomato circle, 1 watermelon circle, and 2 amaranth circles, as well as the street intersection. All the trees are doing well, except the Meyer lemon which is trailing behind the others just a bit. Its leaves got fairly chewed up by the giant swallowtail caterpillars. Hopefully it will recover without any real damage.


Here you can see the whole orchard area in front of the house.


And the rest of the front yard...


More to come! The back yard!