Better (Tree) Homes & Gardens

Last summer, we were fortunate enough to get a great deal on a playset for the kids.  They immediately set to making it their own little place.  I love watching them work on it. 

Over the past few weeks, as the weather has warmed up, the tree house has been getting a sprucing up.  Natalie is creating her own "homestead" out there.  She has added a firewood pile, for the "fireplace" a raised bed flower garden, a place to keep her little chickens, a compost bin, a clothesline, and a flower box filled with pansies.  It's likely that I'm completely and utterly biased, but I think she's one of the most creative little people I have ever met.

Here's a peek inside.

Welcome!

Putting the finishing touches on her window box garden.

 

 

A closer look at the newest addition to her "homestead"
 

The animal quarters, notice they have an escape route behind the barn.

The fireplace

The Kitchen

 

 

 

Sinks and storage for clean & dirty dishes

We hope you enjoyed our treehouse tour!  Happy Sunday :)

This Is My Year! I Just Know It!

After months of careful planning and researching and seed propogating, the garden is in!  Not as early as I would have liked, but still, it is in.  Everything is planted.  Some things are even sprouting already.

Good Mother Stallard pole bean sprout.
I spent enough time in the garden to watch it
actually open and unfurl yesterday.

This year is something completely new for my veggie patch.  I built raised beds.  Nothing fancy. But, raised beds nonetheless.  Next year, I hope to add a few more so that everything is planted in beds.  I have four so far and plans for four more.  I have wanted to do raised beds for some time, but have always been talked out of it for one reason or another. 

 

There it is.
 Probably should have taken my dirty gloves out of the fence
before I snapped the picture.

Raised beds aren't for everybody.  For myself, I know that I don't have a reliable tiller.  And tilling is quite a procedure even when we have one to use.  The weather has to be just right.  Both of us need to be home.  Seriously, the stars have to align for us to get a decent till in.  Thus the desire for raised beds.  This year, I just decided to go for it.  Power tools and everything.  

Natalie and I built the plank rectangles.  Matt and our neighbor hauled in a trailer full of compost from our community pile.  All the kids (ours and the neighbors) hauled in sticks and leaves from the yard.  I hauled in countless wheelbarrows full of composted chicken manure/bedding.  We dug and picked weeds and sifted out rocks and filled the beds. 

Then the planting started.  Lettuce, spinach, carrots and zucchini in the first bed.  Sweet peppers and pie pumpkins in the second.  Peas and broccoli in the third.  Cucumbers, parsnips, and turnips in the fourth.  Potatoes were carefully tucked into haystacks.  In between all this, bean teepees were constructed and planted.  Marigold and zinnia seeds were sprinkled into the corners and between crops.  Tomatoes were the last to go in.  They were planted yesterday.

The garden from the other corner.
The green in the front corner there is
my little strawberry patch.
Lots of berries this year!

During all this steady, sweaty work on the garden, I read an article about another MN woman who constructed huge raised beds with a method called Hugelkultur.  I thought it sounded cool and like it would help our very heavy, clay soil.  I didn't know it was a thing.  Like hipster gardening.  I don't want to be a hipster.  I look terrible in skinny jeans.  Good thing I didn't know that when I started.  Anyway...

So I dug a small trench, hauled in some rotten board chunks (plain rough sawed pine leftover from a long ago project.), sticks and lots of old leaves.  

Trench with sticks and wood scraps.

Same trench from farther away to give an idea
of scale.

  

Toss some leaves on top.

Once I had a decent sized mound, I put the excavated dirt back on top.  In went my shrimpy little tomato plants.  Then went on a light layer of hay. (It was what was left from my little potato beds.  Time to hit up my neighbor with horses again.)   Once the plants are a bit taller, I will add some more compost & manure and another layer of hay, just to make the soil thicker.

Shovel the dirt back on.
Also make sure to pick out the unwanted green things that
may start growing again.

I  pinned it all in place with about 15 tomato cages.  Then applied a good amount of water mixed with fish fertilizer.  I put the fish emulsion fertilizer on everything.  Now my garden smells like somebody farted.  I'm told that goes away.

The tomato mound.
With our super fancy scarecrow watching over it.
Ok, not really, she's actually facing the other way.

All I can do now is cross my fingers, say my prayers and hope that these little plants have the decency to grow and be fruitful.  It would be rude of them not to.  

Sugar Pie pumpkins are coming up nicely.  So far, so good.

Every year, I think this is going to be my year.  Bumper crops.  Veggies coming up everywhere.  This year, I really hope I'm right.  Organic heirloom veggies will abound or I'm gonna die trying!

Homestead Happenings

It's officially Spring!  In Minnesota, we call this Mud Season.  This year's snowfall was far below average giving way to a mild, dry Spring.  When I say "dry" it's a relative term.  There's still mud.  But it's not deep mud.  It's not don't-slow-down-on-the-dirt-road-or-you'll-sink-to-your-axles mud.  It's still sloppy, but it has been worse.  Far, far worse.

Matt & Joey sawing up a little dry pole they found on the edge of the yard

Along with the mud comes the cleaning up of sticks that have blown loose in the winter and the season's first campfire.  And preparing the garden for the "last frost".  And ordering/starting seeds.  And this year, tapping maple trees.

Seeds, Glorious Seeds!

I ordered seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds this year.  I have never ordered seeds in the mail before.  Just gone to the fleet supply or Wal-Mart and picked up whatever looked fun.  This year, I did a bit of research and decided to go with heirloom varieties in the garden.  I already had some seed left from last year for peas, cucumbers and summer squash that happened to be heirloom varieties.  I purchased new varieties (for me anyway) of carrots, peppers, beans, tomatoes, and lettuce.  

One raised bed down, seven more to go.  Just add dirt.  And plants.

The other new thing in store for my garden this year is raised beds.  Tilling is really a hassle for us.  We don't have a reliable tiller, the weather has to be just right and we both have to be home to get the job done.  And it never fails that I manage to stir up some long extinct variety of weed seeds and single-handedly  bring them back to a thriving population.  So, I'm trying the raised bed method this year.  We have a pile of old pine boards leftover from when we ordered siding for the house a few years ago (This is plain untreated rough sawed pine).  The lumber is no longer in it's prime, but it will get the job done for now.  Natalie and I built the first one last weekend.  We have several more to go, but we've got a start.

Matt putting in the final tap.

Another First for our little homestead is the tapping of maple trees.  Matt and Natalie had been talking about it and he told her that his dad used to tap trees when he was a kid.  So, off to Grandpa's house they went for a hand drill and his homemade taps.  My job was to sort through the recycling and find enough empty milk jugs to put under the taps.  Once we had everything ready to go, they went out and got started.  The neighbors were coming over for the afternoon and soon enough, Matt had all five of the kids (our two plus the three neighbor girls) following him around like he had magic powers.  We have collected about three and a half gallons of sap in our first 24 hours.  I am saving it in my big stock pots in the shed until the weekend and we'll try cooking it down.  Frankly, I have no idea what I'm doing on this.  I'm just along for the ride.  But if the kids want to tap trees, then we'll follow the process to the finish.  We probably will get very little if any syrup, but the kids (and I) will learn another lesson in how to make something.  So, here goes nothing!  Wish us luck!  If you have any insight on this, please share in the comments section.

Random chicken shot.  They're happy to see bare ground too!

Happy Spring!

Gardening, Inspired by Gloria

I've been embracing my inner Gloria Dump lately. ( In case that name doesn't ring a bell for you, she's a character in one of my favorite children's books, "Because of Winn-Dixie" by Kate DiCamillo.  If you haven't read it or even watched the movie, I highly recommend it.  Anyway, Gloria Dump is a lady who has a wild overgrown garden full of everything.)  A few Sundays ago, we were working in the yard (one of my favorite things), tilling up some rough spots and planting grass seed.  While we had the tiller out, I asked Matt to please make a pass along the edge of the chicken coop.  The ground is so packed from foot traffic right there and its too shady for grass to grow, so on a whim, I made a little shade garden.

My masterpiece

It's really not much, but to me it was a really big deal.  Not because I divided some shade perennials that were already growing and moved them, but because I, by my own self, used power tools to make a wooden border around my little bed.  Yep, I made three cuts with a circular saw.  My first ever.  Turns out it's not so hard or scary.  Matt may regret teaching me how to work this particular device at some point in the future, Lord knows what I'll come up with...

So, anyway, it's just a little three sided box made out of some old rough sawed pine (leftover siding boards from our house) that I cut and screwed together to keep feet of all sizes away from the edge of the chicken coop.  It is filled with hostas, bleeding hearts and violets.  The plants are a bit droopy in the picture because I had just moved them and because the bleeding hearts are already done for the year.  I found the top to an old chicken waterer and felt that it needed to take up residence in my chicken coop garden.  The other thing in there is a white metal dishpan/shallow bucket thing with some big rocks in it.  All this stuff was just laying around, so I spent zero dollars to make my chicken coop just a little jazzier.  Someday, I'd love to have it be all spiffed up with flowers and art and neat stuff like that.  I feel like I'm one step closer to the coop of my dreams.  (I know, cough crazy lady cough).

The ladies wondering what all the commotion is.

My other project of the day was to do something with this great old enamelware dishpan I got for my birthday.  I love old enamelware.  It reminds me of my grandma.  This dishpan looked like the perfect vessel for growing something in.  That's the beauty of containers, I can either cook in them or grow something in them.  My two favorite things. :)

A good place for a gnome nap.

As it happens I was also working on spiffing up another container garden I have next to my clotheslines.  This little dishpan fits just perfect right underneath it.  Being a shallow container, I wanted it to go somewhere shady so I don't have to water it every 30 minutes.  So, I needed more shade plants.  Small shade plants.  Out came my trusty trowel.  We went around the hosta beds to see what was growing in with them.  I found a really neat vine, which I'm sure is some kind of weed, but I think it's pretty.  There were also violets and some red clover.  Oh and some moss.  Matt hates moss.  His dad hates violets.  They think they're a pain and they ruin the lawn.  I think violets are pretty and moss is so soft to walk on.  So, I was a renegade and purposely cultivated moss and violets.  To some, my little  container probably looks like a rusty old bucket of weeds.  To my inner Gloria Dump, it is just right.  Besides, if the plants freeze out this winter, I'm not out anything.

Now that you've seen my creations and inspirations, what makes your garden grow?

"Weeds are flowers too...Once you get to know them"  -AA Milne

Hello Sunshine!

As I mentioned in my last post, we've been spending more time outside now that the weather is nice.  These mild, sunny days seem like a reward for making it through the long snowy winter.

The seeds Natalie and I planted a few months ago have done remarkably well.  As in, they GREW!  This has never happened for me before.  A few days ago, I moved them out to a makeshift cold frame to harden off.  Some of the biggest ones were ready to plant, so they went into Natalie's little barrel garden.  The big garden isn't ready yet.

Natalie's little barrel garden with grape tomatoes,
cucumbers, peppers, nasturtiums , zinnias and creeping  jenny (on the left).

The chicks are completely feathered out and have moved into the coop with the big chickens.  Egg production is up.  Probably as high as we've ever had.  We've been getting about  6-8 eggs every day and we have twelve adult hens.  I'm pretty sure that my dear little Peg doesn't lay anymore, so I figure eleven layers.  Some of them are pretty old too. So, not too bad.

Our little ladies peeking out into the yard.  The one in front is a Rhode Island  Red
and the stripey one is a Marans.  They are roughly half grown.

The flowers are coming up.   A cluster of yellow mini daffodils bloomed all last week, and the regular daffodils are in bloom at the moment and I think there will be bleeding hearts very soon.  The real treat is going to be when the crab apples and lilacs bloom.  They make the whole neighborhood smell wonderful.

I even found ants already hard at work on peony buds this morning.  I love peonies.  Maybe even as much as  Matt loves them, and I'm so happy to have them again after so long.  (We used to have peonies growing all along the side of the house and they got ruined by a careless contractor).

If you look closely, you can see tiny red ants working their way around the bud.  Yay, peonies!