A new home and yard for me means a lot of new experiences and experiments. 

We moved the little chickens in with the big chickens. It involved letting them free range together, moving the brooder box close by the coop, and ultimately just throwing them all together. It was relatively peaceful actually…they still maintain two separate flocks, but they are pretty nice to each other and I never had any injuries. I think I worried more than I needed too.

I also moved the compost pile into the chicken coop. They are excellent compost turners. Although I don’t really enough material to make lots of compost the chickens are great at making branches, chicken scraps, grass clippings and even a dead bird disappear. The chickens have also turned out to be the best puncture vine control. We move our coop around, and when it is over a puncture vine patch they will eat it gone in a couple of days and it stays gone.

In the spring, I bought a bag of clover seed and inoculum. One day as I was turning on the flood irrigation, I thought why not just throw down the seed and inocolum right now, while the water was flowing, and see what happens. So I hand broadcast the clover seed pretty densely and just basically dumped the inoclum into the start of the irrigation water. The area was a pretty bare patch of mown weeds, mostly winter annuals. All I did to help the clover germinate was turn on the flood irrigation when we had our turn, twice a week. Because it was irrigated, plenty of plants grew, and happily much of the clover. After mowing it once, the clover has become even more vigorous and I think by next year it will have completely taken over. Fifteen minutes was all it took to establish a small patch of clover, and I think I will replicated the process over a broader area next year.

In our side area, we had a bunch of Bridal Wreath Spireas. I mentioned before that we had cut them back to the ground. I was unsure if they would come back. But they’ve come back just fine, even without consistent irrigation. They look so much better than they did, I’m glad we went for it and hacked them back.

The last little experiment was moving our dryer. It was inside and had a long vent line. The dryer worked horribly, and I was pretty sure it was because of the vent line, even after I cleaned it out. My bright idea was to just move the dryer outside on our back patio. My husband wired up a new plug and we moved it. It now takes about half the time it did to dry clothes. In the winter we plan to move it back inside, but also vent inside.

The unattractive but functional back patio complete with dryer.

We are still in the thick of many projects in our garden, and our front yard might look a bit like a construction zone right now. A few things haven’t worked so well–free ranging the chickens in the evening has meant of decrease of of tomato crop and no melons this year. Most of my squash died from an unknown cause. There are weeds everywhere. But we’ve had plenty of things go right as well.