Uphill

May 22, 2015Leave a comment

I stated planting my hugel mounds. It felt and looked weird. It wasn’t clean bare soil, just chopped down cover crop. It is normal to plant in tilled bare soil, but I haven’t tilled at all this year. I’ve planted in soil that was mulched with leaves over the winter, soil bare after the chickens had scratched for a few weeks, tucked in plants next to existing ones, planted through sheet mulch and now hugel mounds with a chop and drop cover crop. I’m not in a hurry to get out the tiller: everything I did was much simpler.

It didn’t feel wrong. In some ways it felt and looked more right than what we normally do. So often in gardening we are trying to move against succession. We try to maintain sterile mono cultures of annual plants, where nature wants to progress into perennials. Nature avoids bare soil and monoculture, so I’m avoiding it in my own garden as well.

I might be stuck with small unproductive plants and weeds come summer. The rain and hail that has been pounding us since I planted isn’t helping either. But if it fails, I’ll just adjust my system. But for now I’m enjoying the experiment. And wondering why in the world I own a tiller.

Photo Dump

May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Guinea pigs are not good baby toys

Look who’s sitting by himself!

This is how my kids feel about peanut butter playdough.

Playing the floor is lava for Family Home Evening

My hot husband building walls

Having fun at the fine arts center

Eating a tiny ice cream cone with a tiny spoon.

Tower of cars

Haphazard

May 15, 2015Leave a comment

The irises actually bloomed for the first time since we moved in. They’ve been neglected in the back corner of the garden. I think they are probably like 30 years old. Irises are good at surviving neglect. But not necessarily blooming through it. So I moved some this year.
iris

I tried something new this year. Instead of seeding all my plants in nice little rows, I seeded everything together. It was a good way to get rid of old seeds, and I’ve got a lot coming up. But if I were to do it again, I think I would do it a little differently and only seed the things together that I wanted primary for greens. Others, like carrots and beets that need better thinning, would be seeded separately so I could keep a better eye on it.

The hugelkultur mounds are about ready for planting. The cover crop started to flower, so I started cutting it back. My transplants are hardening off, and I’ll plant them in a couple days.

The herb spiral has been planted. A bit haphazardly. I’m pretty good at making planting plans for others, but haven’t got around to do it for myself. this whole spring I’ve just been randomly planting things, and I’m starting to realized a planting plan might make more sense.

Soccer

May 15, 2015Leave a comment

We’ve signed PB up for a lot of activities. Not because I want to do a lot of activities, but just trying to find something he likes. We’ve done t-ball, that was mildly okay, swim lesson that were decent but uneventful, karate that he tolerated but never liked, and yoga that was also a flop. So finally, we enrolled him in soccer.

And he liked soccer. Hooray! The first few games he played goalie, even though there isn’t a formal one. Then he got a little better and started to score lots of points. It was the first activity that he decided to do by himself at home too.

Spring

May 5, 20151 Comment

I love spring weather. The kids have been spending a lot of time outside, and it makes my life easier.

This kid is cute and sweet…but annoying. He rolls onto his tummy and gets stuck and cries. He tries to get a toy into his mouth and can’t and cries. And try to read a book with him, and he freaks out. He wants to be older than he is and gets frustrated all the time.

Now

May 1, 2015Leave a comment

I’ve been caught up in a horrible trap of worry and stress. I have more to do than I can do. I do like being busy, but lately I’ve been especially overwhelmed with everything. And because of it I haven’t been enjoying life at all. I’ve known I should just live now and not worry about the past and future, but I had a hard time actually doing that.

I think when I have desires to improve, I have to let them work inside of me for awhile. What starts as a desire is often not met for a while: life stays the same. Even when I try my hardest, change doesn’t happen at the speed I want. My self-control is faulty. But eventually in His timing, the Lord blesses me with change. Change is always gradual, and lasting change only happens through Christ. Lately, the Lord blessed me with a better ability to live in the moment, and by doing so my life is beautiful.

bloom

I can enjoy what I’m doing, instead of getting stressed by all the tasks to come. I’m not as distracted because I’m not as stressed. I’ve been better at putting things aside and not worrying how I’m going to get everything done, but just doing my best. I know sometimes that means things won’t get done, but if I’m prioritizing I also know the important ones will. I’m not worrying about micromanaging my whole schedule: instead I do the best I can right in this moment. All we have is right now anyway.

Remodel Video 1

April 29, 2015Leave a comment

In order to show the progress we are making with out home remodel, I decided to go ahead a take some videos. Here is a before/during shot of the stairs:

We lowered them down just enough so that my husband doesn’t hit his head. In the meantime, we had this lovely large hole:

Boys

April 24, 20152 Comments

At least some of the garden is thriving

April 21, 2015Leave a comment

I haven’t been paying attention much to the garden. Occasionally I will realize I’ve fallen behind and spend a couple of hours weeding and planting seeds to get caught up. But the garden often just looks like a bunch of projects that I don’t have time for. So today is a celebration of what I have done and what is going well in the garden. No pictures of piles that need to be dealt with, noxious weeds to pull, or projects that I want to do later.

Chickens are just fun. Except when I found one of them dead in the coop. No apparent cause, just very disturbing. At least we never really decided on a name for her.

My little clover patch is still doing great, even without any irrigation. I’m sure once we get the water turn and start irrigating it a bit more it will start to grow even more. Usually it probably would be fine, but this spring has been dry minus one sporadic snow storm.

The sheet mulch in the front yard is still great. (Not the picture. I lost one of my cameras and the one I used for this photo has a scratched lens.) No weeds. It is probably the closest I could get to no maintenance. It has been the one method I throw at everyone and is my current answer to everyone’s frustrations of garden. Hate the weeds? Sheet mulch. Don’t have time or money? Sheet mulch.

This is my current experiment. The peas and lettuce were planted purposely. And then I threw down a lot of seed for all the other spring crops I wanted, just sprinkled it everywhere all together. The plan is to thin it out as it starts to grow and eat what I thin as sprouts.

It’s starting to come up, so I should get at least something here.

The cover crop on the swales/hugel mounds is doing well. In just a few weeds I’ll chop and drop and plant my summer crops here.

I’ve got a lot of biennials that are starting to flower–kale, onions, and parsley. It’s not usual to let any of these plant keep going until they flower, but they all overwintered for me well. I’ve started planting flowers and herbs to take over when these guys are done.

Lost

April 16, 2015Leave a comment

Baby H is an overachiever. He is super close to sitting up unassisted and he rolled over from back to tummy.

My camera is missing. Luckily it only had a few pictures from Easter. I’m hoping it will turn up somewhere. In the meantime, here is a dump of all my Instagram pictures. (My username is walkliz if interested).