Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
Soil is a complex web of life with billions of living organisms operating within its structure. Vegetables require a lot of nutrients to grow and thrive, which means they often deplete the soil over time. Early spring is the perfect time to check the health of our soil and get it into shape before planting. We moved back into our Portland homestead in December and
It is officially spring, but someone needs to update Portland of that fact. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I awoke to snow last week! It’s a rare occurrence to have snow in Portland at all, let alone this late in the year. The snow is not great news for early flowering crops. Ornamental flowers like daffodils and tulips can hang on, but early crops
Today is the first day of spring and the garden waits for no one! Juggling a newborn can easily put a cramp in gardening productivity, but gardening isn’t just a hobby for me. It is where we get a significant part of the food that ends up on our table. The “stead” part of having a homestead means inside and out of our home is
What is springtime through the senses of a newborn? Juniper is a tender two weeks old, so I’m guessing most of it is lost on her. She’s focused on discovering the taste of milk, the smell of momma, the feeling of daddy’s freshly shaven cheek. Nevertheless, spring is sprung and I have been introducing her to its wonders. One of my favorite early flowering ornamental
In our series of room facelifts for our tiny house, we did some simple changes to our kitchen as well. This room functions as a kitchen and dining space and is luckily one of the larger rooms in our house. Before the kitchen had a funky light hanging over the dining area from Ikea, which has since died of unknown causes. We were repurposing a
We welcomed our baby girl into the world on Leap Day! Her name is Juniper Carol Wilkinson and we call her Junebug as a nickname. She weighs 6 lbs 8 oz and everyone is healthy and recovering well. My labor went as smoothly as we planned. I woke up at about 1:30 am with contractions I couldn’t sleep through. As things progressed, I slept or
Since returning to our Portland homestead, we have turned our winter focus inside to making our tiny house feel as comfortable and space-efficient as possible. We started with our narrow bathroom and Bug’s nursery. Our nesting has spread to our bedroom now as well. Our poor bedroom has a few challenges. Storage is an issue, as we only have one tiny closet. We also needed
There are some long nights ahead of us with the coming arrival of our baby. Those nights will be spent sitting up in bed, half awake, nursing our little girl. We have never had a proper bedframe, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone by making a headboard that frames the bed and provides some comfort sitting up on those long nights.
Flowering bulbs are my favorite way to add color to the garden. They take just a few minutes to plant, need very little maintenance and multiple every year making them a small investment in your garden’s future. After a couple years away from our homestead, the bulbs in our garden have gotten crowded! The best time to divide spring flowering bulbs is probably in the
We have three new additions to our homestead! No, the baby is not one of them – yet. This past weekend we purchased three new, bareroot fruit trees to fill in some holes in our garden. Nothing makes me happier than adding new, exciting plants to our food forest. We lost two fruit trees during the two years we rented our house, so it was
