Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
Thanksgiving falls at a weird time in my graduate school schedule. It’s always the week before our final studio design review, so I’m cranking on drawings when most people are pouring over holiday recipes. The picture below is the world I live in right now: sketches, trace paper, tea and pomegranates (a little treat to keep me in my seat working). The last few years
In late fall and winter, you may start to notice a lack of anything looking alive in your landscape. The trees lose their leaves and there’s nothing left behind but a skeleton of plantings. That is when you know you need more “evergreen structure” – something to give life to your garden year round. Here is a plant that may just solve multiple problems for
It has been three years since my grandpa passed away and it always seems harder at this time of year. He passed in December, but those late fall months were the hardest for us all. We always talked about our gardens during our visits. In those last few months, it was almost exclusively what we talked about. It was easier to talk about the purple
“I can resist anything but temptation.” -Oscar Wilde This became the theme of my weekend, for better or worse. I tried hard to sit at my desk focusing on homework while Jay worked on tidying up the backyard. Have you ever seen those old psychology experiments that tested the ability of little kids to resist eating a mashmallow? It was kind of like that. Of
What a weekend! It was equal parts active and hibernating with a double scoop of food lovin’. This big baby in my belly, who we’re calling Bug, went with me to yoga. Of course you have to follow up exercise with a huge brunch – hey, I don’t make the rules. I ate my entire plate of biscuits and gravy, plus half of Jay’s stack
Let’s be honest: my heart is planted in my Portland garden. It has been tough to be away for the last couple years temporarily living in Eugene while I work on my masters of landscape architecture degree. I have found a few places to make me feel at home-ish here in Eugene, but I have never stopped pining for my “real” home. I have been
The chickens are looking a bit shaggy and disheveled, which means it’s that time of year: molting time. Molting is the process chickens go through of shedding feathers and replacing them with a new, fluffy coat. They are never completely featherless, but rather they lose feathers and regrow them in patches. The temperatures dipping are a signal to the girls that winter is around the
I’ve been keeping chickens for several years now and have always counted myself lucky that I never had a run in with mites. Up until this summer, I had never lost a member of our flock to an animal attack. Losing one of our ducks to a raccoon earlier this summer was the first sign that my excellent track record was about to hit some
Recently I had the pleasure of visiting the backyard of Brian and Tara, thirty-something parents who just started keeping chickens. They used the standard sized chicken coop plans from my book Modern Homestead to come up with a variation that would work for their backyard. It was really cool to see what a basic plan and a little imagination can come up with. The modifications
The trees are telling us that autumn is upon us! I wanted to share a few of my favorite ornamental trees that put on a great, early fall show. They are not edible, but could still have a place on the modern homestead along streets and driveways, where you don’t want fruit falling. The native trees will offer some value to wildlife and others are
