Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
Portland’s largest farmers market will be opening for the season tomorrow! I love this downtown market, near Portland State University along the park blocks. It is open from 8:30am to 2:00 in the afternoon. The farmers market near me, the Lents International farmers market, won’t be open until June. It is much smaller and less exciting than the downtown one on Saturdays, but this year
Strange things are afoot in my backyard. And front yard. First: the weather. The temperature has been dropping here, close to or at freezing some nights. Strange for Portland in April. This evening I was walking through the backyard feeling very lucky that I came up with my raised bed cloche things right when the weather turned sour – hopefully those lettuce, spinach, and collards
We adopted our cat, Lionel, from the Oregon Humane Society a couple years ago. OHS is a wonderful organization with some of the highest adoption rates in the country and our cat has been a wonderful addition to our home. I have never had a cat and a garden before though, and sometimes that combination can prove frustrating. Although he spends most of his time
The weather in Portland has been very Spring-like over the last several weeks, but sure enough the winter weather has swept back through with one final blow. Snow, hail, and near-freezing temperatures decided to take another run through town and looks like they will hang around for a few more days. What I call “Portland’s false Spring” has come to an end. Eventually the temperature
It’s time to introduce the baby chicks to our viewing audience. I haven’t decided on any names, but then I am not really sure I should. I am already starting to get attached to these young chicks I am planning on adopting out, so naming them probably isn’t a great idea. But here they are one at a time: Chick #1 Breed: Araucana Gender: Straight
There are some major projects going on in the backyard right now! Jay is building me an 8′ x 8′ four-post trellis for my hardy kiwis to grow up – aren’t I a lucky girl? He spent the whole weekend on the project: gathering the materials from multiple lumber yards, measuring off the area, digging out the post holes, and busting up the concrete walkway.
I crept into our kitchen this morning to greet our five little Easter gifts: baby chicks! I know, I know. I already have my three urban chickens clucking away outside in my coop. The plan with these new additions is to raise them until they are old enough to move outside, and then adopt them out to a good urban chicken home. I get “chick
It’s about 7:30 pm and the light is still fading. When I got home from work, the sun was still bright enough for a stroll through the garden. I checked the chicken coop and Winnie laid her first egg (the pink one). Now all three girls are laying and it was the first three egg day of the season! Spring has arrived and we are
This is a new venture for me: growing potatoes in tires. I read about this initially on this Ed Hume website and became intrigued. Looking back, I must have meant to just research growing potatoes in general and somehow discovered the concept of using old tires to do it. It intrigues me for a couple reasons. First, it is one step better than recycling. The
I spent my Sunday afternoon at the downtown Powell’s bookstore and came away with a couple new and exciting additions to my book collection. As I went in search of the permaculture books in the gardening section, I realized there is a whole new addition in the area called “Sustainable Living”. I just about screamed in joy at this discovery! It’s a whole aisle of
