Learning to garden, preserve fruits and vegetables, cure meats, raise animals and homestead in Vermont
Planting bulbs is like a lot of gardening; an exercise in hope, planning and patience. Last fall we added a bunch more tulip, daffodil and some other bulbs to the front beds along our walkway. Despite the chickens deciding that is a prime digging area and eating some of the leaves, we are now at just about peak bloom and it’s pretty cool.
Starting note: I know I’ve been negligent at updating this site lately, but hoping to get back into it. Lot’s of stuff going on at the homestead.
We are finally expanding our menagerie of animals here beyond chickens. We actually planned to get ducks last year and then never got to it. I had a duck coop already built a year or so ago.
Last Saturday we picked up six day old Ancona ducklings from a local breeder. Ancona ducks are considered Critical on The Livestock Conservancy breed list and we are fortunate to have some breeders here in Vermont trying to grow the breed numbers. I’m still not sure how many we’ll end up raising, although the idea of breeding a critical breed is intriguing to me. For now we will end up keeping one drake and all the females from this group of 6. The other drakes will end up being delicious dinner at some point. Seems counter intuitive, but part of building a breed is finding more people to raise them for typical use (eggs, meat, pest control, etc.).
Here they are at almost a week old. Growing insanely fast already.
When we first bought our place, there were just some very overgrown stepping stones leading from the side of the porch to the driveway. Not a very inviting welcome to our home.
One of the first things we did in the fall was to start a small bed next to the house and plant some bulbs. But that was really just a temporary measure and we really wanted something much more in that space. Our landscape design was able to flesh out some additional ideas and we ended up with a walkway going between two flower beds. The intention is to eventually have a full season flowering area of mostly perennials, with some annuals mixed in. This year it is mostly annuals still, but we are starting to get some perennials and also self-seeding flowers into the space.
So basically we were starting from here. The bed against the house was already there, but this is before anything is really showing up yet, like the tulips or daffodils. Here is the space cleared of grass and ready to begin.
Here I’ve laid out some stones just to get some ideas and started digging the trench for the walkway.
When we were having the excavation done, I got some help ripping up the sod at the end of the walkway next to the driveway. We used some larger stone as a base, then a bit of geotextile fabric and then some crushed rock. Here is the walkway taking shape.
And mostly finished, looking from off the porch. You can see some tulips are now making an appearance. This part was finished around May 22nd.
Since then we have loaded up the beds with mulch and planted a bunch of stuff. So here is what it looks like today. Quite a transformation.
I thought it would be fun to start a short little series of before and after shots of various parts of our property. Unfortunately, I don’t have good before shots for everything. But I have some cool ones to compare.
Here is the first one, a shot from our back deck looking back over the northwest corner of our property. Not the most interesting one, but some cool things happening never the less.
The before shot does have a cool rainbow going for it.
Here is the after shot, taken yesterday.
Biggest impact change is the solar panels of course. You can also see some hop poles along the edge of the yard. The t-posts in the back corner are where the raspberries are planted. We moved our raised beds over to this side of the garden and added a few. Btw, the gas grill is relatively new too. After many years of being a charcoal only purist, I finally gave in to the convenience that is a gas grill. Don’t worry, still using charcoal to grill and smoke stuff some of the time.
After a very nice May for the most part, June has been nothing but rain. Sometimes terrible torrential downpours, sometimes just annoying bursts here and there to ruin the day. I hate to complain about water when other parts of the country are dry, but my plants are drowning over here. It’s a good thing we put in the swales in May or it would be even worse.
In spite of all that, we are somehow getting our first crop of the sweetest strawberries we could hope for.
Don’t blink, you’ll miss them.
At least the cooler weather plants like it. The greens are going nuts.
Onions seem much happier in a raised bed than in the garden, to no one’s great surprise.
The hops have already made it nearly to the first wooden support.
The fifteen raspberry plants all made it and are getting plenty of leaves now. Here are 10 of them, they are even bigger today.
And finally a view of the orchard, where all of the trees seem to be relatively happy so far and surviving the onslaught of water.
Current state of some pumpkin, cucumber and squash seedlings, automatically posted from my Raspberry Pi 2
Edit: As you can see, the grow rack is emptying out. Everything is moved to the greenhouse now, so time to find something else to time lapse.
Current state of some pumpkin, cucumber and squash seedlings, automatically posted from my Raspberry Pi 2 
Current state of some pumpkin, cucumber and squash seedlings, automatically posted from my Raspberry Pi 2 
Current state of some seedlings, automatically posted from my Raspberry Pi 2 
Current state of some pumpkin, cucumber and squash seedlings, automatically posted from my Raspberry Pi 2 