Prepping Our Square Foot Garden Site

This past weekend we took our first steps toward getting the garden ready. The first goal was to designate a location and determine which style of gardening we would opt for (we chose Square Foot gardening for the first attempt). This afternoon I posted a bit about the preparation process on my weekly update at Farm Dreams (see the excerpt below and continue reading at the FD site).

Before and After Patio/Garden Area

This weekend we got busy laying out the garden for the two of us. We are planting ~50% more than we think we will need so that one of two things happens. Either 1.) We get too much for us, and our neighbors, friends and animals get the extras, or 2.) We still don't get enough and we sadly head back to the grocery store for food like we're doing now.

What's our plan for the garden? For our first attempt at gardening we're planning a series of square foot gardens that surround a patio that we unearthed over the weekend. When we first moved to the farm there was a big area covered in gravel with a small fire pit in the middle (see photo above). Mounds of sod encroached from the yard on the periphery. We never really paid attention to that area, to be honest. It was outside of the fenced patio and kind of in no man's land. I just figured we'd dig out the gravel one day when we had some time and grass would grow back. Eventually it would just look like the rest of the yard.  But last week Sweetbreads started digging up the gravel and low and behold there's a big concrete pad underneath. 

Continue Reading at Farm Dreams

Kitchen Witchery: Dandelion Salve

Summer seems to have come quite early to Tennessee this year. Everything has greened up and its been in the 80's here for the past few weeks! The sunshine has been lavish and the goats are loving the tender new leaves cropping up everywhere... 

The super warm weather has made us kick into high gear, trying to get the garden and everything else under the sun done before it's "too late" and we starve, or eat more WallMart produce (I think we'd starve). This week, this has meant shoveling lots of gravel (fun!). At some point in time, someone here was much enamoured of gravel, as evidenced by its prolific abundance in every imaginable nook and crany. Covering the patio (why?), embedded in weeds and grass as an abstract walkway accented by truck mud flaps (huh?), piled against one side of the house so that the storm water drains right into our crawl space...  

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The Beginnings of a Tennessee Goat Herd, From Tennessee

When we came to the farm a month ago it was the perfect time to be looking for some milking does and their baby goat kids. Most goats are bred to have kids in the Feb/March/April time frame, so we started contacting people in December and January about availability for March. Our mission was to find some milking does and kids that we thought would thrive on our farm.

Our first doeling, Sabine.

There's a lot that goes into the beginnings of a herd, so I’ll talk about a few of them in no particular order. One of our primary hopes was to find goats from Tennessee (or at a minimum from the South.) By focusing on goats in TN we were hoping to find animals acclimated to our climate, and our parasites. It’s stressful enough to move an animal from one location to another, let alone take it to an entirely different climate, so we tried to keep our animal purchases local. If a goat has lived in our climate previously then it’ll have a better chance at surviving in our climate in the future. It can get hot and humid in TN, which is different from a state like Vermont or Oregon. It didn’t make a lot of sense to us to seek out goats from that far away if we could source them locally. As we expand the herd this may be a more difficult task (and we may want to expand our genetics eventually), but we hope we to keep our livestock purchases as local as possible.

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