One of the funnest memories of my grandparents’ farm was feeding fish from the damn with Grandpa Ralph. He would take a bucket of fish food to the water’s edge and let us toss handfuls into the pond until fish gathered all around. It was basically a religion. Those fish knew him and knew what was coming when he was …
Chicken Coop, Phase 2 – The Rooftop Strawberry Patch
First off – I have no perception that we are sane people. This chicken coop is completely out of hand. That being said, it just got more awesome. As we completed Phase 1 of building the coop, Aaron and I talked about putting a roof on the chicken run. We considered a basic tin roof. We talked about trying to continue …
Dinner on the Deck
When we moved into our Kansas City house, we planned everything around dinners with family. We filled the huge dining room with a massive table and surrounded it with 10 chairs. To celebrate our marriage, we picked table settings for 12. We combined all of our cooking and serving ware into the cabinets and loaded the hall closet with board …
Our Great Big Dandelion Jelly Experiment
With the garden in the ground, we’re itching for something to harvest. Naturally, there’s very little ready for picking aside from a cluster of blue Irises and thousands of dandelions. Having seen Facebook friends post about dandelion jelly over the past few years, an idea came to mind. I asked around and ended up with this recipe for our very …
Day 48: Coronavirus Quarantine
Everything continues to be very odd. The most cliché phrases currently playing on repeat include references to “normal” – “the new normal,” “going back to normal” and “nothing will every be normal again.” To be honest, it was time for a change. I do love that the stay-at-home orders have spotlighted technology and remote work as valuable resources for companies. These …
Harvesters Community Food Network
Between the animals and the tot, Aaron and I have found ourselves in a pretty smooth morning routine. Isai wakes us up to watch the sunrise out of our bedroom window. After a diaper change and some chatter, we make coffee, turn on Fox4 local morning news and laugh at the dogs sprinting across the pasture to wake up the …
Garden Planning and Planting 2020
I’ve had quite the struggle figuring out how to document what we’re doing in the garden this year. Part of the reason I started blogging about the farm is to have an ongoing record of the work we’ve done and how we did it. My hope is that we can uncover what works (and consequently, what doesn’t) so that we …
Sow Many Seeds
The existence of the greenhouse inspired some intense compulsive seed buying in the doldrums of winter. As a result, I’ve been swimming in seed packets littering every surface of the greenhouse, garage and garden shed. With seeds and transplants making their way into the ground, it feels important that I should finally document exactly what we’re planting here. Vegetables Eden …
The North Garden is Planted – Mostly
We’ve spent a lot of time covered in dirt lately. Over the weekend, Aaron’s mom Anna and Aunt Brenda popped by the house to help plant the North garden. The undertaking was a bit more than any of us fully anticipated. Removing starts from their Winstrip trays and transferring them into the ground was certainly messier than we expected. Then, …
This Week on the Farm: April 20-26, 2020
This week’s cold snap was for the birds. We spent the weekdays cooped up in the house and snuggling under warm blankets. I continued to work from home while keeping my fingers crossed that all of the plants in the ground could survive the chill. So far, so good. The weekend, though, has brought us a bit more sun and …