The Raised Beds

Here are the promised photos. You’ll have to visit my flickr to see the notes on the photo of the entire spread of the yard garden.

More photos in a couple days of bunnies, and goats and progress on the goat fencing that is getting finished tomorrow since storms rolled through today.

Backyard Bounty

There is more food in your backyard-even if you don’t plant a garden, and provided you have herbicide and pesticided the crap out of your environment-than you may realize. In the three years that this has been our home, I have successfully identified over 50 edibles growing in the forest and grassy spaces-free of chemicals, nurtured by Mother Nature Herself.

In the video in the last post I mentioned these things: Dandelions, Sorrel, Nettle, New Jersey Tea (Buckthorn) and Violets. Here are some links to some great sites offering info on the crafting, foraging and eating of the delish bounty the EARTH provides free of charge! How is that for frugal living?

The University of Minnesota

Abundantly Wild

Do It Green

Edible Plants

Those are just a couple of sites. If you did a Google search, I am sure that you can come up with any number of sites, and you can cater the search to your state or region of the country. In the next couple of weeks, the fiddle head ferns shall appear and boy oh boy are they going to be tasty!

Eat your weeds!

A short video on a few nearby wild edibles. Next post I’ll have a few recipes and some great wild harvest sites.

MAKE-OVER!!!

You’ll notice that the previous posts have been removed. I am giving this blog a makeover. As Rob and I are both at home working, doing our farm building, self sustaining action, etc. this blog is going to chronicle our weekly, sometimes daily goings on in building our life in the manner we see the world around us. I’ll be posting about everything from our rabbit adventures, our organic market gardens, the chicks I have hatching as I type this post, kids growing up in the forest, butchering animals, foraging for wild foods (we have an abundance in our forests!) frugal living in our menus, etc. etc. I may even throw in a video or two from time to time. Such as this afternoon. I am going out today to take video of our 5 rabbits to introduce them to you, take you on a tour of the chicken coop, a bit of video of Rob putting in the raised beds and a bit of video of the chicks we hatched from our birds.

A little about our chickens. So far the birds we have procured have been gotten for free off of Freecycle from a lady who needed to be rid of them as she couldn’t take care of them anymore. There were 2 that had been purchased for $5 each from a local organic farmer and one hen that I had rescued from a fellow farmgirl. So all told our flock consisted of 18. After one has been butchered and 2 escaped and got eaten by someone else, now 15 remain. Eggs have been gathered from them to hatch in still air incubators and some have been left to be hen hatched. So far 4 have hatched. One pipped but died so there could have been 5. I think there are 6 more of our birds to hatch out.

So after getting into the hatching game, a bug seriously bit us both. Online I ventured to find some pure breeds. I ended up getting Plymouth Barred Rock, Red Dorking Bantam, Silkies, Buttercups and Black Langshans. Those eggs are all still in the incubators and all here are thrilled for them to hatch. As they are our pure breeds, we plan to build separate living spaces for them from our mutt chickens. Three of our mutt chickens, a roo and 2 hens are going as homewarming gifts to some friends of ours who just put up and moved into a tipi. Sort of a get you started small flock.

The pure breeds that had been chosen were chosen because of their beautiful show qualities, some of them are pretty docile and some of them are super broody. All are good meat and egg birds, sans the bantams as they have tiny eggs.

So join us on our frugal life adventure! Feel free to leave comments, opinions, recommendations, etc. If you have a frugal living, farm living, organic living blog, a pagan farm blog, business or whathaveyou, let me know and I’ll link it.

One last venture for our farm life that I am working on is a podcast of farm living. That is a few weeks out yet though….but keep your eyes and ears open!

Spring is here and there is a lot to do….off to make a couple of videos for your enjoyment!!