Going from chilly, rain to intense heat has been hard on me. And on my plants.
In my last update, I wrote about harvesting our pak choy this week. I had meal plans and ideas lined up in expectation for it’s bounty. Unfortunately, the heat and sun caused them to bolt along with most of our freshly transplanted broccoli. Once members of the brassica family produce flowers, they become extremely bitter and aren’t palatable.
Animals
Temperatures above 80 F cause bucks (male rabbits) to become sterile. We had a brief window of fertility this spring that we were able to breed both of our female rabbits once, but if this heat continues, we will likely not have any more kits until fall.
This is another reason why biodiversity is so important when running a small scale homestead (honestly, it’s not just for small scale farms, but the benefits can be applied to larger farms as well).
If we are not able to breed our rabbits again, we will be covered with our meat birds and the pigs we will harvest this fall.
Garden
The silver lining of the pak choy being gone from the garden, there is now room for more cabbage to be planted. The loss of the cooler weather crops wasn’t a full waste, as the goats and chickens thoroughly enjoyed their fresh treats.
Nothing better than turning a ‘failure’ into fresh milk and eggs!
“He is your constant source of stability;
He abundantly provides safety and great wisdom;
He gives all of this to those who fear Him.”
Isaiah 33:6
It’s so easy with gardening (and in life) to fall into dark thoughts of discouragement or even to give up when roadblocks come along. But the beauty of the garden allows us to dig deeper to find solutions and even turn those roadblocks into a source of abundance.
Woodchips
Some sort of mulching material is vital to a Back to Eden garden. But we don’t always use the mulch for the garden, it lines our chicken run and coop, and will hopefully be used in the goat pen.
Sure, we could purchase bedding from a store, but the wood chips are free and can be used in the future (filled with manure) for the garden as an even more rich source of nutrients for next year’s plants.
Today, we started receiving our first loads of wood chips of the season and they arrived just in time for us to clean out the chicken coop.
The more green material mixed into your mulch, the better. Green, nitrogen rich material mixed with the brown carbonous portions aid in breaking down the chips to feed your soil. Adding carbon-heavy ingredients to areas heavily burdened with manure aids in keeping smells down as well.
Landscaping
During the boy’s nap time, I got some work done to the landscaping at the front of our house. It’s been sorely neglected over the past years. At one point, we had several beautiful, full rosebushes, thick lilacs, and several lavender offerings.
It was lovely and fragrant. What flower gardening dreams are made of.
But we slowly started losing our flowers each year. The roses to aphids and caterpillars, the lavender never returned after an exceptionally cold winter, but the lilacs remained.
Out of all of our old landscaping, I’m so thankful they survived. They are the offspring of my great-grandpa’s cherished lilac bushes. Growing up, they lived in a house nearby and his lilacs would make the whole neighborhood smell fabulous every spring. My mom dug little starts up when they moved, and I did the same when we bought our house 9 years ago. I also have some iris that were my great-grandma’s as well.
However, they were originally a chocolate brown and yellow! Over the last two years they have changed to this purple and white! I’m not sure if it’s the minerals from the rock mulch, or if it’s cross pollination. I would love to hear from anyone with knowledge on this!
To replace the lost roses and lavender, I decided to go with herbs (#growfood) that will act as more of a ground cover (less weeding? I hope!).
I decided to go with creeping thyme, regular thyme, oregano, sage, apple mint, and strawberry mint. These all have practical uses as well and will become very convenient for harvesting because they’re right outside the front door!
Bryce’s Mystery Project
Guess what Bryce’s new project is for the next few days?! Tell us your ideas!
Crows nest for kids is my guess
Nope!