two wild and tasty foods

Our resident wild food forager didn't have to look far for some spring favorites -- stinging nettles (cluttering a corner of the garden until I insisted it all get harvested) and ramps, or wild leeks.

Gotta love the gloves. Can't say I blame him.

Ramps are abundant in the woods up here, including those behind our house.

more from boot camp

Never put these up, but more cool climbing stuff the kids had fun with at Camp Ingersol in Portland back in April. First up, they had to walk on the wire, using the ropes to keep their balance.

dante shoots birds

with his camera. He sneaks onto the deck, and sits still underneath the feeder until a bird comes along. Then he slowly rises over the edge to capture their image. As you can imagine, not a lot of birds enjoy dining in the shadow of this lurking threat, so only the bold little chickadee has humored him.

Chickadee

Red bellied woodpecker and a cardinal visit the feeder at the same time.

tea time

Lulu and I have made a few batches of compost tea lately. It's pretty easy to make, and has more than minerals to fertilize the plant -- it also contains thousands of microbes that help eat organic matter in the soil and make more nutrients available to the plants in the area.


We took about 3lbs of compost and put it in some old stockings of mine. We covered that with water, probably about 3 gallons. For the first batch, we kept an old stake nearby to stir frequently. For the second batch, we've upgraded to a tag-sale aquarium bubbler which can finish a batch of tea in less than 2 days.


Straining the tea through cheesecloth into the sprayer. After all that, it clogged the sprayer anyway. I'm on the lookout for an apparatus that will enable us to hook this up to the hose and have it diluted and sprayed at the same time.

Hay!

We found a busted-up bale of hay on the side of the road the other day near our road, so we put it all in the back of the van (oy, what a mess!) and the girls are now enjoying some of it in their nestboxes. The new digs are WAY more popular than pine shavings, at least among our crowd. Izzy did not appreciate my timing, but she didn't budge. Usually they all lay in the one she's in, but someone was evidently moved to try this new stuff upstairs too.

our garden has grown!

Not so much the veggies, although what we have so far is thriving, but I mean our garden expansion. When we dug the garden, we found this enormous rock (see pic below) which was at least 4 feet-ish in diameter. I tried making it a sunken herb garden, but it was all subsoil and the plants didn't flourish.

So that is a photo of our garden back in April. Two piles (one topsoil, one compost) and lots of Lukepower later, we now have this:


We're starting to fill in some areas between the stones on the path and the bed walls with herbs, and got more today to plant that aren't in this pic. But it will probably take a long time for them to spread, so I might sow clover or other greens in the walkways. I'd like to find a nice edible groundcover that can stand light footntraffic. Rosemary has a small bed at the end of the path on the left. Basil will go in the area just past the last big natural stone paver, with thyme plants in each corner of the end of the path on the right, as well as around the belly of the bed. I've planted mint in a submerbed container, but am wary of it taking over the garden. We'll see.

Creeping Rosemary's little nook

The farther half of the garden, already planted. Sorry for the weird angle. I was standing at teh top of the playscape. Most of the clover didn't come back, but it was relatively easy to weed. The long bed extreme right has a back row of peas, the middle row is kale toward the top of the pic, and Early Girl tomatoes and genovese basil on the bottom half, and the front row is Bright Lights swiss chard.

Going clockwise, the next bed has a border of chard, with more dinosaur kale in the center.

Next bed with the big green swath down the middle is arugula, with a border of borage. The bed extreme left has broccoli and some arugula that didn't sow very well (having renegade chickens scratching in this bed shortly after sowing probably didn't help)

ignoring the new bed that hasn't been planted yet, the next bed has more kale and swiss chard, and the lush green bed is Dante's mesclun mix. We've already harvested a few pounds of lettuce from this thickly planted bed, but it's still going strong.

Mr. Toad's no so wild ride