Homemade fruit leather!

Yesterday Caleb and I made this fruit leather out of strawberries and a little bit of honey. It baked for about 7 hours but it is delicious!

The Change of Seasons

Realizing today that we haven't posted anything since October, a lot has happened! We have significantly added to our garden and our home. In January we acquired some egg laying chickens and finished building up the coop for them. Since Winter is almost over and Spring is upon us, we are starting to see one egg a day from each chicken. That's four eggs per day! How amazing is that??

In addition to our flower garden, we have added some raised beds and are currently growing some broccoli, peas, green beans, green bell pepper, lettuce and spinach.  Today we have added strawberries, cucumber, and jalapenos!  We also have merlot and muscadine grapes. Mmmm!!

We have an orange tree in our yard that didn't produce anything this year (bummer!) and recently found a tree from the neighbor's yard that hangs over, produces a fruit called a Loquat. I have never heard of such a fruit before but it is DELICIOUS! I want to make jam or jelly with it, and possibly wine if I am patient enough to do that.

Here are some photos of our ever-growing garden and chickens!

Autumn is here!

Not much has happened since our last blog post, but things are going well with our garden! Nothing has died yet, and seems to be hanging on. I have a habit of killing plants, so planting a garden was going to be a big challenge for me.

In other news, we got some green slat thingys to put in the fence, for privacy. We have a ton of it, it'll probably cover the whole fence! Here is what we have so far...

Some work done this past weekend.

A fence I built from pallets to divide the chicken run area from the rest of the yard.

Ellen planting flowers in the peace garden.

Ellen's new tropical garden, peppers still growing here.

Peanut mowing the lawn.

The peace garden is coming along, walkway and vegetable gardens slowly getting some shape.

Vegies nearly ready for transplant into the ground, better hurry up with them boxes. ;)

Catching up!

 So to catch up some previously unrecorded history on our family garden....

This path was built between our driveway and back porch, we call it  Peanut's path. 

The fire pit built for us as a wedding present by our friends. 

chicken coop, compost tumbler, rain barrel, and the gardeners bench. 

The onions and oregano. 

The pepper garden... which actually has peppers growing!

Pallet upcycle

Pallets can be used for some cool stuff!

With all the recent rains we have avoided trying to plant seedlings for fear they would simply float away, however, we have been doing some work to make sure our garden sees future success. Today Caleb and I built a box to make a raised bed out of an old pallet. Work at the bike shop sees pallets coming loaded full of bicycles, and usually strangers pick up these pallets and profit off of them... I figured, why should they benefit off of our loss? So I brought a couple home.

This box will be one of 3 or 4 that will be raised enough to keep the  flood waters at bay.

The oval to the right will be our "peace garden", the box is on the left.  We also recently staked in those bamboo borders to designate the walkways inner border.

And Out Pours the Rain

Apparently there is a tropical storm somewhere out in the Gulf, which is causing us to have all kinds of rain this weekend. We've been working out in the yard and getting stuff ready for our garden, with a few snafu's that have gotten in the way. Our seed starting box toppled over in the wind a few days ago, and some of the pots were dumped out. We think we were able to salvage some of it, and we hope they will still grow. We'll see as the weeks go on...

For Father's Day, Brian got a wind chime from his parents. Once we have our garden built and growing, it will be put out in our "peace garden". Right now, it's swaying in the wind and rain, chiming away on this drenched Florida day.