Growing Again

The day before yesterday I picked up a few more fowl to add to our flock. They’re guinea fowl, beautiful little birds that are supposed to be really great at eating ticks. Since we live in an area with lots of ticks and lyme’s disease, we figured they’d be worth their weight in gold.

I bought four from a local farmer and a friend is giving me her female, who is very lonely since her mate became fox food.  She’ll fit right in with our 3 females and one male.  Hopefully I can get some better photos when they get more used to me and when we start letting them outside.

These little guys are very beautiful. Dailon turned a storage area in our coop into a little coop of it’s own. They’ll be living in there for a week before being introduced into our flock of chickens. We’re also going to be adding more feathered friends to our flock in the coming week, stay tuned to see what we add.

How many feathered and furred friends do you have in your garden?

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Grow What You Love to Eat

This is the third installment in the 5×5 Garden Challenge Series. Every Wednesday I’ll be posting about the challenge, covering topics that will help all the new gardeners get started. If you haven’t heard about the challenge head on over to the 5×5 Challenge Website, we’ll also be putting up a page here that pulls in all the 5×5 Challenge posts.

I had high hopes of getting the raised bed build for my 5×5 Challenge garden, but the rain conspired against me. So this week we’ll talk about vegetables.

For the 5×5 Challenge I’m going to be growing the Rainbow Kitchen Garden from Renee’s Garden seed. It contains: zucchini, tomatoes, scallions, beans, and lettuce. These are all vegetable that I love. If you don’t like any of these, feel free to choose the 5 vegetables that you like.

The point of growing your own food is to grow things that you love. If no one in your family loves tomatoes, don’t grow tomatoes. That being said, if you’ve never tasted a homegrown tomato before, it’s completely different than a store bought tomato and you might actually like it. The same goes for most vegetables.

Which vegetables do you love and which vegetables do you dislike?

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The Triangle Garden

If you remember, last week I introduced you to Dailon and mentioned that he was already working on something.  I also mentioned that the rock wall I was building was going to enclose a new garden space.



The new garden will be a triangular shaped garden right across the driveway from my kitchen window, which is why I wanted to put a garden space in this spot. It’s a nice space, with good soil and an old outhouse (that is currently being turned into a small chicken coop).

We started by clearing out a pine tree. It was planted in the middle of the space and was leaning.


There was also a raised bed made of railroad ties, that also went away. Mr Chiots was more than happy to get his tractor out for this chore.

The plan is to put some chickens in there to clean out all the weeds. Then I’ll figure out what sort of design I want to use. I’ll continue building the walls to surround it, and hopefully one day it will be a beautiful space that I can admire from my kitchen window.

Do you have any exciting garden projects for the summer?

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Cultivate Simple 27: Pondering Ponds

Today on Cultivate Simple we’re talking about ponds. We went to the local library a few weeks ago for a workshop on pond building and maintenance. We’d love to put in a small pond here at Chiot’s Run for increased diversity and provide a place for planting water loving plants.  We had a small pond back in our garden in Ohio and really enjoyed what it brought to our garden.  Of course we have 40 acres of wetlands in the back, but we really want something that we can see from the house.

Books of the Week

PDF Of USDA book on Ponds: Planning, Design, and Construction.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:39:13 — 68.8MB)

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Quote of the Day: Robert Brault,

Through the blackest night, morning gently tiptoes,
feeling its way to dawn.
~Robert Brault

I love being outside at night, especially in spring, when the air is crisp and there aren’t many insects around. More than the dark of night, I love being up early, right as night begins to fade to day.



One of the reasons I love camping so much is because we’re usually up as the first whispers of dawn break over the horizon.
I especially love getting up early, seeing the first whispers of dawn on the horizon.

What’s your favorite time of day?

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