Homegrown Habitat

The coming growing season will be the seventh we have spent at this house. While we have made many improvements to the yard and garden, it is hard not to notice the progress we haven't made. This land has proven to be the most difficult, inhospitable, unforgiving place I have ever gardened. Which is saying something, because I have always gardened in the dry, poor soil of the mountain west, including several places along the Wasatch Front.

But, this spot! This spot leads to the death of 2/3 of the plants I plant in it. I know I will lose some plants I plant. But, other locations have been around a 20% loss. This plot of land... 70% loss! And those plants that do survive still struggle immensely. Most grow much slower than expected, with gangly, spindly forms. And to add insult, the deer eat many of the plants that do grow well, things they aren't supposed to like!

I am trying so hard to grow a beautiful flower garden. I have bought 200 or more nursery plants for this property. I grow around 500 of my own seedlings every year (that adds up to 3000 plants I have added to this property over the past 6 seasons). I spread seeds of the few plants that are successful. I have collected three large boxes of iris rhizomes from three different neighbors when they were dividing their plants and planted them in broad swathes. I even welcome many plant volunteers off the mountain like rabbitbrush.

I enjoy most the look of a full flower garden bed with layers of plants all mingling together. (See my pinterest board for the look I love!) But, despite all my efforts, the garden here doesn't look full. It doesn't even look half full. It still looks sparce. And random.

The garden during the third growing season:

Back yard, looking NW, before we got our fence, so the posts mark the property line.

Front slope, where I have already plants hundreds of plants by this time.

The yard last year, during the sixth growing season:

Back yard looking NW again.

Front slope from a different angle.

Visually, there is hardly a difference in the filling in of the garden, even though enormous efforts were made! But I refuse to give up. I will figure out what rugged plants will grow on this mountainside without pampering. (As long as I don't have to resort to Canadian thistle, bindweed and tumbleweed!)

So, in a last ditch effort to fill in my flower garden, I ordered two wildflower seed packets from American Meadows. I chose American Meadows seed because last year my son wanted to start a small garden of his own and I gave him an old packet of seeds that came as a sample from the American Meadows catalog. Wonder of wonders... Many plants sprouted in his garden from this packet! That gave me hope! And a favorable view of American Meadows seed quality. I ordered 1/4 lb. Dry Area Wildflower Seed Mix and 1/4 lb. Blue Wildflower mix (to make the color mix more my style). I also added Fireweed seeds, hoping that it is true to its nature: growing in poor, barren soil in large patches. (I first became acquainted with this beautiful plant in Yellowstone this summer and wanted it, plant collector that I am!)

Once my seeds arrived, I spent an afternoon with my entire seed inventory, creating custom mixes for each area of my yard. I felt like a little garden wizard mixing my magic potions. I stored each mix in a labeled ziploc bag. The next day, I mixed each batch with moistened sand for better distribution.

My first plan was to use my seed spreader for the job, but it jammed up immediately with the moist sand. Plan B: I spread each area by hand. The moist sand assisted the seed in falling down throught the snow. It felt like a refreshing act of faith to throw those seeds all out there and hope for success!

I sincerely hope this plan works. The snowpack this year has been higher than normal, and the temps have been consistently cold. If we continue to have a cold, wet winter and then a normal spring, the seeds should sprout well! I spread over 100K seeds, so even if I get 10% growth rates from the seeds... Ah, I hope it works! Please work!!

The "Quakie" garden, with pock marks in the snow where the seed and sand mix fell.

2:47:00 PM
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Duck, Duck, Goose!, Part II

Ducks

To find more females to grow our flock, I scoured the local facebook homestead groups, and local classified ads. However, muscovy ducks are not commonly kept, and so the options were slim. I finally found a listing for a flock of 3 female and 1 male muscovies that a lady no longer wanted to keep. We rushed down to pick up the flock. However, two established flocks do not really enjoy being joined together. The males were constantly fighting to prove prowess, and the females weren't much better. We separated our pen in two, and broke up fights when we let them out into the yard for our daily duck walks.

The final straw was that the males attacked my younger children when they went out to tend to the flock. I am not sure why, because while they puffed and hissed for everyone, they never attacked the teens or adults. One day, my eight-year-old, animal whisperer, would-never-hurt-a-fly, daughter came in clawed up, shaking for 40 minutes after one of the males attacked her and chased her around the yard and cornered her near the shed.

That was it! I was done with the puffing, hissing, aggressive males. I only wanted eggs. No need for them. Thankfully, this time I found an ad for a rescue farm nearby for small homestead animals. I met a volunteer from the organization that afternoon and turned the male muscovies, Goose and Hawk, out to pasture at the rescue farm.

For the past few months, our four female muscovies, Mimi, Ducky Momo, Flash, and Jemima Puddle Duck, have been giving us about a dozen eggs a week. Being muscovies, though, they lay in spurts: many eggs for a few weeks, than a few weeks off.

After the males left, the females calmed and get along with much less aggression now.

About mid-April, I decided I would like to get some duck breeds with higher egg production. I really like the muscovy as an all around useful duck breed, but really want a good supply of duck eggs. I ordered 10 female ducklings from Metzer Farms (their typical minimum order): 4 runner ducks, 2 white crested ducks, and 4 golden 300 hybrid layers (Metzer's own special breed that lays 300+ eggs per duck per year).

The ducks arrived just over a week ago, and we enjoy every minute of tending and holding them (even if they are incredibly stinky little things!)

Please enjoy this video of our ducklings arrival: https://youtu.be/IbhnazWcZSY

To start, a blue kiddie pool served as the nursery, but by one week later the ducks have more than doubled their size and several would jump out each day. We are notified of each escape when they start peeping as loud and fast as possible as if to say "I'm lost and can't get back home!"

Yesterday morning, my husband came down early to replenish food and water (they eat and drink every crumb and drop during the night). He found not one, but five ducklings out of the pool. As he described it, as he came in, the escape artists walked around the pool and just looked at him while he put them back in. He came back upstairs singing "Five little ducks went out to play, out of the pool and far away, when the daddy came and said 'GET BACK IN THE POOL!'" The kids and I rigged up a taller nursery edge with a couple of camping pads and a few stools. And this morning, we moved the whole duckling party out to the garage because the smell has become overwhelming in the laundry room.

The ten ducklings are now named: the four runner ducks are named after the Penguins of Madagascar (because we think adult runner ducks run uncannily like swift penguins) Private, Rico, Kowalski, and Skipper; the white crested ladies are Oli and Bonnie; and the four Golden 300 Hybrid Layers are Quacker Jack, Wheezy, Fluffer Nutter and Mrs. Waddlesworth. As they grow larger (and move slower), I'll get individual "portraits". These ladies should begin laying eggs for us around October.

11:37:00 AM
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Duck, Duck, Goose!, Part I

Ducks

During summer of 2014, we took the plunge and added ducks to our suburban homestead. The foremost reason for adding ducks to our menagerie was for duck eggs, since one of our children is allergic to chicken eggs, but can eat duck eggs with no problem. We found a source to purchase duck eggs for our daughter, but with the high cost of the eggs and gas to pick them up, they were practically golden eggs. When our egg source ran dry for several months, we decided to create our own source. In our nine month journey since then, we have had ups and downs, but over all, I have really grown to enjoy having the funny ducks around.

We began our flock with four four-week-old muscovy ducklings. We attempted to get a flock of three females and one male by choosing the largest, heaviest of the ducklings and then the three smallest, lightest. On our drive home each family member volunteered name options for our little flock. Our teen came up with the winning combination: she suggested a play on the game "duck, duck, goose". The duckling we thought was male would be named "Goose". The three we guessed were female would be named duck in various languages: Oli (Korean), Anatra (Italian), Mimi (from a children's cartoon, but our 3-year-old insisted it was Chinese for duck).

The ducklings resided in plastic bins in our laundry room for the first couple of weeks. During the day, we brought them out to play inside in a big kiddie pool, and gave them brief walks outside. Over a few weekends, we built them a duck house, with lots of help from the whole family.

Once the ducks settled into their outdoor home, we began taking them on "duck walks" everyday. Most of the day they spent in their house and pen area, but each afternoon we bring them out into the backyard to forage and explore with supervision. They entertain us with their waddling, bug hunting and tail waggling. As they have grown accustomed to the routine, they anticipate our letting them out, and then calling them back to return to the pen.

Once they grew up a bit, we realized we had just the opposite genders of what we wanted... Three males and one female. That wasn't working out so well for the female once the males hit duck puberty. They pestered her all day long. Luckily for her, she learned to fly first and spent most of her time perched on top of the duck house, out of harms way.

At this point, I had a dilemma and a difficult decision to make. We could not keep three males and one female. It did not meet our goal of egg production, nor would it be kind to the poor female. Since these were homestead animals, I decided to cull two males. I asked a friend familiar with this process to help me. The duck meat was very delicious, although my children struggled to eat the meat of the birds they had raised. I do think it brought us all much closer to our food supply though, and in the end, if we were in a position to consistently only eat meat we supplied for ourselves, we would be much more reliant on eggs, and cull and eat meat much less frequently.

At this point we had one female, Mimi, and one male, Goose, no egg production, and the desire for a bigger flock of females.

To be continued...

5:02:00 PM
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Agastache Rupestris

Photos

6:50:00 AM
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Grain Salad- An Easy Garden Lunch

Recipes

1:17:00 PM
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Expanding the Veg Garden 2014

Edibles

In the early spring of 2014, we decided to expand our vegetable garden to nearly triple its previous size. Our reasons were really three-fold: 1) so I had space to experiment and grow food our food allergic son could eat; 2) deepen the soil, as the 6" deep beds we started with were just not adequate under the growing conditions on our mountainside; 3) with such a large family, the growing space was inadequate for a sufficient quantity of food to supply our family's daily diet.

Ever the money miser, I was trying to plan a garden expansion for ridiculously cheap. My kind husband asked me what type of garden beds and design I would like if money was not the key restriction. I showed him an amazing vegetable garden photo from Susan Cohan Gardens (http://www.susancohangardens.com/blog/garden-design-details-painted-wood). This garden featured blue raised garden beds with finials on each corner. I found it to be so beautiful and enticing. Dear Hubby agreed that it was a nice garden, and thought we could imitate the beds in our yard without spending that much more than I was anticipating. That sure made my day! An expanded AND beautiful veg garden?? Hooray!

The previous beds (1 4'x4'x6" deep bed and 3 4'x8'x6" deep beds) were built our first summer in our current home. We planned to build up these beds another six inches and add the decorative elements so these older beds would match the new.

We bought our supplies and began building early in February, hoping to get the project finished in time for spring planting. Our children were all excited to help. The garage turned into a factory, first for a painting assembly line, then a building assembly line.

Next came the trickiest part of the project-- leveling the beds in their new locations. It involved a lot of digging clay soil and hefting out large granite boulders. My dear hubs and sons worked hard getting all the beds just right. My daughter and I built up and added the decorative touches to the older beds.

Once the blue beds were done we had 6 beds 2'x8'x1' deep, 3 beds 4'x4'x1' deep, and 3 beds 4'x8'1' deep. (One 4'x4' bed is not blue, but a brown pre-fab garden bed kit given to us by a neighbor who was moving and had no more use for it.) Here they are looking beautiful and finished, although still empty. The beds along the south fence line had to be stairstepped due to the steepness of the slope in that part of our yard.

We ordered many yards of topsoil, garden soil mix and aged manure to fill the beds. Then we hired boy scouts to move all that soil for us. They were sure good workers and had fun moving that smelling old manure together and cracking good boy scout jokes about it! It was an entertaining morning to say the least! We figured that all those boys did in one morning what would have taken us several weekends to complete. It was worth the money, and nice to support the scouts in earning camp money.

The next part of our project involved surrounding three sides of our pergola with raised garden beds. (This pergola we inherited from the same neighbor who gave us the pre-fab garden bed. Thanks neighbor!) We started by adding a trellis around the pergola to support grape vines and a hardy kiwi vine, since the pergola structure itself would not support them. To vary the look in the yard, we decided to use castle block to build this bed, and a circular bed in front of the pergola. The first course took ages to dig in, again because of the slope of the yard and because you have to lay it very level so all the other courses will sit correctly. Good thing my husband was the patience and man-power behind this part of the project, because I probably would have thrown my hands up in defeat.

I was ecstatic with the finished project and brought out the seedlings to start filling the beds before the last block was even laid, I think! Here around the pergola are the kiwi vine (center) and grape vine (end). In the soil below the vines are artichokes, Egyptian walking onions, and alpine strawberries. Here they look so small, but within three months, the soil was no longer visible through the plants.

The blue bed holds cabbage and broccoli seedlings. Again, within 6-8 weeks, this bed was full and ready to harvest.

4:58:00 PM
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Duck Cast of Characters

Throwing it All Out There

Duck, Duck, Goose!, Part II

Duck, Duck, Goose!, Part I

Agastache Rupestris

Grain Salad- An Easy Garden Lunch

Expanding the Veg Garden 2014

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Duck Cast of Characters

Throwing it All Out There

Duck, Duck, Goose!, Part II

Duck, Duck, Goose!, Part I

Agastache Rupestris

Grain Salad- An Easy Garden Lunch

Expanding the Veg Garden 2014

Follow Me

About Me

My Family History Blog

I Believe in Christ

Contact Melissa

Labels

Blog Archive

Subscribe

Navigation-Menus (Do Not Edit Here!)

Popular Posts

Latest Instagram

Flickr Images