Welcome to the Farm
Hello dear reader!
Summer is in full swing and we are working our garden. As you may have seen in previous blog posts, we are honing our farming skills in preparation of our future. Welcome to Jaybird’s Farm! We are beginning our journey right here in the city, in our front and back yards. We hope to inspire you to maybe carve out your own little farm where you live.
We are in a 720 sq ft house, on a 5500 sq ft lot. I think that equates to about .12 acres, but please correct me if I’m wrong! My point being, you don’t have to actually have a ton of land to make your own farm. I mean, that is the goal someday but that’s a bit in the future. With the price of groceries out of control, and the fact that I see almost daily a new food being recalled; including FRESH VEGETABLES, we all need to have a garden. That rant is for another post.
Starting from scratch
So here we are transforming our yard into a mini farm. No, we aren’t growing mini food, although the vegetable garden we planted in the container bed during the lockdown of 2020 did grow tiny vegetables. Still not sure why, but I’ve always been a better in ground gardener than a container gardener. We are taking a basically dirt backyard and transforming it into a garden.
We are starting in the front, because the temps have been in the 90’s and it’s just too dang hot to break ground in the back yet. What we have planted so far is Mint, Basil, Tomatoes, more Basil, Cucumbers and Zucchini.
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- This is some Mint that I propagated from Daddy’s garden. It grew tremendous roots but needed a little help to stand up
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- Our first tomato!
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- Some new Basil plants because we can never have too much! We eat this stuff like lettuce!
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- Newly planted Cukes that will have a trellis soon
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- There are already flower buds on the Zucchini
Utilizing what we have
We had some Blackberry canes from a couple of years ago that never got taken out of their pot and planted properly. We thought that the deep freeze of ’22 had killed them, but this year new canes came up and the plant had rooted itself in the yard where the pot sat. Well, they must have really liked that spot because the new cane is HUGE! So instead of transplanting them, we decided to take the collapsed raised bed (that’s a different story lol) and repurpose it for the Blackberries.
We disassembled what was left, flipped it upside down and put it around the Blackberries. Once it was put back together, we filled it halfway with soil and cut the plastic pot away from the plant. I then put an overripe banana all around the base of the canes and filled the rest with soil. You can’t really see the height of the plant in the picture below, but it is at least 6 feet tall!
A new member of our garden is an amazing wild herb I found on a walk one day. It’s called Self-Heal, or Heal-All and it’s a great little medicinal herb. I was so excited when I found it and even more excited to see it take when I transplanted it into a pot! It’s a self seeder, so we’re going to let it drop seeds all over the yard.
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- The Blackberry box we made
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- Some Self-Heal that I found in the wild and propagated for our garden. We are so excited that it took and is growing new flowers!
Soon we’ll be crafting a trellis out of some Rose of Sharon branches that I prepped from the tree we pruned. Luckily the cukes aren’t really vining much yet, so I have some time to finish that project. Here’s a little video of me prepping the branches.
Stay tuned for more projects on the farm! In the meantime, if you’d like to help this project, you can donate here, or click on the logo below. Even the smallest amount helps! We will be posting here and on our Instagram all the progress and inevitable mistakes we’ll be making. Join us in the fun!
Love, Spider & Rain
Click on the logo below to go to the fundraiser 👨🌾
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