Since the beginning of the year, Nathaniel and I have been focusing our energy on the outside of the house so we can plant a big vegetable garden, have chickens, goats, and healthy fruit trees.  We’d love to be some what self-sufficient someday, and in order to do this we need to get the property in order.

For a good 10 years our house was pretty neglected, and there’s lots of evidence of this when you look at the fruit trees and plant life around the yard.  We have really good soil, but it’s been overrun with weeds for years.  The fruit trees have suffered because they weren’t getting enough water, and some of them have died (which is very unfortunate).  And almost every mature tree we have needs to be trimmed.  It’s a lot of work to say the least.  So we’ve been focusing on one thing at a time.

First things first, we started burning and pulling all the weeds we couldn’t get to with a lawn mower.  (It was not my favorite job).

We also ripped out and replanted a bunch of succulents in the front planter.

Our neighbors, and really good friends Keith and Carrie, also let us borrow their lawn mower.  We’ve used it to manage the weeds and also bring down our biggest out building!  We want to put the chicken coop where the red shed was located.

We’ve also been working on our garden space.  We’ve tilled it with shovels and added a layer of compost we got from the dairy farm.  We think we need to add one more layer of compost before we can start planting veggies and fruits!  Exciting!

And lastly, our little bathtub garden is coming along nicely!  We repurposed the old tub that was in ou main bathroom as our new flower garden!  We’ve had some issues with this thing as the planting bed was very close to an oil drum full of bees.  When we tried to plant in this area, the bees were not having it and tried to attack us!  Needless to say, we got rid of those pesky things!