Farming – My tiny u.p. farm

Mid summer garden updates 2025

August 3, 2025Jen PowellLeave a comment

The garden is really doing well. Here are some updated pictures:

Here is the main garden. Everything is doing well. I’ve replaced a couple of things (picked all my rat tail radishes, added in a tomato plant, things like that).

I’m getting some garlic scapes now. I grew spring garlic (planted this spring after cold stratifying it in the fridge for a month or two). When I grow fall garlic, the scapes are usually here in June if I’m remembering correctly. This garlic is giving me scapes now, in early August. I’m figuring bulbs will be ready later as well since it was planted later.

I had a large harvest of rat tail radishes – they are seed pods from a radish variety that doesn’t actually produce a large root. Those are now out, and that will give my green beans some room to grow.

I’m starting to get small tomatoes forming on my plants. I’ve also taken cuttings – I took the suckers out of the plant and put them in water. The cuttings formed roots and I’ve put them into my beds as well, to see if we can get some later tomatoes. I figured it’s worth a try. I also am starting to get some delicata squash on my squash plants. I didn’t know how they’d do in the raised bed situation but it seems to be growing pretty well.

I’ve got some flowers blooming now, these are zinnias. My plan was for a bunch of different colors all over the garden – I put in some black and red petunias that I bought, and a fluffy red flower (I can’t remember the name). Of the seed-grown flowers, so far I’ve just gotten these yellow zinnias and some yellow calendula.

Outside the main garden, I have some areas of flowers – a mix of native stuff and some things I planted. I was looking around the yard the other day and found that my goldenrod/comfrey/mugwort bed area had a lot of bee activity. Some of them were sleeping on the flowers (it was pretty early yet).

Black currants. I just harvested a bunch of these y/esterday and made some syrup. It was good on pancakes. It was pretty tart, so I needed to add a bunch of sugar. I have only had these canned before, this was the first harvest of a usable amount I’ve gotten.

A view of our back yard, toward the cottage garden. I mostly have perennials in there now, it gets overrun with Valerian and nettles. The white topped flowers in the picture above are the Valerian. I pick the nettles to keep them somewhat contained but they like to spread a lot – I pick the small ones when I find them and put them in soup. The valerian is everywhere but it smells so nice that I don’t really mind. I put a peach tree in the cottage garden this spring and moved my elderberry trees into there a month ago (those were in the front and not very happy – bad rocky soil). I was growing some herbs and stuff in there but perennials work better for me in there – I can mostly just let them do their thing. I leave it a bit wild but it looks nice. The cats like to hang out in there and sunbathe.

The chickens are growing well. I set up a table and chairs next to their coop and like to hang out with them a bit. My cats sit around their coop as well – I do think they may be more interested in the tasty birds inside than being friendly. The chickens don’t seem to mind the cats, since they can’t get to them. I have come out and found a deer investigating them a few times. The chickens didn’t seem worried about the deer.

Summer is in full swing.

Farm updates Mid July 2025

July 15, 2025Jen PowellLeave a comment

The garden is growing, and the chickens are getting larger too. We put the chickens into their new home on July 4th. Here you can see they were almost outgrowing their box, and pics of their first day in the coop.

They are really enjoying their coop. They chase each other around, and we’ve put watermelon in for them on hot days and they love that as a treat.

The garden is growing as well. It went from this in early July:

To this yesterday:

I am realizing as the plants have grown in that I kind of overcrowded things a little. I think it is looking really nice though, and some space should be recovered as I harvest things. Nothing seems like its growth is hindered. I have had deer jumping over my fence and munching on some stuff though so I put some strategically-placed sticks and pieces of fence in the beds to try to deter them. I may have to work harder in the future to fix that issue but there is so much outside of my garden they can eat that I hope my current efforts are enough.

I’m starting to get some harvest now, my chard is getting big enough to pick and I’ll have rat tail radishes soon:

Here you can see the pods growing. I grew these radishes a couple of years ago, and they were tasty. I cooked them like green beans, just sauteed them. It’s a radish plant that gets edible pods up on top instead of the big root down below. I have green beans growing in the same bed, so once these produce I’ll pull them out, let the bean plants get a little bigger, and maybe plant another crop of one of them where these were.

The garden is doing great and it’s very exciting.

A new group of friends for the farm

June 18, 2025June 18, 2025Jen PowellLeave a comment

We got new chickens! If you are a longtime follower of the blog, or have read my old posts, you know that I had chickens for about 5 years, until spring of 2020. We really enjoyed them, but it had gotten too much to take care of them in the wintertime, and was very expensive at the time with all our birds. I think we had 20 chickens or so, plus some ducks when we gave our birds to the neighbor. It’s been a few years now and I missed having them. Then this spring with the price of eggs and everything going on I decided to get some, but only a few. I ordered 6 female chicks. They arrived at the beginning of June. They are just over 2 weeks old now. Here are some pictures of my hens.

We ordered 6 from a mail-order place: 2 easter eggers, 2 fibro-easter eggers (full black chickens), and 2 black/blue splash chickens. When they arrived, one had died in transit, and then one died the next day. The chicken company refunded me for those two, and I went and picked up 2 more hens at Tractor supply, some Buff Orpingtons. I wanted to make sure everyone was the same age, and not have to introduce anyone later. I’m not sure what kind of chicken everyone above is, except the 2 yellow ones are my Buff Orpingtons. We’ll have to wait and see how everyone feathers out to know what is what.

My old coop from before was a converted old sauna building, that is now kind of falling apart and is mostly just used for storage. I decided not to use that and ordered a small coop for my hens. It came as prefabricated parts that we then assembled. I think it will be nice for my hens once they are ready to go outside. The coop came with a small run, and it’s light enough that we plan to move it to our front porch for winter time. That will make it easier for us to take care of them in the winter, and keep them out of some of the snow. Here is our coop:

I also have some predator proofing stuff to add to the bottom to keep creatures from digging underneath – we haven’t added that yet. We just set it up and added some waterproofing. I used to let my chickens free range all over our property, but that got annoying – I had to fence in all my plants everywhere because the chickens used flower beds as dust baths. If I feel that they need more room to roam I may add some temporary movable fencing around the coop and run, so I can give them a little more foraging space.

I’m excited for our new little flock. They are all healthy and doing well. I have another month or so before they are ready for the outdoor coop, but I think they will really like it.

Start of 2025 Garden

May 31, 2025Jen PowellLeave a comment

I had some trouble with last year’s garden. I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy in 2023, which is a form of heart failure. I’m doing well with medication, but it does slow you down a lot. I noticed the most problem with bending and trying to weed or dig garden beds. I had a garden last year but it was not very well tended, because I just couldn’t, and so my harvest wasn’t as plentiful as it could have been. I had a few things that did well, especially if the soil was good (my cottage garden had some indigo and that did really well), but my main garden tends to get compacted a lot. For this year I got some new raised beds. They were just metal raised beds from Amazon. I ordered 6, set them up, and filled them with leaves, compost, and soil. I did a bit of a lasagna garden in them, just to keep my soil costs down a little. Here they are, set up:

*My raised beds. Some had to be on pallets because the ground wasn’t very even.*

The beds are waist-height, so they are just at the right level for me. I am so excited to garden in these this year. My husband told me I should order a couple more, so I did – those will be coming in the next week sometime. I planted seeds this week, so those should start coming up soon. I have some seedlings hardening off right now (tomatoes) but I just saw that we have a frost advisory for tonight so those will be coming inside tonight.

I put garlic in one of the beds for this summer, to try a spring-garlic trick that I read about. I had a really good harvest of garlic last fall, I think partially because they are a low-effort crop. I didn’t plant any in the fall though because I knew we’d be doing raised beds and didn’t want to take any space in the garden for them at the time. I read that you can plant it in the spring. Sometimes they won’t develop heads then, unless you cold stratify in the fridge. So I put some heads of garlic in the refrigerator sometime in March, and planted those in one of my raised beds the other day.

Besides the raised beds, we are doing a small Sunflower patch in the garden, and then raising potatoes in dog food bags:

*Here are my potato bags. We put bamboo sticks up to prevent the dogs from messing with them or peeing on them when they come into our garden with us.*

So far this year seems to be quite promising. Once we quit getting frost advisories anyway.

Seed Starting

March 24, 2024Jen Powell1 Comment

I started my early seeds last weekend – tomatoes, brocollini, some dye plants, and flowers. Some are things that the seed packet said to start in place, but last year when I started them in place I never saw them come up (like Woad). I wanted to make sure that I can find them. I also made sure to only plant a few seeds per tray, which will help me later because I won’t have to thin the seedlings.

I used old mushroom trays (from when you buy mushrooms at the store) with holes poked in for drainage, and set them inside actual seed starting trays. I have taller domes because my seedlings tend to be in the house for longer (because of our U.P. climate) and to keep plants safe from cats longer. One of my cats likes to dig into the pots if she just sees soil, so this will keep the seedlings safe. The domes have air vents, so that is helpful.

Here are my seed trays, with my grow lights (in the sunny window) – the sunny window does not give enough light, so they have grow lights. The Toilet paper tubes are cat-deterrents – to keep the cats from jumping up.

I didn’t have plant markers so I created a map of my seed trays:

*Here is my seedling map. My tomatoes are the bottom right of the right tray. I then turned my actual trays so they are horizontal, but the larger trays in the trays are in the center.*

I was able to fit 8 mushroom trays per seed-starting tray. Here you see the left tray (or most of the left tray:)

*Here (at the bottom of the picture) you can see (from L to R) marigold, safflower, and brocollini*. *I have rocks between the brocollini types.*

Some of the seedlings sprouted right away and some are taking a while, which is expected. It’s only been a week.

*In this tray the dahlias are coming up before anyone else.*

It’s always exciting during seed-starting time. Our weather is still really weird. Our winter never really showed up – we got a little snow over last weekend, right in time for St. Patrick’s day – a few inches of snow though. We’re still waiting to find out if our snowless winter will translate to an actual early spring. I’m going to follow our normal schedule, (most plants go out in late May/early June) just so I don’t get any unwelcome surprises.

Mid winter garden planning

February 17, 2024February 17, 2024Jen PowellLeave a comment

We’ve had a really weird mild winter this year, but I’m starting to dream of spring. We have some snow on the ground, but I have a good view of the garden (even covered with snow) from my window and I have been sifting through my seeds to see what I’m going to plant this year. With last year’s travel and health issues, my garden wasn’t very successful last year. I want to try to go a little easy this year, but I still want to make a good effort and have a great garden. That said, I tried to rein in what I’m going to plant but it is still a little more extensive than I originally wanted. Here is what the plan is for this year:

*Here is the garden plan for 2024. A little rudimentary but it will work for my purposes.*

I did a quick pen drawing for my garden plan for this year, but you can go as extensive as you’d like if you make one. I did a nice one a few years ago that I actually colored in, on large paper. My problem is that when I go to plant I tend to bring this outside with me so a nice one will become dirty and probably wet from being out there with my. So rudimentary is best in my case.

To make the plan above, I started by going through all my seeds. I have a plastic photo box that I use for my seed storage, and earlier this winter I went through and got rid of the old seeds – anything pre-2019. I had tried to grow some older seeds last year and had a bunch that didn’t sprout, so I figure 5 years is a good mark – anything older I tossed. I also through out any onion seeds also because those are really only good for about a year.

I went through the seeds and decided what I wanted and what I didn’t want to grow for the year. I also bought a few things this year so of course those will be grown too. I had an original pile that was probably half of my seeds, and then I whittled that down more by choosing things I know I definitely want to grow. Some plants I like but know that they are a hassle for what we get, and some things I wanted to grow but I have tried and failed too many times (like Brussel’s sprouts). Here are most of the contenders for this year:

I have most of the regular contenders – pumpkins (including another try at giant pumpkins), and those giant Gete Okosomin squash I grew a few years ago. We’ll see if this summer is hot enough to get a nice crop. In my effort to really rein in, I’m only growing 2 types of tomatoes – one is a Pineapple tomato that I really liked and have grown a couple times. While seed shopping I saw some Devil’s claw seeds and Job’s tears – the job’s tears are good for beads, and I figured maybe i could make some art with the Devil’s claws. We’ll see if they grow and what they are like.

I decided I definitely want to grow carrots, so I grabbed a few kinds for this year – one was a free seed packet I just got. I am growing lots of flowers this year, including 3 types of sunflowers, because I love them. I also am growing cucumbers, beans, green zucchini, broccoli and some other herbs and vegetables.

I make a lot of art and have been working with natural dyes and botanical printing lately, so I decided I would like to grow some dye plants. I started some last year but with everything going on, most of them didn’t take. I did grow some madder plants, I had 3 in the fall, but we’ll see if they survived our winter once the snow is all gone. Madder is good for red dye.

*Here are the dye plants – I did start some Woad seed last year but I didn’t see it come up (I blame the slugs).*

This year’s garden should be exciting. Let’s hope the weather is good.

Early summer garden

July 1, 2022Jen PowellLeave a comment

The garden is going well so far this year. Here are some pictures from the last week or two:

My foxglove have been spreading. And I have several white ones too. They are in front (as seen here) and along the moon garden portion of the old chicken shed.
Here is my greens bed – kale, Asian greens, chard, and collards. There is some spinach that is starting to bolt, and I’m growing some salsify as well.
My honeyberries are producing more. I need to put some kind of tarp down underneath. The berries are supposed to be ready when they just fall off the bushes (or you can shake them off). They are still a bit tart yet.
My strawberries are doing well. The mint is overtaking some of the bed, so later this summer I will be pulling everything out and replanting just the best strawberry plants.
My poppies all re-seeded, I can see them coming up everywhere. This bed will be full of them soon.
Here are even more poppies.
Here is half of my main garden. Things are growing well. I had a couple of zucchini plants not take, but I put like 12 in, so a few missing won’t matter so much.
Here is the other half of the main garden. I put sticks up around this bed to keep the deer from jumping in this year. A way to inexpensively make my fence taller.
We didn’t put the greenhouse fabric up this year, but I am still using it for planting. I put onions in, and some tomatoes. There are tons of ground cherries coming back from last year, and some wildflowers (daisies) and wild herbs (the giant Mullein on the left).
I did combined-beds (companion planting) this year. This bed is onions and Chinese cabbage. I have several beds with 2 things interplanted, to help save space, but also the plants benefit each other. There are also marigolds in this bed.
My nettles and Valerian came back in full force. We picked some nettles and froze them for eating when they were small. (They get too bitter once they get large). The Valerian flowers will smell really nice once they fully bloom.

Garden updates May 2021

May 23, 2021Jen Powell2 Comments

Our spring was very cold for awhile, and then the last couple weeks it’s been super hot. It was 85 degrees yesterday and humid. Today it’s in the 40s. Tomorrow it is supposed to warm back up. It gets hard to plan your garden and planting when you’re not sure if the weather is going to cooperate. Here where we are situated, I follow a couple of different Last Frost dates – one for Houghton, Michigan, and one for Marquette (they are each about an hour or two away from me, I’m in the middle). According to my source, these two towns which are only a couple hours away from one another, are about 2 weeks different in terms of last frost date. One is mid May, one is late May. Then our weather can vary from day to day. It can be really hot and make you think “oh, I can plant those tomatoes” and then we get frost. Or even snow! I saw we might get some slight snow / rain showers in a couple days. But the temps shouldn’t be too cold where I’m that worried about us getting it. Anyway, I planted the last bits of my garden this weekend (before I saw that snow prediction). If I have to cover things, I will. I do have one or two things still waiting in the house – ginger, which can’t take ANY cold at all, and some gourds I’m waiting to sprout.

Here are some updated pictures of our gardens the last couple of weeks:

My cottage garden – we are putting in stones around all the paths. I will be sprinkling cayenne pepper if we get something digging up stones like we did last year. (We had something digging for grubs in the garden – a skunk or groundhog, probably.)

The garden is growing and our spring is definitely under way. Hopefully the weather keeps cooperating.

End of Season thoughts

October 23, 2020October 23, 2020Jen Powell2 Comments

We had a great gardening season. I’ve been so busy with the harvest that I have not had time to post anything. Fall has come and almost gone – winter seems like it is coming early this year. We’ve had close to freezing temps for weeks already, which is not typical for us. I think a lot of the upper U.S. is in this weather pattern as well. I have not yet planted my garlic – I ordered from one website, and then saw that it was back-ordered, and they were not going to be shipping till late October. I typically plant the first or 2nd week, so I cancelled it. I ordered from another place that I know grows their own garlic, thinking that they would ship quicker. I ended up having to order a different kind, but it’s still a Porcelein type of garlic (they typically have 4-6 large cloves per garlic head). They have not shipped yet either, so I called this week, and they shipped it for me yesterday – I have a blanket on the garlic bed, trying to keep my ground from freezing before I can plant the garlic.

*Our front yard on October 17th. Not a nice sight to wake up to – I’m not ready for snow yet. It luckily melted the next day.*

With our hot summer this year, some vegetables grew fantastically, and other plants didn’t do so well. Some things I thought did horribly but as we cooled down they surprised me – our cauliflower grew really large, but didn’t head until September after the rest of the garden was dying. We had a whole lot of squash and tomatoes. I have so much squash that I don’t think I will plant any next year, at least not winter squash.

*Here are squash waiting on the porch after picking. I ended up putting them in the greenhouse to cure so they will last most of the winter.*

Last year I planted 3 plants of butternut squash, and got about 1 per plant. This year, I planted three butternut and three Gete Okosomin squash plants. The butternut gave us 11 very large squashes, and the Gete Okosomin gave us 28 – the largest was 25 pounds. These things were massive. Our super-hot summer really helped.

*Another pic of some of our squash (with a couple of our Jarrahdale pumpkins).*

*Here are the squash being stored in our house. We are using them as we are able. Eventually I might have to cook them up to freeze them, but we are currently out of space in our freezer.*

We bought a pig for meat from a butcher / farmer this year, and our freezer has run out of room with that and all the vegetables. I have a lot of tomatoes that I just froze instead of canning, and a lot of zucchini that I froze, besides the pork. I am hoping the squash will mostly last for us through the winter since I cured them for awhile. I will check them here and there to make sure they aren’t softening.

We had too many cucumbers this year – we tried to make pickles but we just got tired of them. So that is something I won’t grow next year, or maybe a plant or two. I had at least 6 plants this year – too many. I also grew Patty pan squash but we weren’t very excited about them. I grew some Zucchini Rampicante, a curly long zucchini variety – they were really nice. The plants sprawl everywhere, so I’ll trellis them next year, but the flavor was really good and if you forget them or don’t find one until late, they turn into winter squash. They just harden up a bit on the outside and turn from green to brown (like a butternut color).

Pumpkins we grew (the orange one is not from my garden). They are called Jarrahdale, a white / light green pumpkin. Most were left outside as decoration, but I took one in so we can eat it later. The ones outside are doing ok but they have frozen and thawed, so probably wouldn’t be good for eating. I’ll open them up for the deer after Halloween.

This year was pretty good for our gardens. I don’t like the cold of winter, but I do like that we get a time to slow down. I’ll start getting the mid-winter gardening itch probably in January once we’ve had snow for awhile.

(Pictures in this post are all courtesy of my husband, Elton Powell).

Early August Garden Updates, 2020

August 5, 2020August 5, 2020Jen Powell4 Comments

We’ve had a lot of things happening – it was really hot for the beginning of summer, so my garden was growing like crazy. We’ve cooled down a bit for the last few days, and today it got sunny again. Here are some nice pictures of our gardens and yard:

Some bee balm growing against the house. I split this plant – took some and put it in the cottage garden.

destroyed garden 2 — Last month, I went out and found that my beautiful herb spiral was ruined by something – we suspect skunks. They moved the rocks, and then have been digging for grubs or something. Some plants survived – they didn’t eat the plants, just messed them up on their way to the grubs.

destroyed garden — Here you can see another spot where my spiral was messed up, but not as bad. I tried fixing the spiral for a couple days and then gave up. I will get some motion lights to try to deter the skunks before I try recreating it.

Here is the squash jungle. This part is butternut squash.

gete okosomin — Here are a couple baby Gete Okosomin squash. There are tons of them on the 3 plants I am growing.

IMG_20200731_185227741 — Here is a Gete Okosomin that we accidentally picked early. It was in a weird spot and I wanted to keep it off the ground – I went to adjust it and knocked it off the vine. It was 6 pounds. They can get up to around 20 lbs when ripe. We cut it up and it was soft like zucchini, so I used it as I would zucchini this week.

Here are the gourd plants. They are both birdhouse gourds. I had a mixed pack – there is one plant that is very tiny by the door in the background. I don’t know that I’ll actually get any gourds from it. I was hoping for a bowl gourd plant. But birdhouse ones are nice. I want to make some cool gourd art eventually.

Here are the gourd flowers. They are really cool, I was expecting them to look like squash flowers. I like how these are growing, they just look really whimsical.

IMG_20200726_131342720 — Here are some gourds getting bigger on the vine.

tall sunflower — Our giant rogue sunflower (grew from last year’s seed, randomly in the garden). This was just before something knocked it over – it was broken at the base but still connected. I tried tying it up to save it. It still flowered but the leaves look dead.

tall sunflower 2 — Here is the bloom – for a few days after I tied it back up, the leaves would wilt by end of day, but be all healthy looking by morning. But for the last few days the leaves have been wilted all day. It now has 3 blooms though, even though the leaves look sad.

Here is my first red sunflower – one I started from seed this year (on purpose instead of volunteer/rogue).

squash jungle 2 — Another picture of the squash jungle, from inside the garden fence.

IMG_20200726_130520967_PORTRAIT — Here is a terra cotta frog I have in the cottage garden. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)

IMG_20200726_125911351_PORTRAIT — The terra cotta frog sits under the foxglove. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)

IMG_20200730_193410657_PORTRAIT — Here is another view of the foxglove. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)

IMG_20200726_130049142_PORTRAIT — I’m growing Balsam for the first time – the blooms are pretty. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)

Here is a little helper, (well, kind of a big helper), Mr. toad. He was living in the main garden, I found him under my tomatoes.

IMG_20200803_180012464 — I’ve been wanting a wind spinner. I have a plastic colorful one, but I wanted a metal one. I had some scrap aluminum sheet, so I made my own. I just made it the other day so I have not seen it actually spin in the wind yet. We’ll see how this works. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)

VID_20200801_195444513_exported_1163_1596326307189 — My Wizard has a friend. This black and white kitty comes to our yard sometimes. She has stayed with various neighbors around here, but I don’t know what home she originally came from. My son named her Shadow. She and Wizzy are good friends. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)