homesteading

Mid summer garden updates 2025

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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).
Garlic Scapes
Rat tail radish

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.

Tomato plants
Delicata Squash

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.

goldenrod with a sleeping bee
goldenrod and comfrey

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 saying hello

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

Jen 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

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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

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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

Jen 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.