Is La Niña Code for "Start Baking"?

That's not dandruff, folks. It's been snowing!! And we all know that snow is one of Aengus' favorite snacks. 

We covered the garden with straw just a few short days ago, knowing that cold weather was on the way.

Boy was that good timing! It doesn't snow very often in the Pacific Northwest. Sure, the mountains get covered with it this time of the year, and the ski resorts are always happy when the icy winds begin to blow, but we live extremely close to salt water, so snow is a rare treat for us.

Year-round gardening is usually simple in this region. We currently have one cold frame to see some plants through the winter, but you can see the leeks (in the bed on the left) holding up well even in this sub-freezing weather. The strawberries, just to the right of the leeks and garlic (which has yet to sprout), were still giving us ripe berries only last week. The blueberries (in the foreground) have turned a lovely shade of deep red. There are carrots, turnips, rutabaga, and kohlrabi growing in the uncovered bed, and a few small pots of strawberry runners are in the cold frame bed. Everything else has been put to sleep for the winter.

Straw is a really simple way to cover raised beds and garden space this time of year. It's very inexpensive (usually about $7 per bale), and we use lots of it in the chicken coop anyway, so it's always on hand. I only wish the bales weren't so messy. In the spring, we'll pull all that mulch off the beds and toss it into the paths for extra weed control. It sometimes sprouts a little hay grass when it rains, but it creates a very effective weed barrier.

Is it time to pull out the doggie sweaters, too? We've been baking brownies and making homemade chicken noodle soup all weekend to keep the house toasty warm. It's supposed to drop down into the very low 20's tonight, and it probably won't get above freezing until Wednesday. Here's to hot cocoa and fuzzy wool sweaters!!



Chicken Vacation!

You may have noticed that the girls haven't posted anything exciting for a while, but that's only because we've all been on vacation for a week! What's been going on around our urban farm?

The garden has been growing like crazy. We've gotten several days of rain over the last few weeks, and it's worked more than a few wonders. Hmm.... How did this pumpkin get here?

A funny thing happened in the compost pile... We always throw in lots of veggie scraps and leftover bits from growing things, and sometimes things sprout up from the compost after it gets spread around the yard. At least two pumpkin vines were determined to grow this year, despite the fact that I did not plant any.

We hit the motherlode! This lovely specimen was growing OUTSIDE the fence along the sidewalk. Bad idea. I harvested him a bit early, but we were afraid he would get victimized or vandalized by someone walking by. We joked about these pumpkins (affectionately called punchkins in our family) as they began to grow and mature. As many of you may know, cucurbits are extremely promiscuous plants, and they'll cross-breed with anything nearby. Last year we grew three varieties of punchkins and one type of cucumber, so our early plants were named punchcumbers. Thankfully, it appears that the pumpkins are indeed pumpkins, and they are most likely a cross between Jack-Be-Little and Rouge vif d'Etampes, better known as Cinderella pumpkins.

We've eaten a LOT of cole slaw lately...

And I cannot wait to taste my first home-grown brussels sprouts!

Our tomatoes are the talk of the 'hood. No one else has red ones yet, and we've already collected over three pounds of ripe cherry, grape, Vintage Wine, and Brandywine tomatoes. What's our secret? Pruning, trellising with twine, snapping suckers, and generous heaps of crushed egg shells for each plant. Okay, okay, and we bought FABULOUS starts at the farmers market in the spring.

We've had lots of visitors and friends in the garden, and many of them are keen to hold still for a photo op. Can you believe I grew this Echinacea from seed last year?

There's been lots of vacation time just spent lounging and sun-bathing.

A little work got done, too. Look at that brave contractor replacing windows upstairs! Almost all the windows in the house are now energy efficient. Best of all, they open and close and they don't leak!

The girls have had lots of fun, too. They've been out in the yard nearly every day, they've gotten lots of veggie scraps, and the coop got a good cleaning. You can see here that the straw on the floor is all gone. When we clean the coop out, we give the hens a few days to scratch around in the dirt and clean up the extra feed and seeds that fall through their bedding. When fresh straw goes down, they go crazy! It's fun to scratch, fluff, and play with new bedding, so this is a pretty exciting time to be a chicken. By the way, make sure to wish our older girls a happy birthday! They're officially one year old now!

The babies are still babies, however. Winnie and Dark Meat never get to roost on the pole with the older girls, so they sit on top of the nest boxes every night. And no, they have not started laying yet. Portia (pictured in the background) has been looking for creative places to hide her eggs. We found one in the compost bin earlier in the week. Bad chicken!

No vacation would be complete without a few tasty treats. The hens get their own designer pancake this morning. There was a little leftover batter and some raspberry seeds from the compote I made, so a fancy chicken brekky was born. Happy vacation!

Dances With Wolves... er... Mutts, Actually

I've apparently neglected to post much about the canines on our little urban farm, so today we'll catch up with the Usual Suspects.

Jodie was the first member of our pack. She's a Korean Jindo and possibly has a bit of Whippet mixed in there somewhere. She will be seven this year, but that hasn't slowed her down one bit. In fact, she's probably in her prime. Jodie's favorite words are:

• Hungry
• Car
• Park
• Hike

Did you mention hiking?? One of our favorite activities as a family is hiking on the many beautiful trails here in the Pacific Northwest. No matter where you are around here, you're never more than an hour from a fantastic hike. Jodie was the first to get a backpack, and she knows when it comes out that an epic adventure is afoot! Dogs can carry about 20% of their body weight in a backpack, depending on their age and physical ability. Jodie weighs 35 pounds, so she carries poo bags, a few dog biscuits, and sometimes her own water supply.

Caleb enjoys getting outside no matter what we do. He has a backpack, too, but he has a hard time figuring out that wearing it prevents him from skinnying through tight spaces, so he gets stuck quite a bit. He's wearing his in this picture, but it's hard to see anything but his tongue. Caleb is two going on three this year. He's as close to pure-bred black lab as you can get without having papers, and he frequently has to put up with him calling him a pretty girl. He's gorgeous.

Caleb's favorite words are:

• Hungry
• Pretty girl
• Jodie

Aengus likes a good breath of fresh air, too. He's a cross between a gorilla and a woolly mammoth. This picture was from his first hike last year. He had a great time, but then he always has a great time. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Aengie is about as blissful as they come. We think he may actually be Black Lab mixed with Irish Setter. Either way, he's enormous. At 18 months, he now weighs 80 pounds, and he's a skinny little beast.

Spring is in the air around here, and we're already planning the first dog hike of the year. It's always a gamble to head up into the mountains this early, and we may run into snow, but that can be fun in its own way. Sometimes the best part about living in the city is getting away from it all for one day. It's time to taste freedom.

We bought this house...

My name is Robin. My partner is Aimee. Two years ago we bought a house. Her name is Josephine. Josephine was built in 1912. She's holding up well for a girl of her age.

When we bought our house, our last thought was remodeling or changing things, but a home is a constant work in progress, which was one of our very first lessons in home ownership. That first year, around June of 2008, we were forced to do a complete, down-to-the-studs remodel of our upstairs bathroom. I now have a jetted tub, so life worked out well in the end. The remodel was the last in a long line of expenses, including (but hardly limited to) replacing the roof, installing functional gutters, and having a fence built around the property. It had been a long first eight months of home ownership.

Our second year with Josephine was a bit more under control. Her old, flaking paint, originally a pale green, was scraped off and replaced with a deep blue. The neighbor across the street loved it, proudly bringing over a can of Bud Light to describe how we had matched the colors on the can of her favorite beer, right down to the black and white stripe above a line of red. I think I managed to reply something like, "Oh." The front yard has been landscaped on one side, and the seasonal 'creek' we installed now channels water from the roof away from the foundation and our seasonal 'pool' in the basement. Aimee and I built six raised beds out of cedar posts and boards, and we collected more lettuce and green tomatoes than you can shake an organic stick at.

But our crowning achievement, as the girls out back will happily tell you, was the construction and subsequent occupancy of our chicken coop. Our girls were all hatched on Monday, August 3rd, 2009. They arrived in the mail two days later, peeping and ready to eat us out of house and home.

The girls are now comfortably established in their coop, and we eagerly await the day the our first egg will arrive.