Eat The Yard

With just two weeks to go before, by most measures, the egg laying should commence, our four chickens have become decidedly anti-nesting in their dispositions.  At 18 weeks they are full grown, combs and all.  They just don’t seem to possess a nesting bone between them. I have been waiting expectantly for some sign that [...]

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The 67 square feet of red winter wheat I planted last November finished a honey-yellow and the tall stalks for months undulated in the every-day, afternoon wind — but I could hardly characterize the little plot as “waves of grain”.  The description seems better suited for a vast expanse beyond our yard’s capacity.  The not-far [...]

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Getting to one percent feels like getting a point in a game that would have otherwise been a shut out — and despite the tasty food we’ve harvested sporadically in the past 10 months, there have been many times, even recently, that I’ve felt aced by the yard, certain that we’d come up not just [...]

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Last week I dug up ready potatoes that had been thriving in a small plot below our bougainvillea.  In the past two weeks the tops had turned yellow like straw and wilted to the ground.  I gave them one last watering, as recommended in various readings I’d read, and a few days later carefully scratched [...]

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At least one of the praying mantis eggs I placed in our yard three weeks ago as a pest control has hatched — just in the nick of time, too.  In the past few days I have crushed dozens of little green grasshopper nymphs. According to an article my brother passed along, this season the [...]

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To be honest, at first I hated the tree that grows like a weed beside the Silk Oak in our lower yard.  A gangly skeleton in winter and the plainest Jane at the height of spring, it called little attention to itself in any season.  Its three trunks testify to others having felt the same [...]

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