Eat The Yard

Egg salad and fried egg sandwiches, brownies, several batches of chocolate chip cookies, and lots of pancakes: Since our chickens started laying on June 28, we have collected 37 eggs — and for the last 11 days straight we’ve gotten at least two each day. It took a few weeks of fits and starts for [...]

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I have tried many things to keep safe this latest round of edibles, so it’s hard to say which of the many worked best, which was the bellwether of our current good fortune.  Likely, our flourishing garden results from a confluence that would be hard to parse. Insects have ceased to be a serious threat, [...]

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Despite industrial agriculture’s co-opting and subsequent diminishing of the descriptor “free range”, it is rewarding to be able to describe our chickens as such and mean it.  They aren’t limited to a euphemistic “access to the outdoors” — typically a meager chicken run meeting the minimum USDA standard and meant to dupe consumers.  Our pullets [...]

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How many iterations can a single season’s garden have? Since sowing our first sets of Contender bush beans on March 12, I have reconstituted our warm-season plantings four times, resulting in a landscape completely different than that of early March — and certainly one far removed from what I conceived in winter, when all there [...]

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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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