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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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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I have had this … pile in my yard for nearly six months.  It grows and shrinks, but mostly just sits there doing nothing spectacular — at least nothing I have been able to notice.  Six months is the amount of time I have most often read that it takes for a pile like mine [...]

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In the spirit of the listing that this season entails — the New York Times has no fewer than 11 book lists to guide what readers read and buy — and the good reading weather the cool season brings (though it is 77 degrees in San Diego as I write this), I thought I’d jot [...]

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The several storms that hit San Diego this past weekend left me little to do in the way of gardening but plan.  So I fiddled with my designs for a living-roof chicken coop — designs that needed no fiddling.  That will get built in January.  Chicks in February or March (We can’t wait!).  I flipped [...]

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When crops start small, they start vulnerable.  This was an essential weakness of my warm season crop: 90 percent of the loss occurred early in the plant’s development.  Birds pulled just-sprouted veggies from the ground to eat the seed off the bottom, leaving the first inch of growth to wither in the would-be garden.  Rabbits [...]

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One reason it can be so hard to accomplish the ends of sustainable-small-organic-green-ecofriendly-slow-local eating is just that: It’s not clear what we mean when we mean it.  At least for those trying to live responsibly outside of an organization, group, club, or some other coordinated_activism.org.  This lack of clarity is part of the problem in [...]

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My wife and I moved into our first home about a year ago: A little 1950s Ranch that clocks in at just under 900 square feet and sits on an 8,250 square foot lot, which is right around the American median in terms of land.  Less than a fifth of an acre.  Great view.  Lots [...]

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