We got chickens again.

After being on the boat for a year and not being able to have chickens, we decided that it was time. Our local feed store said that they had a 95% success rate in ensuring that we got female chickens.

We bought four of them, and one of them is absolutely a male. So... I guess we have to figure out where we're going to drop off a rooster.

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With the heat of summer upon us (100+ degrees, typically), I figured I'd give another update of my garden.



Quite a bit of food for such a small space. I'm pleased with it.

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I don't have a large enough back yard to have a typical "pile of food scraps" compost pile out back, so I decided I'd give worm-composting (vermiculture) a try. There's a local hippie out here that sells the worms by the pound, so I stopped by this afternoon and picked up a canister.



There are lots of how-to sites on building worm bins, and because I had a spare plastic bin, that seemed like the simplest method. After 20 minutes of tearing up newspaper scraps to make some worm bedding, I've got the bin set up in my garage with a pound of worms and table scraps. According to what I've read, these worms can eat their own weight in table scraps every two days. Amazing. That should produce quite a bit of compost as well.

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This is my heirloom crop of wheat that I've grown since 2008.

At that time, I found a few stalks of wheat growing on the side of the road that were ready to harvest, so I plucked the heads and harvested the seeds. By the end of 2009, I had my third generation of seeds, from which the wheat in the photo was grown. (I didn't plant those seeds in 2010, because I didn't have a yard to do any gardening.)

This year, in February, I planted my wheat seeds together and hoped that they survived the year in a plastic baggie, and sure enough, they sprouted. I'm now on my third generation of wheat. And for some reason, that's really interesting to me - this idea of maintaining generations of a single plant. I suppose it's a bit like sourdough friendship bread, or yogurt - from a single batch, it keeps growing and spreading, and you can pass it down from generation to generation.

I don't know if I have an end goal with this wheat. But I do like the idea of preserving it, and maybe passing it down to my children. And wouldn't it be neat if, years down the road, I'm able to gather enough of my wheat seeds to start a wheat farm or something? We'll see.

In the meanwhile, here's a few other things growing in my garden:


Blueberry blossoms


Dwarf Lemon blossoms


Grapes


Strawberries


Artichoke plant (huge)


Artichoke bulbs (there are ELEVEN bulbs on this plant)

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I typically post a ton of photos of my garden every year, but it was a little labor intensive, and it took a while for me to get around to annotating each photo. This year, I decided to post a video, making it easier for me to share and for people to see what's going on in my back yard.

Enjoy:


(feed readers may need to click HERE for the video)

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