Summer Solstice party

Last Sunday our neighbor Barb invited us to a Summer solstice party at her Unitarian church which like the Winter one we attended was a blast. They had lots of poking at our dictator/governor Plenty Pawlenty and consumerism in general. Here are some pics of Heidi and I and one of the family.

Spring hath left and Summer hath arrived

and with a vengeance to say the least. Our temps this week are 90's and humid with no real break in sight. We were supposed to get rain, but I guess our Governor must have decided to allot that from the budget also with everything else he vowed to protect and lied about. Yeah, you Pawlenty or should I say plenty since that is what we have had of your dictatorship.

We have been cooking on the grill to save heating the house with the stove/oven. Yesterday we made potato gnocchi with local potatoes, green beans, and asparagus. We also made a loaf of bread on the grill which was real chewy, but really good. Here are a few pics of the bread

Tonight we made pizza on the grill. We are also trying our hand at farming a neighbor's yard who gave us about 200 sq ft to work with. We will be putting tomatoes and squash there along with some soybeans which we sowed today.










On the job front there are a couple of opportunities, but nothing firm yet. I am getting more involved with the local food movement and am waiting to hear back from our local housing entity about leasing some vacant lots for community gardens. On Thursday I am giving an overview on urban ag to some neighborhood residents.

Today I attended a great presentation by Rose Hayden-Smith who gave an awesome and inspiring talk on the history of Victory Gardens.

Permaculture at its best

We put in the corn today after we used the last of the 15 cubic yards of compost delivered on 4/14. The main issue was that the weight of the compost compacted and need a little tilling. Since we do not believe in tilling, we were at a loss, but then we remembered we had 13 little tillers. Here is a little video of 11 of them at work.


Over the weekend Heidi finished priming the coop which you can see in the video. We are still only getting 5-7 eggs a day on average which is a little frustrating since we have 10 layers. Any thoughts from the ether?

The Quinces

Done

I have been working way too long on this post or more accurately should I say I have been working too much in the garden, so I will post this and try to another one up soon.

We finally removed most our driveway from the garage (tool shed) down to where there is maybe 30 feet of driveway left. Here are some before and after pictures
Looking E. We took the asphalt out to about the back of the truck in this picture

We also took out all the driveway leaving about 3 feet next to the garage door which is about to the recycling bins in the 3rd picture.




Now for some pictures of what it looks like now. We are going to have a 4 foot path on the North side to allow the bikes, trailers, and motorcycle to get out and the rest will beds for our black raspberry bushes.

We also took out the grass on each side of our front walk to put in 2 sets of potatoes along with a 3rd set in last years corn bed in front. We planted 29 tomato plants on Monday and last night I went to the first public for homegrown minneapolis.

Local food/urban farming meeting

Tonight we attended a meeting sponsored by IATP on local food planning geared towards Urban farmers and gardeners. It was great to see the large number of people of different walks of life and economic standing at this event. They had 2 urban planners if I remember right who spoke along with Will Allen from Growing Power and to say the least he was downright inspiring! Oh and there must have been at least 20 bikes there which was awesome to see.

We also rode part of the way to our house with a nice person who may spend a few days in July helping on the farm as a way to get more experience with urban farming.

We transplanted the tomatoes today for the last time before they go in the ground for the year. Tomorrow we will plant carrots and another round of radishes

We are also working on starting a garden design/support business geared towards helping people get their own gardens off the ground or maybe even has far as tending their gardens, so if anyone is looking for some help with design, building beds, or anything else gardening related, have them send us an email at quincegardening (at) gmail.com

Namaste,
The Quinces

First harvest of the year

The last few weeks we have been a bit worried about the Asparagus plants we planted last year. We bought the 2 year ones as to harvest this year and so far no spears until about a week ago. Tonight we had our first dinner with our own Asparagus and let me tell you there is nothing like home grown Asparagus!

We also started ripping out the driveway today with a friend's bobcat. I hope to have it all out tomorrow before the parade of coops starts at 2 PM. I will try and get some pics up soon.

Spring update

The boys had Spring break last week and since I have been looking for work we got a ton of work done. We finished the new coop minus painting, the old coop torn down and used the old posts to make a cold frame. We planted radishes, lettuces, arugula and onions in the bed. We are also putting the pepper and tomato seedlings in the frame but still in the trays. We also put up a trellis for some grapes and maybe other vertical growing. The old clothesline is back up between the coop and the garage since we lost the other pole we connected it to when Barb started on her house next door.



We built 3 new beds where the chicken run used to be where we found ~200 garlic heads we planted last year. We transplanted these to one of the new beds. We transplanted our broccoli and brussel sprouts in 2 of the new ones. We also received our potatoes and are excited to get those in the ground.

We have the parade of coops this weekend where a number of flock owners open their homes to people for viewing coops and birds. We also are working on moving the 15 cubic yards of compost still so we can work on taking out most of our driveway for conversion to food production.

I will try and get some more pictures up soon, but here are some quick ones