How Does Your Garden Grow?

Our garden is coming along quite nicely.  We have peppers, tomatoes and basil that Ron started from seeds indoors. Some of them are being eaten by some kind of bug, mostly the basil, but some are thriving. Hoping for a lot of big, juicy tomatoes! We also have some beans growing that we planted from seeds early on. They are beautiful and producing lots of beans.

The pictures below show some of the beds that are almost ready for planting. This area was just an flat space with nothing but weeds. Now we have raised beds and vegetables!

There is still a lot of work to be done. We need to figure out what pests are eating the basil and how to deal with them. We also planted some carrots, beets, lettuces and spinach and those never made it. As soon as they came up, something ate them. It seems to be an insect, not the rabbits or squirrels, because we can see holes in the leaves that are left.

Wild Cucumber

We have a pretty vine that started growing under and all around one of our oak trees as well as part of our fence.

We weren't sure what it was, but it was pretty, so we let it grow, wondering if it would produce any fruit or anything. Yesterday, we found this crazy spiky, green fruit on it, and decided that we had to know what it was. 

Turns out it is a wild cucumber. According to SF Gate it doesn't strangle the trees it grows on, so I guess we don't have to kill it, but perhaps we don't want to let it grow everywhere it wants to go. 

Our First Egg

We got our first egg! We think it was an Easter egger because it has a greenish/blueish tint.  You can see that it is much smaller than a "large" egg from the grocery store from the second picture. We don't know if they will get bigger as the chickens get older or not. They chickens are just under five months old.

Our first egg!

Our egg on the left, a "large" egg from the grocery store

Loving 4H

The girls need to have Western wear for some of the 4H horse events so we bought them some new hats. We will be going to our first horse event, a gymkhana that our club is putting on. The girls aren't going to be riding yet, but it will be fun to see all the events and watch their friends compete.

Aaron had his first event, Area Presentation Day. He will go to the County Presentation Day in April. Depending on how well he does there, he could move on to state which competes during the 4H Field Day, which sounds like it would be fun to go to regardless of whether he is competing.

Our Chicken Coop

I realized that I never put pictures of our coop up. The indoor picture is from November, so the chickens are MUCH bigger now.

Ron designed it all by himself, no plans were used. He did a lot of reading about coops, and we looked at a whole lot of plans together to get a feel of what we liked, and then he went designed it on his own. 

We have a few more things to do. It still needs steps to the door so the kids and I can more easily get inside. And we need to add access doors to get to the nesting boxes from outside. But it is fully functional! 

Wild Life on the Farm

A few of the animals we have found on the land.

California Toad

Gopher Snake

Tarantula

Island Fence Lizard (I think)

We also have rabbits, squirrels and gophers, but I really like the non-cute and fuzzy ones the best!

Fruits and Veggies

It's not all chickens on the Potter Farm, we've also been working on the garden. And when I say "we" I really mean "Ron."

Last weekend he put in some fruit trees and table grapes.

The girls planted a row of strawberries and Ron put in a soaker hose

We also have some beans growing that we planted a few weeks ago,

Hopefully we will have some nice fruits and veggies this summer. As long as the gophers don't eat them first.  

We'll see what we get up to this weekend. I still have to add pictures of some of the creatures we've found as we've been working in the garden.