Last week Ellie and I put a new-to-us tool to work for the first time. Our own wood chipper.
You may recall that two falls ago (2022), I borrowed our farmer’s wood chipper (and one of his giant tractors to run it). A little while after that, I was at our tractor dealership, and our sales guy said, “Hey did you ever get that brush pile cleaned up? We have a used chipper here, and your tractor could probably run it.”
Well, the brush was cleared, but I knew there would be more to come. After thinking about it for a few days (and with some encouragement from my sister), I bought it.
But up until this spring, I still hadn’t used the chipper yet. Though I had been rebuilding the brush piles.
So finally I asked our sales guy to come out, and he helped me hook up the chipper and made sure everything worked properly. And then we blasted through the branches.
The chipper worked so, so well. It handled big stuff, small stuff, green stuff, dry stuff. The chips are nice and small (our farmer’s chipper let a lot of sticks through). And it gives us great mulch to use in the gardens–much better than burning the brush as we’ve done in the past.
For anyone interested in the details, the chipper is a Wallenstein BX42. It can handle branches that are up to 4 inches, though at our farm that’s firewood. I probably chipped a few 3 inch pieces, and they went through just fine. Our Kioti CS2410 (24hp) tractor runs it easily.
The chipper is a useful attachment, and I’m glad that we have it. It’s a good way to clean up branches, which we always have here at the farm.
Do you have any new tools at your house? Do you use mulch in your gardens? Who else buys something, but then takes a while to use it?
Looking ahead to projects for 2024, I feel like I need a bit of a reset. So this year’s home goals list is pretty modest. There are some familiars (vegetable garden), some get back on track (coop), some finish it off (driveway) and some regroup (clean up).
Read on for more details about what I’m hoping to accomplish this year.
Driveway
In 2020 we built the garage and mudroom. In 2023 we built the patio. The last thing to finish off the south side of the house is to pave the driveway. I’m not paving the whole lane, but I would like to have one section with a solid surface. It makes for easier plowing and maintenance. It will also give our girl a smooth spot for biking and scootering, rather than riding circles inside the garage (or testing the limits of training wheels in the snow).
Coop
The coop returns for another year. First up, framing a new wall to close up the side of the barn. This has been on my to-do list for more than a year, and I haven’t done it. I met with one of the contractors who built our garage last week to see how much it will cost to have him build the wall. I expect it will be out of my budget, but talking through the plan with him has made me feel like maybe it is DIYable. And then I can save my budget for other things like eavestrough, electrical and fences.
Vegetable garden
As you saw in my Home Goals 2023 wrap up, the vegetable garden was a bit of a disappointment last year. I’m hoping we can get back on track and make some more progress this year.
Clean-up inside
This goal is probably my biggest reset. I’m currently feeling like every single space in our house needs tweaking, organizing, purging. I’m honestly not sure where to start as I also feel like I’m in the middle of a stack of dominoes. I need to move the old king-size headboard out of my room, but I need a space to put it, which means reorganizing the cold cellar (or stashing it in the barn). Reorganizing the cold cellar means building better lumber storage in the garage. (And I can play this game for pretty much every room in our house.) This goal is a good example of why it’s helpful to “just start,” because anything will be progress.
Clean-up outside
There is always an area to clean up outside. This year I’m focusing on two big brush piles, continuing to maintain the septic bed, and working my way further along the “junk pile.” With 129 acres, narrowing my focus is essential, but I feel like I made good progress on the clean up category last year, and hopefully this year I can build on that.
I’m looking forward to getting back on track, making progress, and crossing some things off my list this year. Stay tuned.
Do you have any home goals for this year? Anyone else feel like they need a reset?
Last year was a different kind of year. I started a new job as a college instructor. We took a big trip to Ireland and had other getaways and day trips. This meant that there wasn’t as much time for working on the farm.
As we start 2024, I feel like I left a lot undone last year. But as I look back at the goals I set for 2023, I feel like maybe I didn’t do too bad.
Here’s a review of some of what we did and last year’s home goals.
Coop
My plan was to have the coop completely finished by the end of the year so that we’re ready to bring home some chicks this spring. That did not happen. Our landscapers cleared the old foundation, Matt’s Dad helped tear apart the roof sections and burned a lot of the old wood. I piled more lumber that I hope to reuse and cleaned up the area inside the barn where I want to build. But we still have a big hole in the side of the barn and no pens inside. I’m not giving up, though. The coop will return this year along with other barn upgrades, like eavestrough, exterior lighting and probably some more electrical.
Patio
The driveway patio was the biggest success of last year. Our contractors were great and the result is fabulous. With a comfortable dedicated dining spot, we ate breakfast outside every day and many other meals as well. The herb garden surprised me with how well it did and we were still clipping herbs into December. The new border of rocks around the garden adds so much to the front of the house. The patio is a small area, but it’s added so much to the house and how we live. I am thrilled with how this project worked out.
Swing set
The swing set was another success–and something I accomplished (mostly) on my own. The swing set is big enough for our girl and strong enough for underdoggies. I think it will also grow with her as she learns to swing more on her own and uses the hanging bar and rings more. I also made a few other playground upgrades at the same time, spreading mulch, attaching a ladder to Ellie’s climbing tree, and adding a flag to her treehouse. It’s become a great play zone for her that will last for years.
Vegetable garden
The vegetable garden ties with the coop for my biggest failure. I started 2023 feeling optimistic and even ambitious, so I think that makes it harder that by fall the garden just… fizzled. The timing of my new job and our trip coincided with clean-up season, and eventually I closed the gate and walked away. The raspberries have not been pruned and dead plants have not been pulled. Never mind new mulch, compost, pathways, or growing beds. The garden is another project that will return though.
Turnaround garden
The turnaround garden saw some progress last year, though it’s still pretty haphazard. We added more transplants from a friend, some garden decor with my Dad’s bike and a memorial for Matt’s Mom with a strawberry hydrangea tree. Every garden is a work in progress and an ongoing project. The turnaround feels all that even more. We will keep working at it.
Ellie’s bedroom
A year ago, I wasn’t sure I could convince Ellie to switch rooms. But once we started the makeover, she was all in and eventually set a deadline for me to finish the project because she was so excited to move in. “Finish” is slightly conditional as there are a few details that I still want to do, but she is fully settled and has added lots of details to make it her own. And we’re both sleeping better with a little more space between us.
Like every year, 2023 was a mix. There is no shortage of work on a farm and a fixer-upper house. Just mowing the grass regularly felt like an accomplishment (and thank goodness my cousin came every other week to help me with that). But we did more than that too.
I used the rotary cutter more than I ever have before and did it on my own. Our septic bed and the upper edge of our front field are now in “maintenance mode,” which is big progress. We also did lots of clean-up: picking up litter, clearing overgrown areas, and cutting trees (Matt’s Dad gets credit for this).
Despite feeling a bit discouraged on the project front, I am proud of the balance we found last year. We did so many things, both on and off the farm, and the year was full of fun, love and joy. For us, that’s what life is about. It’s not what the house looks like or whether the property is perfectly groomed. What matters is the people who are here and the things we do together. Projects are part of that, but there’s a lot more too, and that guided our time in 2023.
Did you do any projects–big or small–at your house last year? Did anything disrupt your plans?
In the centre of the part of the farm we call the meadow, halfway between the pines and the pond, is a big old apple tree. This tree makes me think about the life of this property.
The woman who was born here in 1936 says there wasn’t a pond when she was growing up. It was a stream that they crossed every day on their walk to and from school.
Another former owner that I’ve met called the meadow the orchard. Just two apple trees remain now.
This year was an amazing year for apples. Unfortunately, the weight was too much for this big old tree. Several limbs broke, including one huge section. I feel like half the tree has fallen.
As usual, Matt’s Dad came out with his saws and helped me clean up. The apple tree has grown wild for as long as we’ve been here (and maybe before that). Pruning has been on my list, but I have not done it. There were suckers around the trunk, twigs going in every direction and the aforementioned broken branches.
Matt’s Dad cut most of the suckers. We left one big one, as I hope this could become a new tree if the original tree does not survive. He cut up the fallen limbs and I piled the brush at the edge of the meadow. I loaded the logs into the tractor and brought them up to the woodpile.
The tree could use more pruning. With all the work that Matt’s Dad did, I can now get to it a little more easily. And pruning goes back on the list for next year. Then we can maybe finally do something with all of those apples.
This tree has seen a lot of changes to the farm, the people and the surroundings. I hope that it will stay with us and continue to grow as we grow with the farm.
Expanding the turnaround garden was one of my goals for 2023. When I started working on the turnaround 10 years ago, my plan was to have a whole circle filled with lush plantings.
We put up the flagpole and a brick pathway (that I envisioned someday overhanging with greenery and flowers). Then I filled half of the circle and realized that the turnaround was so large that it basically swallowed up every plant I put there. So one half became a flower garden (which has filled in decently, though some of the gaps are filled with weeds). The other half we mowed.
Then this spring’s patio project came along. The garden around the well was going to be torn out and reconfigured. So almost exactly a year ago, Ellie and I quickly moved a bunch of plants from the well garden to the unplanted half of the turnaround.
We still have a long way to go with this garden. The turnaround is still big and still eats plants. Our transplanting has been very hasty, so we dig holes wherever and don’t pull up the sod in any methodical or expansive way. But, most of the plants we moved survived, and we’ve since added a few more. It feels like a garden is starting to come together.
We’ve spread some mulch and made a little stepping stone path to the flagpole.
We also added two things this year which changed the significance of this garden.
The first is my Dad’s bike. This is an old bike with no gears, no handbrakes. I remember my Dad riding it (often with one of my siblings in the baby chair behind his seat) when we’d go for family bike rides. It’s rustic, like the farm, and makes a nice sculpture in the garden–and is a happy reminder of my Dad.
The second addition is a memorial tree for Matt’s Mom. Matt’s Dad’s friends wanted to plant a tree in her honour, and Matt’s Dad decided he wanted it to be at the farm. (His friends also planted a tree here for Matt.) So a few weeks ago they brought a strawberry hydrangea tree and added it to the turnaround.
It’s special to me to have these reminders of my Dad and Matt’s Mom, two people who are so precious to us.
The garden is a memorial in another way. Ralph is buried beside the flagpole. I like that they are all together here at the heart of the farm.
Do you have any memorials at your house? Do you have any in-progress gardens?
Over the summer, Ellie’s playground got a few upgrades.
The treehouse has been a hit, and I’m so glad that I made it for her. It’s large and high (with room for her to grow) and has most of the things she likes (she is very proud that she has mastered the firepole).
She had very quickly outgrown the little playground that I bought for her three years ago, so this spring I sold it. The departure of the playground meant we no longer had swings, so building a swingset was on my to-do list.
But before I could get to the swingset, we did a few other things.
First was adding a simple ladder to her climbing tree. I knew we had a little section of wooden ladder somewhere in the barn. When I stumbled across it one day, I immediately grabbed it and brought it out to the tree she likes to climb (but can’t reach the lowest branches on her own).
A little digging anchored the bottom of the ladder into the ground. A few screws anchored it into the tree. And our girl scrambled up right away. She also enjoys jumping off the ladder. (I’m used to her leaping, so my heart doesn’t completely stop anymore.)
Next up was spreading woodchips under the treehouse. I’d had a load of mulch delivered for this purpose and the pile was where I wanted to put the new swingset.
Unfortunately, when I was ready to move the mulch, the tractor wasn’t due to a flat tire. A shovel, a pitchfork, a wheelbarrow and tenacity got the job done.
First I mowed the grass under the treehouse extra short. Then I covered it with a layer of cardboard. (That person you saw heaving surprisingly heavy bales of cardboard from the drugstore’s recycling pile into the trunk of her car? That was me.) Then I spread a very thick layer of chips under and around the treehouse.
The mulch cleaned up the treehouse so much. No more crazy grass and weeds sticking up here and there. No more contortions as I try to mow under the platform. Ellie also enjoys it as it makes a softer landing zone for her jumping.
With the mulch pile gone, I moved onto the swingset. I had bought a set of brackets and swings off kijiji last spring. I’d even bought the 4×4 lumber I needed to go with them and found the instruction manual online, and then it all sat in the garage for the winter.
Assembling everything was pretty straightforward. Though moving, attaching and flipping 10 foot tall A-frames required some creativity (thank goodness the tractor was back in action by then). My sister also gave me a lift to move the swingset to its final position.
I purposely chose ten foot lengths, even though the manual called for eight, as I planned to sink the A-frames into the ground to anchor them securely. Matt’s Dad helped me dig the holes and move the posts into them. Then a few bags of concrete, some dirt on top and a sprinkle of grass seed, and the swingset was complete.
The final touch for the playground was a flag. The bracket and flagpole have been on the treehouse for more than a year, but I finally sewed up a personalized pennant last week. Ellie helped to colour in her name, and she now loves waving the flag around.
This spot has come together as a great play zone for our girl. Ellie now has a treehouse with tire ladder, firepole and slide, a climbing tree, and swingset with two swings and bar or rings.
The vegetable garden is a mix of highs and lows right now. A nice change, since the last few years have been all lows all the time.
I’m not quite as high as I was last fall, when the garden was cleaned out for the season and I had grand visions for the possibilities that awaited us. But I’m not in the doldrums either.
I’m working at it.
We are using about half the garden this year. One quadrant has mulched pathways and beds that I established last fall. My mission there has been filling the beds (mixed success) and maintaining the paths (mixed success there as well).
The highest of our highs is a surprise. Three potato plants that appeared at the edge of one of the mulched pathways. I am pretty sure the last time we planted potatoes was 2018, so these have been lurking in the weeds for some time. Potatoes are always Matt’s, so these three plants feel like a gift from him. We’re calling them Daddy’s potatoes, and we’ve pledged to always leave some surprise potatoes in the garden.
The next high is our raspberries. We have so many canes and they are loaded with fruit. One of the highlights of working in the garden this spring was hearing hundreds of bees pollinating the berries. This is also our first year harvesting from plants I transplanted from Matt’s Dad, and the berries are beautiful.
The lowest of our lows is of course the weeds, which are still thriving. I’m reminding myself that they are very well established. It’s going to take effort to knock them back. Thistles and milkweed are our major invaders. (I know milkweed is important for monarchs. We have lots all around the farm and have transplanted many plants this year. I’ve decided they don’t get the vegetable garden too.)
Then we have the plants that I want to grow in the garden. These are not as well established as the weeds. We were a bit late in planting this spring, so they’re all still a little small. We also used our old seed stash, so we’ve had some spotty germination. The old seeds worked great for the tomatoes and watermelon, but the zucchini, carrots, and lettuce didn’t come up at all and the beans and peas are sparse. I bought fresh cucumber, spinach and beet seeds, but the beets didn’t sprout either. (Though I did have a spinach salad for lunch yesterday.)
But speaking of tomatoes, our bumper crop of seedlings led me to open another quadrant of the garden. This one had been tarped, so it was fairly weed free, but there were no rows or paths or beds. I stuck 70 tomato plants in the ground and figured I’d deal with the infrastructure later. But of course as soon as the soil was exposed to the light, the weeds sprouted. The tomatoes are not placed how I want the beds to be, so I can’t work around them to put in my paths and beds. But I’m going to try to lay down some cardboard in between the rows to try to fight the weeds a little bit.
I planted the herb spiral at roughly the same time as the tomatoes, and I mulched the spiral with wood chips. We have had barely a handful of weeds from that whole bed, so contrasting the herbs with the tomatoes has been a great lesson in the power of mulch.
I’m so committed to my no dig and mulch and cardboard and paths and beds that seeing and walking on the exposed soil in the tomato section felt weird. The areas where I spread cardboard and mulch last year are definitely less weedy than anywhere else in the garden. They’re not weed free. I didn’t have enough cardboard to do the whole quadrant, and the cardboard I did have has now decomposed. So the weeds have broken through in spots, but there are not as many and they are much easier to deal with than the bare soil.
I think I entered no dig expecting truly no dig. The weeds would succumb with one application of cardboard. The worms and bugs and plants would thrive. My garden would be lush and beautiful and low maintenance.
The more I’ve studied, the more I realize that it’s a process. Battling the weeds takes time. Finding my balance of mulch, compost, interplanting, succession planting and just plain planting takes time. I believe that no dig is best for the soil, animals, bugs and plants. I also believe we can get there to a lush and beautiful (but not necessarily low maintenance) garden. I’m working at it.
How is your garden growing? What are you growing at your house? Are you a mulcher? Anyone else experimenting with different growing methods?
We’re halfway through 2023. (Yeah, I know. How did that happen?)
We’ve made progress on all of the home goals I set for this year (yay!) and I’m excited about how far we’ll get over the rest of the year.
Are you excited to check in with me? Here’s how we’re doing so far.
Coop
The last trace of the 100-year-old coop disappeared last month when the crumbling foundation became part of our (now massive) rockpile behind the barn. It was a huge job, and I was grateful that our landscapers were able to handle it while they were here for our patio construction. Next up, the building phase, starting with a new wall for the (still massive) gaping hole in the side of the barn.
Patio
The patio is almost done and it’s fabulous. All the details are coming soon.
Swing set
The swing set fittings and lumber that I bought last year are still stacked in the garage. I sold Ellie’s too-small playset, so we have a spot for her new swings. Then I took delivery of a big pile of mulch, which was dumped in the swing set site (say that six times fast). As soon as I spread the mulch underneath her treehouse, I can build her bigger swing set. In the meantime, our girl has mastered the firepole on her own. She’s so proud of herself, and I am too.
Vegetable garden
I’m still trying to be cautious in the garden. Some days I’m quite optimistic. Others I feel like it’s close to being overrun with weeds (as has happened in years past). We have mostly cleared and planted about half the garden. We have 70 tomatoes, 6 watermelons, plus beans, beets, spinach, carrots, lettuce, zucchini, peas, cucumber, grapes and about a trillion raspberries on their way. I feel like we are getting closer to a no-dig, not too weedy, productive garden. But it takes constant vigilance right now.
Turnaround garden
Most of the plants Ellie and I moved to the turnaround last fall survived. We’ve added some more, made a path to the flagpole and spread some mulch. There’s lots more to go yet, but we’re getting closer to my original vision to fill the whole turnaround with plants.
Ellie’s bedroom
Ellie loves her new room. She has been sleeping in there for several months (although this weekend she started sleeping on the floor). I still have a few things I’m hoping to do to fully finish off the space, along with convincing her to move back into her bed.
I’m really proud of everything we’ve accomplished so far. Every item on my home goals list has had some attention. At the start of the year, I felt like we weren’t just playing catch up anymore or fixing things that were broken. We are finally making progress. Reviewing these goals makes me feel like we’re making lots of progress. I hope the momentum continues.
What’s your big accomplishment so far this year? How are you doing on projects this year at your house? Do you have any home goals?
As I was writing about our patio project and the herb spiral around the well, I took a journey through the blog archives. I came across this post that I wrote just over 10 years ago about the plans I had for outdoor projects and another about some of the progress we’d made.
I marveled at what I accomplished in one weekend and then laughed at myself for all of the landscaping I thought I would accomplish in one year. We’ve completed most of the projects, but they definitely took more than one year. In fact, some of them are still in progress.
The post also included my long term plan, which, I said, “will take who knows how long.”
Funnily enough, we haven’t done too bad on that long term plan. What I enjoyed most, though, was seeing how little my plans have changed over the past 10 years. Some of the projects are done. Some are not. But I still want to do them.
Come take a look back (and ahead) with me.
Here’s our (extremely ambitious) list from 2013.
I’m still working on the turnaround garden (though we were in pretty good shape by 2015). We eliminated most of the flowerbeds around the house, but the ones we kept need ongoing attention (welcome to gardening). I’m continuing to ignore the rubble and rock piles, though they’ve been very helpful for the fireplace and sunroom demo and every rock pick-up we’ve done for the past 11 years. We kept the longe ring and put the vegetable garden there (also in 2015). The pond shore was a saga for many years, but we finally cleared it and built our firepit (in 2020–just 7 years late).
Here’s the long term plan.
The garage and the driveway trees and lights are done. The bridge over the creek, the tree line clean up and the coop are in progress (some farther along than others). I still want to level the dirt pile behind the barn (now known as Grassy Hilltop courtesy of Ellie), although it’s come in handy over the past few weeks when our contractors needed topsoil (and Ellie does not like the idea of Grassy Level Ground). I still imagine how nice it would be to have a dock down at the pond, and I still want to shift the laneway to the back field slightly westward.
Overall, I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. And I’m learning that landscaping is a process–and usually takes longer than I planned. Each thing I do builds on something I did before. And there’s always more to come. Thanks for following along.
Do you have a long list for projects at your house? Do you find what you want changes over time? Who else is ambitious about how much you can accomplish?
As part of the patio project, the garden around our well was completely ripped out. It hurt a little, as this garden was our most established flowerbed, and the plants were huge. But Ellie and I did a lot of transplanting last fall, and despite our rushed, late season, haphazard technique, the plants survived. Our contractors were also very obliging and moved some of the larger shrubs for us.
Faced with a blank slate, I started to re-evaluate the well garden, and I decided to try an herb garden. Herbs can be lovely and decorative, and also of course functional. This garden is very close to the kitchen, so it’s a convenient location for herbs. Plus it receives a lot of sun, which most herbs like.
I decided to try a different planting pattern: a spiral. (Hint: a garden hose is helpful to plan out the curves.)
I came across this idea on Pinterest. Spirals are an established technique for planting herbs. Usually people use some kind of edging (bricks, rocks, wood) and build a twisting bed that gets higher toward the centre. The spiral creates different growing conditions based on where you are on the curve, and herbs are planted in specific locations based on how much sun or water they prefer.
The well garden is round, so it’s a perfect shape for a spiral. I didn’t make ours rise very much, as I don’t love the “tower” visual, but I think the design and principles will still work. We have lots of rocks, so I used those to lay out the spiral, and we even had a start on the herbs.
My Mom gave me a big planter of herbs for Mother’s Day, so I used that. Matt’s parents gave Ellie a lemon balm plant, which she loves. Another friend gave me some echinacea. We also have chamomile growing wild around the farm, mint behind the house, and chives that I transplanted from my parents years ago. Ellie and I bought one lavender bush, a plant which I’ve wanted to add to the farm for a while. I also took a broad interpretation of beneficial plants and added some milkweed too.
It took us just a couple of hours to lay it out and put all the plants in the ground. Everything is small and a bit droopy right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing them grow.
Thinking about this new garden was energizing and fun, and I’m excited by how it came together.
Do you grow herbs at your house? Have you tried any new gardening techniques? How do you mix beauty and utility in your garden? Anyone else starting a new garden this year?
Home on 129 Acres 