For us that meant to finally have the time to catch up on some reading and getting more familiar with gardening principles and broadening our horizons and understanding.

One book that I bumped into at the local library was “Solar Gardening: Growing Vegetables Year-Round the American Intensive Way” by Leandre Poisson and Gretchen Vogel Poisson.

With the relatively short growing season at higher altitude (~5400 feet) and a low humidity climate this book holds some interesting ideas on extending the growing season that could be adapted to the active fallow methodologies…

I will have to study this book a bit more but I already like that it provides hands on instructions with construction plans that use low cost materials. This looks like a doable project for an experiment…

I will keep you posted.

But we still did harvest quite a bit last year

Samples of our Active Fallow harvest last year

and learned a lot but just didn’t seem to find the time to update our website.

Well, it’s a new year and a new start and we are back.

Hope to see you around!

Here we go: Do you recognize what this is? If you know the answer leave a comment. Good luck!

This was the last quiz picture:

And Carolie came up with a realy good guess for a goat’s eye. If you’ve never looked a goat in the eye, you should definitely do it because a goat’s pupil is a horizontal rectangle! Yep, not a round pupil like most of the animals have. Check it out:

Here is the correct answer to Quiz #2: a bee!

Enjoy!

a delicious sweet pea

and a spicy radish!

It is a pretty awesome feeling when you loosen the soil around the radish, pull on the leaves and this nice red radish pops out. My sons were really proud that their watering has paid off. In their excitement they wanted to pull out everything at once but learned to restrain themselves.

But now we had to speed home so that we could taste OUR radish. Oha, that was a spicy little red radish! But surprise, because it was OUR radish my older son actually liked this spicy little devil. Wow! I am impressed…

The kids can’t wait to go back and get more… haha!

It all started with the goat refusing to eat and not getting up. Even the vet couldn’t figure out what was wrong but started the goat on antibiotics anyway. After a few days of antibiotics, massages and extra care the goat started to eat again, started to walk again and seemed on the way to recovery – when I suddenly received the news that the goat had passed away.

That hit us all by total surprise as the goat was seemingly doing really well…

The goat found its final resting place below the willows past the greenhouse. Good-bye, dear goat!

Seconds later, a beautiful pheasant strutted out of the grass, inspecting the disturbance (us), crossing our plot and disappearing into the tall grass on the other end. Good thing I always keep my little digital camera in my pocket!

Wow, what an experience that was! I’ve only seen stuffed pheasants in a museum but this was really something else…

With the produce starting to grow to a point where some can be harvested the aisles are being trampled on a bit more and the tilling becomes more important.

You can definitely make out the order in which the beds were planted with the first bed showing lots of stuff growing and subsequent beds a bit behind.

The first bed contains: garlic, onions, peas, spinach, mixed greens, mustard, endive and fennel.

The second bed contains: carrots, beets, green onions, summer squashes (zucchini, yellow squash), winter squash (butternut), broccoli, okra, flowers, assortment of tomatoes.

The third bed contains: potatoes, corn, strawberries, radishes, beans, squashes.

The fourth bed contains so far potatoes, corn, and squashes and is waiting for the some more produce.

The fifth and last bed is waiting for the peppers, eggplant and other produce. We’ll plant them with in the next week or so.

It looks like we could definitely need more greens and the herb garden will need to be started too. On Saturday we will be at Coastalfield’s “Learn How to Plant Herbs” educational series.

Enjoy!