Where to start?

 Even though it is late in the season to start thinking about a vegetable garden, we plan to work on our infrastructure this year and plant a small fall crop of cucumbers, potatoes, lettuce, carrots, parsnips and herbs.  We are working on a few batches of compost to start amending our soil instead of bringing in loads of topsoil and fertilizer.  Topsoil and fertilizer can be expensive and you don't really know what you're getting.  Our grass clippings and chicken poop, however, are free!

Our sad little fence is all that separates our lot from the road, a PUD substation and the rest of our neighborhood.   We only have the one side of our property fenced but hope to re-fence the whole thing soon so we can keep our critters in and the neighborhood dogs out. 

These little ladies are some of the hardest working members of our crew.  Even though only one of our three chickens is laying eggs right now, the other two are skilled fertilizer producers and...

they sure know their way around a compost pile.  They love to dig for worms which helps to aerate the pile. (Don't worry, the chickens only go out in the yard while I'm standing there with them.  Otherwise they cruise around the yard in their chicken tractor, totally protected from dogs, neighborhood children and other pests.)  

The projects we will be focusing on this week are:

• Raised beds (one or two to start)
• compost bins
• planting potatoes in an unexpected way
• planting dill seeds in the front yard

For these projects and all of our projects we will be using as many repurposed and salvaged items as  possible.  Why not keep some gently-used but still perfectly good stuff out of the landfill?  And we're doing this on the cheap so every penny saved by finding free or really inexpensive used stuff is what we're all about!