Musings of a Back (and Front) Yard Farmer

Here, in Southern California, the weather is starting to look like spring.  Even though it is still winter, there are days when it is 80 degrees outside. The weather tends to flip flop from beautiful, warm and sunny to cool and rainy and everywhere in between.  As the beautiful Spring-like days become more common, I start to think about gardening.

Then, I go outside and start inspecting my little backyard farm … and realize maybe I don’t want to think about gardening. Ay-yay-yay. There is a lot of work to be done.  Granted, I haven’t done much work on it during the Winter months.  But, as I look around, I see I have a lot of catching up to do.

For instance, the Melon Patch, as we affectionately call it doesn't even resemble a melon patch. It kind of resembles more of a garbage patch.  Or, at the very least, it resembles the junk pile on a real farm bigger than the size of a backyard. We have an empty chicken tractor there.  The last chicken vacated that tractor (by dying) months ago. Next to that is the broken up skeleton of what used to provide shade on our patio.  

The plants don’t resemble the corn, beans and melons that I like to plant there.  I found a few ripe tomatoes on a volunteer tomato plant, which is pretty exciting for wintertime.  I also see the remains of a once-thriving butternut squash vine that I didn’t plant … because we don’t really like butternut squash. On the wall are some dead vines. Although, I do see that my berries are starting to make a tiny bit of progress. However, the dragon fruit plant is, sadly, not doing well. And, as you can tell by the weeds overrunning the place, the chickens haven’t even had a chance to work on that area as they usually do in the winter.

I thought I’d do better if I checked out the garden beds. But, alas, not much luck there, either.  The first two beds are looking good.  The chickens have been working the soil there for a while.  We had a nice, thick layer of leaves on top that the chickens have worked into the soil. It’s nice to have the chickens do this work for us, especially since they don’t lay eggs during the winter.  In addition to preparing the soil, they also kindly eat our kitchen scraps for us. Those are some well-fed chickens, I tell ya’. The second bed has a millet plant that not only can I not get rid of, but it apparently doubled in size since last year.  And, the third bed just needs the chickens to work on the leaves.

However, beds 4 and 5 seem to be getting the best of me.  I can’t figure out how to keep them from getting completely overrun by grass. You actually can’t see all the grass because it’s covered with leaves. I’ve tried pulling all the grass out by hand, roots and all, but it still crept back in from the surrounding grass. I also tried covering the grass with cardboard and then dirt before planting. That didn’t work, either. I covered the walkways around the beds with thick, black plastic, but it doesn’t seem to help. And, that last bed has really not grown much of anything for me since we started the garden several years ago.

On the bright side, though.  I do have one beautiful specimen of a chard plant growing in one of the beds.  It supplies me with lovely greens for my green drinks.  I even manage to get a leaf or two into the kids’ smoothies. Try not to be distracted by the farmyard junk in the background.  We're just trying to keep it the ambiance right.

Moving to the front yard, I find climbing roses which have never quite looked healthy; although, last year we got several beautiful roses out of it.

 I have my Nuccio’s Pearl Camellia that I splurged on because I love the flowers it is supposed to grow.

However, for the last 3 years, the best I have gotten is buds that end up turning brown and falling off.

I even managed to kill a mint plant, which, I think is a pretty impressive feat in itself. I didn't think anyone could kill mint.

And, last, but not least – my parkway. It’s supposed to be filled with thick, lovely creeping thyme ground cover like this.

But, sadly, I have never gotten it to look any better than this. I will even admit that this picture was taken immediately after weeding the parkway.

I can’t really explain to you the incredible amount of hours that I have put into weeding this parkway.  It began when we had heavy rains that flooded the parkway after we planted the seeds.  I didn’t know which plants that grew after that were weeds and which were thyme.  When I finally figured it out, I had quite a weeding job to do.  And, I’ve spent countless hours weeding it ever since.

The yard isn’t looking too bad considering we’re just coming out of winter.  And, over the last several years, I can slowly see the goal coming into bloom.  I see I have my work cut out for me in the months to come.

I did find one exciting thing while I was out there, though.  The freesias are blooming!