Pretend Farming...

Being a pretend farmer makes me happy...  :D  

Not farm-related, but still exciting to me.  Our grass is coming in, and so are my lilies!!!  So are the weeds... but the grass is finally big enough that we can spray for the weeds once the storms clear out.

This is what the front yard looked like before.  It may not look all that worse, but every bit of that green was weeds.  There was NO grass!  We had to pull up the sod that was there and put down seed.  At least my "after" picture... (no, let's call it my "during" picture) is mostly grass.  We're headed in the right direction... slowly.



My Garden:

The plants in the front are pumpkin, the ones in the middle are zucchini and butternut squash, and the plant in the back is watermelon!!!  I'm really excited about the watermelon, because I've tried to plant watermelon two times before and this is the first year it's survived!  I should have taken a picture when it wasn't so hot because the leaves are drooping here, but they look great in the evening!

The board is actually there on purpose.  We have an infestation of Squash Bugs, and I've found that if I leave the board there over night, in the morning the bugs are underneath it and I can smash them all at once.  These bugs destroy squash plants, so I was glad to find some sort of a solution.

The row on the left is a bit of cucumber and a bit of sugar snap peas.  We've started getting peas off the vine, which is fun!
The middle row is carrots, and the row on the right (up against the fence) is green beans.  I planted half a row of bush beans and half a row of garden beans.  No fruit yet, but the plants are doing well.

Corn!!!!  This has been very fun to watch grow!  Two rows of corn... so excited to get cobs off of them!
p.s. I'm experimenting with ground cover this year.  Part of my garden has straw, part of it has grass clippings, and part of it is bare.  I'm keeping my eye on what keeps weeds away the best, and if one seems to maintain moisture better than others.  Grass clippings are winning so far.

The Animals:

Meet Hobbes.  Our last kitty, Tiger, was poisoned and slowly died a few weeks ago.  It was sad.  :(  But we needed a new mouser (any house on our street that doesn't have a cat, has mice... even with traps), so in enters Hobbes.  

"And on the farm there was a... duck!"  We got two ducks this spring, and it turns out one's a male and one's a female!  Soo... ducklings in our future?  This one is the male (a Rouen), and he's turning out to be quite gorgeous, isn't he?  The female is a white Peking duck.  She's loud!  I have a little baby pool in our chicken coop where they swim, and use their water every other day to water my garden.  My garden is loving their presence!  ;)   But they've added a new smell to the coop I'm not loving....  :\  The straw helps.

When we added ducks we got 4 more chicks.  That brings us up to 6 chickens!  In about a month we should be getting a few dozen eggs a week!  Wahoo!  This chick is my favorite.  She's a miniature chicken (a Bantam), and will always be about half the size of the others, with tiny eggs.  She has feathers going down her feet and she's so docile!  Two of the chicks we got should give us colored eggs (either green, blue or yellow), so that's something I'm looking forward to as well.  In addition to the eggs, I love that we can give our food scraps to the chickens and they can work on making the food, the straw and the dirt in their coop into my garden compost for the fall.  Also, they're great pest control!  When I go down to the garden I bring a chicken and it helps me get rid of some of the pests that like to hang around my plants.  Chickens are just awesome to have around on a wanna-be farm!!!