Blog Update!
For those of you not following me on Facebook, as of the Summer of 2019 I've moved to Central WA, to a tiny mountain town of less than 1,000 people.

I will be covering my exploits here in the Cascades, as I try to further reduce my impact on the environment. With the same attitude, just at a higher altitude!

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

My spread

Okay peeps, I know you're all wondering about what kind of spread I have to work with on my urban homestead. Well, even though we live in the city of Seattle, our lot size is actually quite large. When our development was built (in the 50s) it was just north of the city line so the lot size restrictions didn't apply.

We just moved into our current house last year. Our previous house was basically a on postage stamp sized lot, so I'm not exaggerating when I say the lot is twice as big at 7000 square feet.

Quite a bit of the current lot is taken up by the house and deck, but we still have a bunch of space in the backyard as well as several existing raised beds to work with.

I'm in the process of digging up some of the sod in the backyard (got to leave some for the chitlins) to put in more raised beds. It's a slow process with the rain and lack of time. Right now it looks like a few cemetery plots have been dug up out back.

I also need to buy the wood for raised beds. I've been looking at cedar planks from Home Depot and Lowe's and will probably put in three or four 4' x 4' beds. I wouldn't mind buying some pre-made raised beds, but they are expensive so unless I get really lazy, I'll be constructing them myself. I'd love to get beds made from ORCA board, which is made from recycled plastic, but they are really expensive.

If anyone has any hints or tips on constructing their own raised beds, send 'em my way.

Anyway, I'll post pictures of my progress disemboweling the backyard. I better get crackin' as it will be planting time soon. Fortunately, my husband, Mr. Chicken, doesn't mind me tearing up the backyard. In fact, even though he walks through it every day, he didn't notice that I already started digging it up.

1 comment:

Niobium said...

We live in rural New Hampshire, so what we have abundant you probably don't living in the city.

The garden beds Wolf built came from the woods out our back door. He went looking for fallen trees, shaved the bark off, and cut them to the size we wanted. To hold them together, he cut branches to use as stakes. You can see pictures on Howling Hill.

Maybe you can get logs/branches from your local landfill. Often times they keep yard waste seperate from household trash.