One-Acre Angst

There's nothing quite like having loaded fruit trees in your backyard—where you can just pluck a plum off a branch, polish it on your shirt, and eat it right there at its very freshest. So juicy and delicious. It makes me wish I'd met Mr. W in his 20s when he was all ripe for the pickin'. But I digress...

My point is, I love summertime in our yard. I love that we can harvest peaches and plop them into our caprese salads. (If you haven't done this, you MUST try it. Trust me.) I love that we made fajitas this weekend with an onion we grew. I love that Mr. W and the chickens worked together (he dug the hole and they kicked dirt back into it...) to plant zucchini on Sunday. And I love that the shoulder-high weedfest we had going in our back 40 got mowed down and tilled.

Troublemakers.

But that also brings me to something that doesn't feel so lovey: having so much freaking land it's like we're Tom Hanks and Wilson the volleyball adrift in an infinite sea. Every time I look at that big swath of acreage in our backyard, I get a little touch of vertigo. It's. Just. Too. Much.

See what I'm sayin'?

Our house is like a child's-sized shoebox up there.

As a registered control freak, it completely stresses me out to have that area growing wild and looking so unkempt. And after Mr. W and I went to a birthday party on a beautifully manicured piece of property recently (think freshly mowed grass and white lights draped from the canopy of a beautiful oak) we're both antsy to get this part of the yard into better shape. So he has put his Sketchup skills to work once again, and has begun drafting ideas for our open space. Behold:

Of course I have grand visions of hosting outdoor yoga and coaching classes down there, followed by micro-farm-to-table dinners. And of course we'll be drinking wine made from our yard's own grapes. While Mr. W plays the fiddle and I sing folk songs. It shall be dreamy.

In the meantime, we'll just have to enjoy what we've accomplished so far—like the fire pit Mr. W installed. It's made of cortex steel like the edging in our front yard planters, so it'll get a cool, rusted patina over time. Mr. W sort of built it himself (someone else bent the metal but he riveted it) so no one else has one exactly like this. Pretty sure if it went up on auction it'd fetch like a mil.

We also got the chicken yard fence all completed. Now those little buggars can't escape and poop all over our back patio. 

Anyway, that's where we are with the yard accomplishments and growing angst. I'm sure I'll be cursing and shoveling gravel back there again at some point in the not too distant future...

What's Springing Up Now

After years of gardening and micro-farming, you'd think we would be desensitized to the debut of new buds and veggies each spring, but I tell ya it gets us every single time. Each year when our first artichoke pokes up its head, we cheer. When we uncover the red of a strawberry hiding beneath the plant's leaves, we get giddy (which, lately, is quickly squashed when we find that the chickens have eaten the berries...). The most fun of all is seeing growth we've never seen before—like the emergence of almond fruits on our young tree. Here's a springtastic look at what's going on at our house right now:

So many Meyer lemons. And a mockingbird nest in the tree. Watching Papa bird ferry twigs over all week has been my favorite break from writing marketing copy.

We've been eating a lot of artichokes. There are dozens in the front yard right now and we just can't keep up. Mr. W decided today that we need to make spinach-artichoke dip with them, so that's on the dinner list this week.

Buddha-guarded basil tastes extra good.

A friend kept bringing me chard from her garden because she had so much. Then Mr. W decided to plant some and we have such an abundance I'll probably start giving it away soon.

One of our first almond fruits! Woo hoo!

Sweet onions mixed with a couple marigolds to try to keep the bad bugs away.

A half-eaten strawberry. It would have been our first one of the season but someone else got to it first.

Buds breaking on one of Mr. W's many grapevines.

Purple broccoli. We tried to eat a fair amount but it goes to flower so quickly, it's hard to keep up.

Funkytown purple broccoli. I have no idea what happened here but it looks like a caterpillar took over the plant.

These suckers had been in their box for months but they still turned out ok and tasted quite good with a little sea salt, olive oil, and rosemary.

New plum tree (we think...it was a freebie from Mr. W's dad).

My sweet little cactus flower that bloomed and fizzled out in 3 days. So pretty while it lasted.

Baby tomato plant that I so badly want to grow and start gracing us with the fixins for Caprese salads.

Each season is a delight and I'm hopeful that we'll have more time to devote to the garden-farm (farden? farmden? garm?) now that our major renovation projects are winding down.

Wait, what am I saying? The construction around this place never stops. In fact, just this weekend we started building a new fence in the side yard because those feathered little wienerbeaks Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha kept breaking out of the "fence" we had. Yes, the quotation marks are more than necessary because the "fence" consisted of one of the closet doors we ripped out of our bedroom + a piece of the previous fence propped up by 4x4s and a metal pipe + a scroll of chicken wire, under which the girls kept escaping. It was a sad, sad yard barrier.

 

Naughty, naughty sneaker-outers.

The new fence should be a heck of a lot prettier than the ramshackle one we had, and will hopefully do a far better job of keeping the chickens where they belong. You know, in the planter boxes, eating all of our strawberries...