Vintage Home and Farm

We're excited to have the boom lift here so that we can more easily and safely paint the upper level of our house.  You may recall that last year, after many days of painting, I fell off the ladder while trying to paint a portion of the second story; the ladder slid away from the house and I came crashing down, paint bucket flying and globs of yellow paint splattering all over the place. With a badly bruised leg and hip, and my arm and back wrenched out of whack, I decided to put away my paint brush and work with my husband to come up with a better plan. We finally realized that renting a boom lift was the only reasonably safe way for us to accomplish this task.  The rainy fall season was approaching at that time, and so we had to put off the task until now. We rented a Genie TZ-50 trailer-mounted articulating boom lift from Sunbelt Rentals.  It has outriggers that come down to help make it very stable.  There's a power plug in the bucket so you can run a sander easily without

  When I was recently out in the garden, I noticed that the garlic scapes had grown big enough to curl into a complete circle over the top of each head of garlic, which meant it was time to make garlic scape pesto. This is the first year I've made pesto from our garlic scapes. It was such an easy task and the result was so delicious that we thought it was worth sharing some information about it.  If you are interested in growing garlic, or you already grow garlic in your garden, don't forget about the scapes. Scapes only grow on hardneck garlic varieties.   You may recall that we planted our garlic last October .  The garlic overwinters and then begins to grow like crazy once spring arrives.  Our garlic is usually ready to harvest in July, but in mid to late June we can cut the scapes off, allowing the rest of the plant to continue growing for a few more weeks. Below is what our mature garlic looked like recently, prior to cutting off the scapes.  Take note that the garlic has

The garden is transitioning from spring to summer which can be seen in the new growth that seems to happen overnight. This morning I spent a couple hours weeding, watering, harvesting and enjoying the solitude out there, just me and the bees buzzing around.  I've put little dishes of water all through the garden so that the bees have water.  In each dish are little rocks for them to stand on so they don't drown. Today I spotted our first zucchini flower with a little zucchini fruit growing on it. What good timing, we are down to our last two jars of zucchini relish.   It turns out that the huge, beautiful pepper plants that I thought were growing down there by the beehives are actually tomatillos.  I realized this when I spotted a tomatillo fruit forming on one of the plants.  I really should keep better track of the seeds I'm starting in the house as by the time the plants get outside, they get mixed up and I forget what is growing where.  You can see the tomatillo growing

The past few weeks have been busy here on our little farm.  We added three female ducks to our mixed flock last fall and with the arrival of spring our male ducks suddenly realized they are male ducks. Those big bad boy ducks have been chasing the female ducks unmercifully, and sometimes they even turn their attention to our chickens.  I started putting containers of water up on the tree so that the chickens can climb up there to drink, which gets them away from the bad boy ducks.  Fortunately there are lots of climbing spaces in their chicken run so that they can get away from the ducks. One funny moment happened in the chicken coop the other day.  Three hens were spotted trying to lay an egg in one nest.  They have many other nests to choose from, but they all wanted the one on the corner. Our garden is filling in.  That's garlic there in the image below.  There are about a thousand heads and bulbs of garlic growing out there.  Every evening I've been harvesting a couple of t