Planning the Urban Farm

After reading back over some of our past posts, I realized we never followed up by posting about everything we said we were going to. Allow me to address some of that.

When we moved into our place, the lot was pretty simple. It had a lot of grass and mulched borders. It was quite unproductive. Here is what it looked like:

The box in the center left is the house. The odd rounded shape in the right was all lawn.

After some work removing sod and mulch. And after tilling, we managed to make some headway. Here is roughly what the lot looks like now:

We've increased the garden space, added the chicken coop and outdoor run (along the far right edge), put in a compost bin, and done some terracing out front for herbs (on the far left). In the parking strip between the sidewalk and the road we planted iris bulbs and 2 apple trees. Here is a shot of the back yard from late last summer:

This is far from being done. Ideally, we would like to remove all the grass, leaving just a pathway through the middle of the back yard. The entire north edge of the lot will have a permeable pathway (replacing the poorly drained sod that turns to mud with any rain and replacing the pea gravel that forms a path by the back door). We also want to put in cold frames along the west side by the sidewalk so we can take advantage of the sun in extending our growing abilities during winter and spring. Here is what it might look like:

There. That's the vision for our urban farm. As we work closer and closer to this we'll keep you all posted!

-Fauna