Redoing the landscaping

The important thing to see in this picture is what you don't see. But imagine with us, edible berries on bushes along the foundation and hardy kiwis growing up the pillars. The other day, we used the tractor to rip out the old bushes along this side porch, making room for our new edible landscaping. All of over the farm, we're slowly intergrating edible bushes, vines and trees into the landscape. Some of the newest additions include pinenuts, a hardy citrus, a hardy pomegranate, chestnuts, a cork oak, and some hazelnuts.

Putting the sweetpotatoes to bed

A week ago, we bedded up our sweet potatoes. The onion plants had come out of these coldframes so they were mostly ready to go for growing our sweet potato slips. This year, we're growing them in sawdust, so we dug out most of the soil and filled back in with some aged sawdust. This picture shows before we finished covering them with more sawdust. We're excited to be growing many of our favorites, especially Porto Rico, white triumph and Red Japanese. We also have some new ones to try this year, including an all-blue one. It will probably be another month before the weather is consistently warm enough to start setting out the slips in the garden. In the meantime, we're still feasting on sweet potatoes dug last fall. They are great keepers.