Building with Dirt (Part 1)

Shortly after Aaron and I got married, we bought a piece of land. Dreams of building our own house morphed into the reality of home construction in early 2008. This is the short version of the story of our home; I hope it will be useful to anyone considering building a more-or-less green home. We made a lot of difficult choices and compromises about materials and designs, and ended up with a very happy hippie home that we adore.

Mystery Rooster

One day, a rooster showed up on the doorstep of---not our house, but the henhouse. He'd been wandering in the desert for who knows-how-long and found his way to our chicken coop with its five cute redheads (what luck!). He looked healthy, maybe a little thin, and he was friendly when we approached to give him food and water. We had no idea where he came from; we had never heard a single cockle-doodle-do in our neighborhood before. 

Rex the mystery rooster on the day he showed up.

Anytime Pumpkin Pie

After the Thanksgiving and holiday rush on pumpkin pie, a few more months pass before we make it again. When it starts to feel like summer's almost here, we always realize we still have a few of last summer's pumpkins sitting decoratively on the counter, and we finally make the last few batches of pumpkin pie before the growing season begins anew. We love the vegetabley goodness of pumpkin pie with garden pumpkins absolutely any time of year, and this is my go-to recipe.

Pumpkins and squash sitting decoratively in the kitchen.

Building a Chicken Coop

We built a coop in Summer 2012 for a small flock of 5 hens. It was our first time raising chickens, so we learned a lot along the way. Here's an overview of the design and construction of our coop and food and watering systems.

Our Greenhouse

I'll start by describing the greenhouse design and building process, and then briefly show what we've grown inside during its one year of operation to date. Later posts will cover our greenhouse growing techniques, successes, and failures in much greater detail.

About "Farewell to Spring"

Welcome to our gardening blog! We have been growing fruit and vegetables in our high-altitude New Mexico garden for years now, and our focus is growing as much food as possible, as sustainably as possible, during all four seasons. To that end, we've collected years' worth of data, which we plan to share here so that others may learn from our gardening experimentation. Our goal is to present the data in ways that are graphically appealing and easy to understand. Eventually, we hope to share tools to help readers collect and manage their own gardening data, and learn from their experiences from year to year.

A harvest of ripe orange 'Persimmon' tomatoes and other goodness, Summer 2013.