When your primary focus is growing food sometimes other plants get overlooked. I have to say I’m definitely guilty of this. In a race to use all of our available space to grow food we made the dumb decision to rip out our landscape that was filled with flowers. Soon after we moved the chickens…
Blogging is a labor of love. I love sharing with you what we’re up to and what we learn. I really hope that all of my readers learn a little something from our adventures and can become more self sufficient in their lives as well. I spend several hours every week researching, writing, finding guest…
My life seems to revolve around farming even when I’m at my day job. Have I mentioned that I’m a landscape design consultant and project manager for a landscape architecture firm? It’s really not as glamorous as it may sound. OK, I admit it doesn’t even sound that glamorous. I spend 99% of my time…
Security. It’s something I never really bring up but I think it’s important that I discuss it. This time I’m not talking about food security, biosecurity or keeping your hens safe from raccoons. Rather I want to discuss keeping an unwanted two legged animal off your property. Over the past year it’s definitely been a…
Another question that came up when I asked our readers to give us their burning questions was what our daily life looked like. They wanted to know just how much work we put into running everything. Of course our days vary greatly depending on the season, what we have going on, and even the day…
You’ve probably noticed that the blog has gone through a few updates in the last few weeks. I decided to migrate it from Blogger over to self-hosted WordPress. I’m still tinkering with the design but hopefully I’ll have it nailed down soon. I really appreciate your patience while this migration goes through. It’s taking me…
Every year I take a look back on the varieties of plants we grew and how they did. Some years I’ll grow multiples varieties of one plant so I can choose the best one for our area. Other times I’ll just switch to a new variety completely to see if will work better. I’ve learned…
Now that I’ve got all the numbers I’m kind of depressed. It wasn’t bad in the grand scheme of things, especially with the animals, but compared to last year’s crops it’s low. The fruit trees don’t help. Of the 27 fruit trees we have we only got fruit off of 11 – less than half…
The seed catalogs are coming in! I always look forward to my two favorite ones – Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek – which are where I buy 99.9% of my seeds. I’ve been experimenting with different heirloom varieties to see which ones do best here. I’ve also been trying the seeds of the same varieties from…
This past weekend we did a radio interview for the Preparation Station on Blog Talk Radio. While I think it’s important to be prepared it really isn’t our primary focus. I will admit though that it got me thinking about what would happen if we were faced with a major catastrophe? Would we be prepared to survive?…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
