Located in Helena, Montana. Zone 4b
Our quarter acre, urban farm where we’re creating habitat for pollinators and native species while trying to feed ourselves.
Some Posts from the Farm
- Hummingbird Musings OR Why can’t we see that the whole world is a bountiful garden?
For the last month or so the Monardas, or bee balms, have been blooming at our urban homestead. We have five different cultivars sprinkled throughout our food forest, pollinator and herb gardens ranging in color from lilac through magenta to cherry red and in height from about 12 inches to 24. The leaves and flowersContinue reading “Hummingbird Musings OR Why can’t we see that the whole world is a bountiful garden?” - 2021 Growing Season: urban farming by the numbers
It turns out that the lofty goals of building a 500 square foot chicken enclosure, 250 square feet of raised beds, a 20 foot long by 2.5 foot tall rock retaining wall, while also roto-tilling the better part of 2,000 square feet of sod into mulched perennial beds [which amounted to about 14 cubic yardsContinue reading “2021 Growing Season: urban farming by the numbers” - Impermanence, OR how to act when the future isn’t coming
Reading [listening to] Terry Tempest Williams’s essay collection Erosion: Essays of Undoing while building my retaining wall [and maybe doubling down on irony]. It is a transcript of a conversation between herself and Tim deChristopher before his 2011 sentencing after being found guilty of violations of the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act.Continue reading “Impermanence, OR how to act when the future isn’t coming” - Shoulder Seasons: lessons in non-attachment
I had been saving up lots of images and pearls of wisdom about gardening and permaculture in the inter-mountain west to write something about the Farm. Things had been going very well for over a month. Temperatures had been unseasonably warm, annuals were germinating on the their own from last year, the rhubarb was outContinue reading “Shoulder Seasons: lessons in non-attachment” - Animal Husbandry, OR Yes, I think we are going to eat these
On our urban farm we already have chickens, but these chickens are for eggs. Yesterday, we got chickens for meat. In some ways, thinking of the adorable balls of fluff cheeping under their heat light in our boiler room, it seems unthinkable that in September we are intending to turn them into chicken, the meat.Continue reading “Animal Husbandry, OR Yes, I think we are going to eat these”
The Oracle of Z 