What can we do on a small urban property? **WARNING*** this is a really long post!

[ChickAudie]

I live in CO too! I have a TINY yard, seriously not even an acre, and all my friends are SHOCKED that I have what I have! I REFUSE to water anything I don't eat! So.... we have 4 chickens, which I let out to range during the day in the tiny but well enclosed yard. In summer we have a huge garden, literally my entire back yard. EXCEPT for a small boarder of rock, which every year I clear out part of and add move garden real estate. We also have 2 big potato boxes, I thought our potatoes might be dead because they looked like it. We too did the boxes with adding boards. I found out however by digging like a badger on crack into those boxes, I had a good 10 lbs of potatoes in each! Totally happy!

As for your soil, I too have to keep adding compost, if you want to grow good carrots you need to compost like crazy because of our soil. This year we had a good haul. We also have a bee hive, this is amazing for the garden! I am in love with the bees! I highly recommend bees! Even if you don't do honey bees, you can do cutter bees or mason bees, they don't sting. Totally awesome! The honey for me is a draw! I love that I can provide home grown honey for my allergy sensitive children. I'll try to figure out if I can put in a pic or two of our little house garden. The upside, is soon we are going to move into a bigger house, and all i care about it having a big kitchen and huge yard! I really want a greenhouse. It's on my wish list! Nice to meet you!







We also have a HUGE raspberry patch on the side of the house which I planted as these two pathetic little sticks 5 years ago, now? I dug up shoots for friends! Our corn reached 12 feet this year, and we had a LOT of yield, I think the corn was due to me always putting in real blood/bone meal into the ground from fish innards we fish a lot. Also, we water but I am sparing with it, I don't over water. The rest of the garden I really have to say the bees were awesome. AND for the 1st time in 5 yrs I was able to grow Okra... it just reminded me that sometimes God does listen to you when you pray, and it's the little things that are a blessing!

Lisa

Wow! So impressive!! Bees?? On a small plot?? Never even thought about it! You are amazing!

 

[the-bird-man]

i like having rain barrels to catch water off my house and i keep goldfish and duckweed in them. i like berries, i have tons of raspberries and the chicken poop is great for them. i planted seedless grapes on my garden fence along with cold hardy kiwi fruit. i do perennial food items like bunching green onion, rhubarb, horseradish. i have a almond tree and a few apple trees. i got some sunflowers that are perennials. i have things like comfrey that i make compost tea with the fish water from the rain barrels. i compost a lot and am very ocd about collecting leaves in the fall and shredding them up for the garden. i too grow some grains for the chickens and they love the actual plants along with the grains. other berries i have are currents, black berries, strawberries loganberries, gooseberries. it is common in parts of the world to plant grapes next to a tree so they grow on the tree. i have rabbits but they are pets. lots of herbs. i do tons of tomatoes and squash among other veggies. a good herb i like is salad burnette, it grows year round and tastes like cucumbers i am very into gardening and landscaping lol. wish i could have bees but i cant due to a neighbor i put all the organic material i can into my soil and even have a chipper to help. i live in utah in zone 6 but most my stuff works to at least zone 5 or lower. all my stuff is organic too. and if i had room i would do a huge greenhouse and do some talipa fish for food. my yard is not huge or anything but i make the best use of space i can

 

[mickey328]

Wow, you've got tons of stuff; I'm impressed! We're hoping to seriously expand our garden next year, by planting in the flower beds, LOL. I don't do much with annuals, so our borders mostly have a decent under structure of perennial shrubs and flowers. I don't see any reason at all not to stuff tomatoes and other veggies in with them. We'd like to put in some raspberries, but they kinda scare me...seems they need a lot of tending to what with training and pruning...and the suckers...ugh Plus, although I like the red ones, the black ones are my faves...and of course they're the hardest to grow. I've thought about rhubarb but our neighbors have a huge plant and let us harvest from it at will, so I may just carry on that way.

What I'd really, really like to do is get some more fruit trees in, but finances are really tight so I'm not too sure when we'll be able to do that. My main goal is to be able to grow enough next year to can and freeze to get us through the winter.

 

[jendodd79]

I have an incredible book but can't remember the title! Something like Urban Farming on a 1/4 acre. It's amazing what you can do! We have 1/3 acre but I'd say a half of that is concrete driveway and parking lot (

) What a waste! I eventually plan on somehow ripping up the parking lot in the back since we don't actually park back there... We have on mature apple tree, 2 new fruit trees, a raspberry patch, 6 raised vegetable beds and an unused greenhouse. And the chicken flock Soon, soon I will have time to expand!

 

[the-bird-man]

oh i forgot i have a cherry tree too and blueberries oh and a filbert. i got food all over lol. raspberries are not much work actually but they can take over. we do have black ones too. i do not train my berries. there is no reason you cant plant food crops in with the flowers, actually i think you should as it will help with pollination. have you ever had currents? i am a big fan of all but the black ones and they take very little work, just water and stuff like that. for a fruit tree why not get a fruit salad tree? its a bunch of different fruits grafted onto one tree so you can have apples, pears, plums etc on one tree. do you like asparagus? you can plant some of that. i actually added onto my garden this year. i figure what i do not eat the chickens and rabbits will. i do not grow corn because i can get it from the farmers for cheaper than i can grow it.

 

[mickey328]

Jen, I have to ask...is a whoodle a whippet/poodle cross? Getting the concrete out will be a chore but you'll have lots more usable space and more water absorption as well. Wish we had even a small greenhouse; that'd be awesome. Of course, if I had some of that concrete, I might consider using it as a base for a rabbit shed

Do you find the black raspberries difficult to grow, bird man? We have a similar climate here...quite arid, so if they grow well for you, they might well do okay here as well. Where I grew up we had a gooseberry and 2 red currant bushes. Can't say I cared much for any of them...mostly they were food for the birds If I don't train the canes, would it mostly be a matter of just chopping the suckers out to keep them from taking over?

We have room for more trees so I'd like to get individual trees...we get the dwarf variety so they really don't take all that much space. We have 2 plums and an apple out there now. I'd like to add another apple, a cherry and maybe a peach. We got a lovely crop off one of the plums this year and now I'm thinking we should have only put in 1 since we got all we needed from it. Hoping for maybe a few apples this year, but the tree's still young yet and they take longer.

We don't grow corn either...it takes so much space and so much water to get enough to make it worthwhile that as you said, it's cheaper and less trouble to get it from the farmers markets. I may put in a few stalks this year just to make poles for the beans to climb on, though. When I've had ears that we didn't get eaten, I just let them dry and give them to the chickens...they have a blast picking all the kernels off 'em.

We have a Concord grape vine off the corner of the deck. We figured it would do double duty...give us enough to make some jam (I can never find 'em in the stores) and provide some shade so we can actually handle being out there (south facing). LOL, didn't discover till a month or so ago that you need to prune them heavily to get them to produce.

 

[the-bird-man]

i have one black raspberry plant that i put in a few years ago and it is in a horrible spot so it has not done as well as i would of hoped but this year it did produce a lot. i will be getting a lot more of them. i think you should try them because you never fully know how well they will do unless you try them. yeah you would just take any suckers out you do not want, for me i find it a great chance to give a gift to friends. some people sale them, that is how i got mine. i love logan berries, they taste like a cross of a raspberry and a blackberry but they grow more out than up. so for apples do you like more tart apples or sweet ones? we have a mac too, we also have a jonathon and a gold delicious and a granny smith. i like the more tart apples. we did have peaches, plums, apricot and pears but i took them out. all but the almond are semi dwarf. all my grapes are seedless and i put them in last year, we had seeded concords but the seeds made it a pain. my garden fence is cattle panels so i have lots of space for vines. when you get your meat rabbits give the grape clippings to them and use some poop on the grape vines. i once had a rabbit that was so big he lived in a dog run with the grapes growing on his run, well he would eat the grape vines as far as he could reach and then fertilized them, it worked great for us and it cut my feed bill for him way down because he was a huge rabbit being 45lbs and the size of a cocker spaniel so you can just imagine how much he would eat lol

 

[mickey328]

Wow, I've never seen a rabbit that big! There's a lady locally we get rabbit manure from and it's really been beneficial. We dumped it all over the actual "garden area" and turned the chickens into it for the winter...even in just a month, they've done a great job of scratching everything up and adding their own fertilizer to it

I'm thinking we may try some raspberries in the front yard. There are a couple spots that get sun pretty much all day, so it might do very well for them.

We prefer tarter apples, Macs are our absolute favorites. I'll have to check bloom times to see if Granny Smiths bloom at the same time...they might cross pollinate nicely. I'm also thinking we may get another couple of grapes to sort of fill in the whole SW corner of the deck. I love grape jam and think Concords make the best. The seeds are a bit of a pain, but when you're processing a bunch you can use a food mill to separate everything and I generally just do it once a year to make jam.

All that's going to have to wait unfortunately...at present, we're saving pennies to get our rabbit cages set up. Too bad my brother doesn't win the dang Powerball instead of just "making donations" LOL!

 

[the-bird-man]

he was one of a kind that is for sure. he would eat anything in sight, even stole some meat off of peoples plates when we would have bbqs. i miss him a lot. he was a flemish giant, those are the largest breed of rabbit but he was even large for a flemish. they are slow growing tho so they are not good for meat rabbits. i do think macs and granny smiths bloom at the same time but i could be wrong. still most are self pollinating so you should be good. we have seedless concords now along with other grapes like red flame, and green. with your meat rabbits you could do worm bins under them and raise worms as treats for the chickens

 

[sumi]

I haven't checked on this thread in awhile. Reason being we've moved. Country, not house! We moved to Ireland nearly a month ago. At the moment we're renting a house on a farm and we have a nice big yard and a barn (half full of the owner's junk). So far we bought some hens and a coop, most important things first! We also picked up some herbs at market and a gooseberry plant and 2 strawberries. They're in pots on the window sill in the conservatory until we figure out when to plant them out. I'm guessing right now would not be good. LOL
We do have some beds with a few plants in it, that we're leaving, but I want to grow some vegetables in there as well. Next year. We have a lot to learn about planting things here and what to grow and when to sow, transplant etc. So any pointers would be enormously appreciated. I really don't have a clue!
One thing I love about this property is that there is a lot of comfrey growing everywhere. It's just everywhere. And so much fallen leaves and stuff for compost.. And it's got a well. And that barn is handy! We got permission from our landlord to raise a pig in there next year. He said one pig would be lonely... I say the freezer is only so big!
We're thinking about a greenhouse/poly tunnel. Still looking at budget options. We don't want to spend too much if we can help it.

So, yeah, starting fresh. I've done this all before, but I'm a little daunted this time. So much to learn still..