Gardening plans

Taking a wee break from the last two posts in my Big Changes Series.  I thought I would put up our plans for our garden expansion.  I am sure we could do so much more, but for now this will have to do.  We made some great headway in the herb garden, but looking at these pictures, and the abundance of warm weather we are having I think we had better get to work!!!  Pronto!!  You will have to excuse the wobbly lines.  Our mouse is on the fritz and I was having a hard time getting it to move more than a cm at a time :-) 

Above is our current garden beds.  The red outline behind the beds is where we would like to expand.  Without moving the laundry line we can get two more beds in that space.

I would like to put a bunch of strawberry plants here.

This spot is in the dog area.  The back of our house faces south, so most of our planting needs to be done back there.  With the front of the house up high on a foundation it casts a long shadow on our front yard, making at least half of it unusable.  Our back yard is not as large, and most of it is full of trees.  The above spot would make a great blueberry area.

This area is further along the back of the house, on the other side of the back stairs that you see in the previous picture.  You can see that we need to cut back a bunch of brush.  Not sure what to plant here.  Maybe one or two elderberry bushes and some other veggies.

You can see we've made progress on this area up front.  This is the area that I took a picture of with the rocks bordering it the other day.  This will be the herb garden.

This area is furthest from the house in our front yard.  We want to put a bunch of dwarf fruit trees here.  Again we have more brush to remove.  We have a gentleman who will be dropping off the chipped trees and brush that he gets come spring.  That will hang out along our woods line.  We are hoping to get some free windows to make a makeshift green house/ cold frame.  We saw a stack on craigslist the other day.  We'll have to keep our eyes out for some more.

Along with this we will be putting up more fencing for our goats so we can rotate their living area.  It does no good to keep goats when they are too sick to drink their milk.  Along with rotating them we will also use the chipped wood to help dry up the soggy areas around the barn.  We also need to give the barn a thorough cleaning.  We think at least one of our goats is pregnant.  We think she is due around the end of April.  Plus we've been thinking about our chicken situation.  We have many chickens, but few eggs.  Our egg production has gone up since giving them the oyster supplement, but not enough compared to the number of chickens we have.  We've talked to the girls about 'retiring' the older chickens and bringing in some new ones.  There is a very good reason why many people get a new batch of chick every two years.  After two years the egg production of a chicken goes way down.

Shared on Simple Lives Thursday and Homestead Barn Hop