Impromptu Trash Project

I recently took Cade out of his daycare, and he is at home with me 100% now. He was starting to develop some less than desirable learned behaviors from a few of the little "thugs" that were in his class. But, I have to say, I did like all the cool activities they had the class doing. So in an effort to continue that in his daily routine, I thought I should come up with some custom stuff to do, Extreme Stay @ Home Mommy style.

Today was a cold spring day, but I wanted to get us out there. So we loaded up the dogs, buckets, shovels, gloves and a giant plastic Tonka excavator in the pickup, and headed off into the adjacent desert. The photo above is a shot of our desert.

Once off the main dirt road, I let the dogs out for a Redneck Dogwalk (I drive, they run). We were scouting for some primo DG (decomposed granite) that I wanted to collect to mulch the xeric aroma garden. We came to a little clear spot off a secondary dirt road. Got out, unloaded stuff, and noticed that it wasn't as pristine and wild as we thought. Someone had made this spot their unofficial shooting zone for quite sometime. It was littered with exploded paint cans, endless spent shotgun casings, busted clay pigeons, some old material that looked like a rug, shot up television parts, spray cans....

Cade was running up and down the sandy lane with the dogs, and I just started to pick up the stuff and put it into a bucket. Pretty soon, the bucket was full. Having no trash bags, I dumped it out in a heap and filled the bucket again. And again. It made quite a pile. Cade wandered over and started picking up empty shotgun casings and tossing them in the bucket, too. He kept asking me, "What's this Mommy, what's this?" to any discarded object he found. So I tried to explain it was trash and someone had left it out here, and that that was wrong. But he's two and half, so who knows what he understood of that. But he did get the concept of picking up trash.

So I think we will try and do that one morning a week. I thought it might be interesting to chart how many bags of trash we pull out of there in say, 3 months. Plus, the dogs get to come along and run all over.

Having a kid that loves the outdoors is so cool. It's pretty awesome having the opportunity to get out there and teach him some basic responsibility, too, at such a young age.

Stay tuned for photos and a progress report.

Here are some pics below of the DG we ended up collecting, plus a little wild beavertail cactus plant we found. We planted him in our cactus garden at home ( he's on the right). That rocky sand is the DG I was looking for. It is also good mulch for drought tolerant plants.

Meet the Smartchicks!

We have had chickens for a few years now. They take ridiculously little maintenance. They are far easier to care for than cats, and endlessly entertaining. But the best part of all is realizing the benefits of backyard chickens goes beyond daily fresh eggs.

Our 12 hens, The Smartchicks, and their rooster, Big John, free-range on our fenced acre. They have a coop and henhouse that they are free to return to for shelter and water whenever they like.



We buy a little grain, but these birds LOVE leftovers. Mac and cheese, veggies, fruits, leftover oatmeal, any vegetable ends or peelings, anything that is going bad in the fridge such as rice or pasta, moldy bread. Totally into it. And being free-range they entertain themselves all day by hunting for bugs and weeds. They also enjoy grass clipping and the windfall from the apple orchard. Talk about self-sufficient. I don't really have that much garbage in the can anymore, either. Nice.

Their poop is awesome, too. I clean out their henhouse and add it to the compost bin with a little water. The resulting compost is "the shit". The garden loves it. I also make a chicken manure "tea" by putting a shovelful of fresh droppings into a bucket of water. Stir, stir, stir and let it sit for a day. Then I add the slurry to the base of fruit trees as a spring fertilizer. I soak the base of the trees to get the fertilizer to sink down to the roots. Pretty expensive if I bought it at Home Depot.

The Meadow Project

We love projects, me and Cade. Especially if they keep us outside. This year I decided we needed a wild meadow on the property.

The back courtyard has been an ugly, hard packed expanse of dirt for a few summers. Every time I look out there I just long to see some green. It gets so dry and windy here I am reluctant to plant a lawn that just endlessly consumes water. I have fond memories as a kid of exploring for bugs and plants in the long grasses of my hometown. I wanted Cade to enjoy this, too. So we are making our own native grass and wildflower meadow. The seeds I chose are xeric (drought tolerant species), so hopefully this kills two birds, one stone.

Here are a few photos of the yard being prepped in stages for planting our seeds. I cleaned up the big rounds, raked out the sticks and debris, rototilled the area, raked in all our composted chicken manure and such, added a temporary fence to keep dogs and chickens out while it germinates. I also lugged over a bunch of granite boulders from along the driveway to create some areas of visual interest in the meadow. The top photo is the before, the bottom is the after pic.

You can also see the "halfway house" for the baby chicks along the fence. It's a mini coop they can go into during the day when they are a bit older, but still too young to hang with the big girls. The love to hunt bugs, take dust baths and practice flying in the "halfway house". We might plant some corn or some other tallish plant in front of the coop to provide shade. To be continued.

April 1

The meadow is planted!

June

July

2010 Spring Projects

It's barely the end of March and Cade and I can't wait for warm days so we can just stay outside. We have come up with some projects to get us prepped for Spring's true arrival in a few weeks (we hope).

One of our projects is starting our vegetable garden from seed. They take a bit of babysitting in the beginning. Cade is excited to be "a farmer" and get to planting these bad boys. Here he is taking his plants for a ride around the house. He is a good farmer.

Another annual spring project is raising baby chicks. We get the day old chicks from a local feed store, trying to select breeds that are friendly, good egg layers, and tolerant of the heat of summer in the desert. We got 8 this year. They live in Cade's bathroom in half a dog crate until they get their big bird feathers and can move out to the "halfway house".