New Garden Planning - the side 'yard'

In the presence of more energy aka more time to do things these days, with the house back to the good-enough stage after my pregnancy-induced lack of cleaning this past fall, and in the absence of any grabbing-my-attention-yarn laying around, I've been working on something equally as easily picked up and put down as a batch of knitting - garden planning! Or rather, NEW garden planning! That's right, I've been sketching up plans for the new side garden I've been thinking about for about a year now. Mostly just coming up with ways of planting and orienting things to maximize the space available, but also spending some time thinking about chicken coop designs and greenhouse/potting shed ideas. If you are on pinterest and want to check out my garden inspiration board, click on over here, and to check out some greenhouse/compost bin/homesteady pins, click on over here :)

I'm sure I'll pick up some great yarn soon, as a couple of my plans for decorating Little M's big girl room involve some knitting & crocheting, but in the meantime, whenever I've got a spare couple minutes in the evenings, I've been picking up my plans and sketching out better details about where the raspberries will go, how we'll separate the chickens from the garden, and all those fun details.

Of course, with this baby coming this summer, I don't really plan to do much in the way of implementing this new garden area, after all, this will at least triple our garden space, and moving the chickens over to there will require either some serious shed moving or a whole new coop. These are more long term, 5 year plans. But I'm sure we'll put something in the ground there this year, even if it's just some extra raspberry plants when we thin out our current patch this spring, throwing up some junky fencing around it, and putting a pile of pig & chicken manure over there when we clean out Pat's old pen & the chicken coop this spring.

The really nice thing about taking my time on the evolution of our property plan is that over time we learn how we use the property, and what our plans are longer term for it. I can only imagine how much re-doing we would end up doing down the road if we had of implemented all of our plans after the first year of living here! This way we have goals, but can live with them in theory for a couple years and be comfortable with how well they will work for us before we put them into practice!