We have a nanny

There is a goat in our living room. A 3-month old goat. She was outside, waiting in the alley of our house waiting to be transported to her new backyard home a couple of miles away at a friend’s house, but she was clearly lonely and started to bleat as soon as people walked away. We named her Wendy, and I think she is still terrified of us, but she likes eating alfalfa hay from our hands as long as she’s in the kennel where she feels safe.

Hubs really wanted a goat. Like really wanted a goat. Almost as much as he wants a pig – which we haven’t seen at auction in weeks, no idea why. So we got the goat. Within 10 minutes that goat was really stressing Hubs out, since she was a walking invitation for someone who hadn’t heard that she was only here temporarily to call code enforcement. Especially since goats sounds a lot like strange crying people; they lack the vibrato that a lot of animals have making them sound less human and more animal.

As much as I love getting new additions to the farm – remember, I bought a duckling that was supposed to be a pet and that other time I brought home a momma cat and her 3-3 week old kittens, and that time we ate 1 duck and got 4 pullets to replace that single duck? My animal math is bad. I’d like our animals to have tons of space and we never crowd them on purpose like in commercial ventures (which we are so far from in so many ways) but our enthusiasm and spontaneous purchases sometimes results in some tight quarters around here – or goats in the living room and ducklings, quail, or chickens in the nook.

I have slowly accepted that except for the breeding rabbits (whose population is kept in check by the semi-regular crisped bunny cooked in coarse pepper and sea salt), we have basically reached our max capacity for critters. We will be acquiring a hive of bees in the near future, but that is a different sort of animal. One day we will have the room for goats, somewhere. Probably not here, and we will probably farm more than part-time whenever we have livestock larger than our torsos, but hubs has learned the lesson of crying kids in the urban landscape, and that may not be the way to keep the rest of our not-so-in-line-with-code urban farm living.

Changing Seasons

Image from Christen Barnes Photography

I realized as a kid that one day when I was older I would actually like going into stores like Bed, Bath & Beyond and Williams & Sonoma, but I kind of dreaded that day coming at the same time. As a kid, I also longed and ached for Summer and Winter – the most extreme of the seasons, because they brought freedoms that Spring and Fall just didn’t. Now, just like my taste buds have adjusted to more subtle and nuanced flavors that aren’t just very sweet or very salty, I can also appreciate and I long for Spring and Fall much more than Summer and Winter.

When I was smaller, I would probably just trample over and frolic my way through all the Spring’s new buds, sprouts, seedlings, and quickly passing moments. Now, I sit still and wander slowly through a garden to watch for each blossom and try to catch each seed sprouting so that I can care for it and nurse it along. I am so grateful for the nuances of changing seasons. It helps me to notice the change from Summer to Fall even living in a climate that is so lacking in the reds, yellows, and oranges of the changing seasons elsewhere in the world.

Tampa’s Free Garden Network

The Tampa Free Skool Garden install went well. It reminded me, yet again, that for all the buckets upon buckets worth of rabbit poop we have (excellent fertilizer guys!), it hardly makes a dent when you’re filling an 8 inch deep raised bed. I had these grandiose plans of filling that bed up and the kiddy pool, and maybe actually creating a separate lasagna mulched bed as well. Right. We filled up half of the raised bed and the kiddy pool.

Natalia D. brought some awesome donor starts of hot peppers, peanuts, and eggplants, so we went ahead and transplanted those in along with some transplanted basil and unknown pepper varieties from our large pentagon around the oak tree that quickly became overgrown with grass we introduced during poorly planned lasagna mulching we initially put in the area.

In between the transplants a few gardeners/students planted some Five Color Silverbeet Chard. Chard is my husband’s favorite thing ever, next to beets, but no wonder since they are basically kissing cousins they’re so closely related. We overbought mustard greens and chard seeds in one of my seed-whore crazes, so we’ll be growing a boat load of those for quite some time and donating/trading seeds with every gardener we know.

My biggest question, which I need to raise with the group of people involved in this endeavor of turning our side yard into a community haven-garden, is how does one account for the harvest or divvy it up among participators. I’m not interested in even trying to glean from this garden since we have so much backyard space that needs cultivating and I don’t want to feel like I’m stealing from the people, but I’m not sure how community garden split up the community yield versus the individual plots, since we don’t really have enough space to make individual plots a super feasible/fair option. Anyone a part of a community garden or have any ideas toward this end? I may just consult the Seminole Heights Community Garden and see how they do that, and take a hint from a practiced group of folks.

I’m excited about the fact that the turnout was quite good, but better than that, there have been floating rumors and discussions about personal-turned-community “yardens” as I’m calling our space popping up in several more areas. A few people had volunteered their space for the garden at the original idea and several of them are still talking about offering up their spaces for the community to turn into a plot of shared edibles (and Jill even considered fattening up a pig in a corner of her backyard!). The idea of a network of community gardens is something I’ve loved since I read Novella Carpenter’s Farm City and heard about the City Slicker Farms in Oakland, CA so the possibility of something similar happening in Tampa makes me a little giddy.

Related news: Nate and I know that anyone with a truck will never need to scrape together table scraps to get a decent compost pile going, and we’ll never actually need to dumpster dive to amend the compost pile again since we found the Farmer’s Market on Hillsborough Ave. with their mounds and mounds of rotting and non-rotting produce. We brought home 50 or so gallons of rotting produce to put in the pile – Nate and I have the greatest date nights, what can I say!