Gardening

Our first year here we tilled up our garden (with the help of a nice neighbor) right next to the chicken coop. with the idea that we could let the chickens in after harvested everything and they could help us clean up. We planted in traditional rows and coming from the arid rocky mountains we were thrilled with the amount of rain we received that summer. We didn't realize that we had quite a bit of clay in our soil and it wouldn't drain so the only plants that we didn't kill by drowning them were the potatoes, since they were grown in hills.

The next year we built some raised beds and that helped a lot with our drainage problems.

 Needless to say, we did pretty well with the raised beds. This year we are going to use companion planting to help cut down on weeds and add to the health of the plants. I am excited to see how it works out.
http://www.companionplanting.net/
We already have a lot of our seedlings started, taking up half of our dining room, just waiting for the sun.

Spring is almost here!

Our first spring here we decided to get some chicks to raise. We ordered 15 female chicks from a hatchery and waited for our package to come in the mail. One day we got the call from the post office that there was a peeping box with our name on it!

I loaded the kids in the car and went to pick them up. It was an exciting day for the Parkers!

 We raised them in the dining room for the first few weeks until they were ready to go out into the coop we made out of an old shed and the run we attached to it.

 We were also enjoying the wildlife we were seeing in our yard. There were deer,wild turkeys, foxes and raccoons right outside our door.

One Season...

One Season...

Winter in the Medium Woods

This is our fourth winter here. We have had quite the learning curve, and we still don't have it figured out. We moved into this house in January of 2008, and there was no snow on the ground. This gave us a little bit of false hope. First thing we managed to do was get the truck stuck. That warm january weather also meant the ground was nice and muddy.

But by the time we started to put in the wood burning stove a few weeks later we had plenty of snow.

 For snowshoeing

Skiing

Hiking

And lots and lots of plowing...

 The house we fell in love with was giving us all kinds of adventures!

Welcome!

This blog is about the decision we made four years ago to move from a mountain town in Colorado to Western New York. We left a house on a paved (and plowed in the winter) road in town for a house in the woods at the end of a very long dirt driveway!