Not sure how it happened, but our 5 acres transformed quickly from a backyard with a vegetable garden and some fruit plants to a homestead. A few days ago it was too rainy to work outside, so I roamed the garden to see what edibles were forming on our plants. What happened??? We no longer are working toward a ‘landscape’; instead we have created a homestead interspersed with some really cool ornamental plants. Not that I’m complaining – I really am liking this, but oh my! We have 13 chickens (6 dozen eggs/week), 14 grapevines, 6 blueberries and at least as many blackberries. Oh, and the gardens – 2 vegetable plots, plus raised beds and cucumber and melon patches. The hops vines produce well. And fig trees – 3 mature trees plus 2 more in containers. I heartily suggest one, maybe two, fig trees. Any more is just too much and five is … well, the chickens will be feasting on figs. Mother Nature planted some for us – muscadines, elderberries (great in wine) and poke salet (ever had a poke quiche? – yummy!).

The poor front garden is suffering as I hoe and gently coax tomato plants back into their cages. This three-day weekend I will commit to working on the neglected front, adding containers and flowers, pulling out plants that aren’t working and doing some serious pruning to the groves of variegated pittosporum. When pruned, they look like windswept trees.

So I will never have the magazine-layout landscape – but I should have plenty of eggs and veggies to share with friends.