City Homesteading

I've decided there's no sense in waiting for "someday" to be homesteaders. Remember those books, Better Off and The Omnivore's Dilemma? They got us thinking about being as self sufficient as possible when it comes to food. Since we got a late start for a fall garden, we're limited in what we can put in, but we figured we'd put our past record of successfully growing strawberries to work for us. The result was this giant raised garden bed:

It's in an octagon shape. The outside edges are 12 feet long. The outside edges of the inner octagon are 6 feet long (the inner rings are 9 feet/side and 3 feet/side, respectively). This genius idea (it wasn't ours) allows us to set a sprinkler in the middle of the whole thing and water without standing there the whole time or keeping up many many feet of drip line. This whole bed adds up to 435 square feet of space and is currently planted with 350 strawberry plants.

These are our smaller beds:

They're 6 feet on the outside edges and there are two of them for a grand total of almost 700 square feet of growing space. Not counting the 10 fruit trees that went in this week and will hopefully be producing well in a few years.

And in other news, Sierra *really* enjoys yogurt.