Suburban Farm Girl

My little farm in the suburbs has moved to a real farm

I'm Lisa and this site is about my adventures of having a farm. It started out in the suburbs, in our cookie-cutter house where I kept my chickens and ducks and kept the neighbors quiet by giving free eggs and produce we grew.

The farm was purchased in August 2011 but life being what it is, we didn't actually move until October. In that time the farm has been growing.

Follow along and see what's new. Oh, and if you want to be added to my mailing list to notify you of updates, leave me a comment with your email address.

It is Spring - new life abounds!

What I'm reading:

Ball Blue Book - Guide to Home Canning, Freezing and Dehydration
Independence Days - A guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation
Putting Food By
Storey's Guide to Raising Dairy Goats

Lasagna Gardening will tell you how to prepare the soil - the trick is that you don't have to! It's easy. You pile 'stuff' up on the hard dirt that's there - and you plant in the new pile.

Square Foot Gardening will tell you about spacing the plants for the most effective growth - you can get a lot with just a little space.

Carrots Love Tomatoes will tell you what plants do well with each other, and which you should avoid planting together. You can create a symbiotic relationship between plants so that they protect one another from bugs... this helps a lot because you don't want to spray poison on something you later hope to eat.

Books I recommend - links to Amazon.com

Lasagna Gardening - by Patricia Lanza

Square Foot Gardening - by Mel Bartholomew

Carrots Love Tomatoes - by by Louise Riotte

Home
Guestbook
Recipes
Home Notes
03/05/12
01/26/12
Posts from 2010 & 2011

Websites (and the people who write them) that inspire me:

Self Sufficiency in Style - www.go-self-sufficient.com/
I used to follow this site regularly, but the writer has some issues with his government. It got pretty bizarre. Still if you leave out the weirdness, it's is an inspiring site.

Artistic Gardens - https://www.artisticgardens.com/catalog/index.php
This isn't so much a person's website as it is a site for a seed catalog business. Why it's so fascinating??? They have 35 cent sample seed packets. And since you don't usually use even 1/4 of the seeds in a commercial packet, this saves you tons of money.

Path to Freedom - http://urbanhomestead.org/
I've followed this family on and off for years. With hard work and creativity, they have turned their little plot of land in Pasadena, Ca into a way to have a successful, self sustaining lifestyle.
Read their blog at http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/