Well, that is just the way life goes. No baby, but back in action doing gardening and expanding our homestead.
My husband and children had finished planting all of de gardens. Some gardens did Ok, others where ratter disappointing. I will be reviewing our different type of garden beds after they have been harvested and prepared for winter.
Harvest
Meanwhile harvest has been somewhat disappointing. The onions where very small and I will not come around to buying onions in winter. I am trying to shorten the time that I will have to buy onions by using onion tops and spring onions as much as I can for as long as they are growing in stead of using the onions we have in storage.
The garlic did well and even had some nice size bulbs compared to last year. What I found so strange is that some of the garlic plants also made a small bulb in the stalk above ground level. I have never seen this before, but apparently some varieties do this instead of making a flower.
I am also saving some seed. The kale, unlike last year, survived the winter and bloomed beautifully. After the seed where done I cut all of the seedpods of and let them dry for a while. Deseeding the pods was a bit unpleasant, because the seedpods where a bit sharp and stung but with gloves on it was ok. We got enough seed to last us a life time.
We also collected seed from mustard, spring onions, lupine, peas, carrots, different grains and different flowers.
I am also drying some marigold flower leaves to make some calendula salve.
We finally started to harvest tomatoes, but we are losing the plants to blight again. Surprisingly late since we are having rain for over a month already. Luckily we also have a greenhouse now and there is no blight in there yet. With the first chilli’s turning red in the greenhouse, I made a chilli sauce on tomato base. My husband enjoyed it very much after a few months without chilli sauce.
Other then that we have been eating potatoes from the garden, but the beans have been very disappointing. We are also having some cucumbers from the greenhouse.
My sons Hokkaido pumpkin was the only pumpkin plant to really survive and thrive, so he is very proud of that and checks the crop every day.
I have been trying to harvest some blackberries, but since they are wild growing most of them are hard to reach and will be enjoyed by the birds.
As for our homestead
My husband left to collect sidewalk tiles at a friend’s house. He came home with 2 runner ducks (a couple). I’ve always wanted to have runner ducks to eat the so many slugs we have in the gardens. Apparently they also eat lettuce, so I did not let them in the main garden yet, but they where in our garden 3 with the compost bed with the potatoes. They seemed to find more then enough to eat there. As the type of crops growing will allow, they will be moved trough all of the gardens.
Well, since the runner ducks do not go into there coop we also bought some geese to protect the runner ducks against the fox. After that the potato bed, obviously, was done.
As the coop we build for the runner ducks stayed empty we also bought some meat chickens after which we where gifted some dwarf chickens we put in the coop with them. Well the coop was a bit small for all of these chickens, but after the meat chickens have been butchered the coop is a very comfortable home for the dwarf chickens (they are so cute).
We got 5 female sheep, lambs from this spring, and we plan on breeding with them. They are still too young though, but next year in the fall we would need a male sheep as well.
We went out for some hare to raise for meat, but now we have one female for breeding and 3 males which are the hare of the kid’s. It is unbelievable how much the kid’s love there hare and care for them and cuddle with them. I have never seen such tame hare before. Well, we can’t possibly butcher these, so it will just take a bit longer before we will eat some hare.
Last but not least my husband gave me some fantails for our anniversary. They don’t really do anything, but are beautiful to look at.
To finish up some beautiful pictures
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Beautiful Chaos 
You have certainly expanded your smallholding, I love all the new editions! The harvest looks good, too, even in a disappointing year it’s amazing what you can produce and use and seed-saving is such a good thing to do. Have you tried growing perennial onions of any kind? We have a lot of Welsh onions (Allium fistulosum) which are a perennial clumping onion, they grow like giant spring onions and the clumps can be lifted and divided regularly,you can also just take the green stems and they will grow back. We used them between the end of last year’s stored onions and the start of this year’s harvest and they were really useful, I’ve raised some red ones from seed for next year, too. They also produce masses of seed so I’m planning to use that instead of spring onion seed next year as a bit of an experiment.
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Thanks. I do have a perennial onion. We call it Winterheckenzwiebel and after looking it up this actually is a Welsh onion. I did not know you can use the onion as well. I have only used the greens. Thanks for the tip. I will be sowing these more in the spring as well. You say you have a red type as well. I will have to look for seed of those. I have only found white once until now. My spring onions want to be perennials as well. They came back second year in a row and has given lots of greens and lots of seeds.
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