We just got our 20’ pipe bender in the mail today. This allows us to bend our 20’ wide hoops for our hoop house/greenhouse. This will be an incredible investment for this coming winter season to extend our growing season, get our starts ready sooner, frost sensitive trees/plants and of course our larger scale Aquaponics. More announcements to come when we begin completing this project. The shipping container will serve as our potting shack and work space for greenhouse preps and management. We will have a door in the middle of the container for egress into the greenhouse.

Here is the newest design that we have been working on. We wanted our farm to have the feel of an urban farm & garden that brings you into it rather than a typical unattractive garden space that people tend to ignore. This farm & garden will serve at least three primary purposes. First, it will serve as the demonstration & Residential Research Facility for Blue Sky Agriscaping. This means we will always be testing new ideas and other things to see what works and what doesn’t, as well as host tours and classes. Second, we will grow food in an intensive yet elegant way to be able to serve as a Market Garden providing better-than-organic produce for our friends, local health-food junkies, chefs, restaurants, and more. Thirdly, it will serve as a tree and plant nursery to provide high quality plant stock for customers of Blue Sky Agriscaping and the general public.

There have been many iterations, and as you can see in the drawing we are only approximately 40% complete. Here are some of the things we are incorporating into the design:

1. ​Recreational Pond - this pond will be an attractive garden pond without fish where we can swim. It will have marginal plants growing and the water is filtered biologically using hardly any electricity. We will have it run off of solar power. It will serve also as a backup water supply.
2. 5,000 gallons of above ground water collection that will serve our home for all its water needs with a better-than-city-water filtration. The tanks will overflow into the pond which will overflow into reservoirs on the property to water all the vegetation. We will be growing with very little need of water compared to other farms and gardens.
3. Fire Pit Island
4. 20’ x 40’ greenhouse that will eventually double.
5. A smaller Aquaponics pond that will grow plenty of food aquaponically.
6. Plenty of cozy retreat style sitting areas to relax throughout the gardens with lots of paths.
7. Subterranean Trampoline Garden - ground level trampoline so when kids fall off they don’t get hurt. Then stairs will lead underneath to a two-tier subterranean garden. This garden space doesn’t go above 100 degrees or below freezing and stays a higher humidity to be able to grow tropical and subtropical plants.
8. 16’ Rabbit Dome for raising meat rabbits in colony style.
9. Large Chicken Area/Soil Production - all food scraps, grass cuttings, shredded leaves and other organic goes into this area. The chickens will eat a lot of this and eat the bugs that eat a lot of this. In return the chickens gives us amazing soil with the side benefit of eggs.
10. Outdoor Bathroom with rainwater collection for the sink and composting toilet.
11. Outdoor Shower
12. 16’ Grape Vine Geodesic Dome Retreat - this dome will be the same as our existing rabbit dome but without the mesh and with grape vines growing over the whole dome. This dome will serve as an outdoor living space with cool shade in the summer.
13. A couple tiny homes to allow people or families to stay on our property if they have like-minded interests who would want to work on the farm to earn a side hustle. One of these will be a shipping container tiny home and the other will be a traditional tiny home. We may also provide a space for an RV or Trailer. These will also be part of our AirBnB that we will offer no our farm.
14. ​And a lot more...

Talk about scary times! As Krisann and I were working on removing a fence to build a new one we were in this area with some tall weeds. I was in short shoes and shorts and Krisann was in shoes and pants, neither of which were safe from a strike of a Copperhead. In the making of this video there were no humans injured, however, that is not the same for the snake. He did meet his match, luckily before he bit any of us and sent us to the hospital. Enjoy!

​We just bought a Fiji and Gala Apple Tree for $10 each from a big box store. We are also announcing a bunch of new updates coming soon on several systems that have been or are being updated.

We got a cat to have poison-free pest control, and we got her fixed, that was about $50.
We removed the free feed from the chicken coop one month ago and now have the kids feed them every morning. We finally got a duck egg yesterday and another one today! Hopefully this success will continue.

We had to add 3 rolls of 1/2” wire mesh to the top of the rabbit dome (where the rats were crawling up the sides and in through the top which wasn’t meshed) to completely seal it off. This cost about $80, and we’ll have to get a new tarp for the roof, another $60. We have two pregnant does and fingers crossed we’ll no longer find mutilated baby bunnies.
We built a completely new quail cage with 1/2” wire mesh and a closing lid over the egg compartment.

Overall, the rats have cost us around $650. That is frustrating.

All this to say, if things don’t seem right with your animals, if they aren’t laying eggs or breeding like normal, and you’ve eliminated every other possibility, it may be pesky rats terrorizing your animals! Hope this helps someone down the road save a lot of time and money, as we wish we would have known a long time ago.

As we were out collecting some black soldier fly larva as a show and tell for a Gardening and Homesteading class I teach we found this large male Orb Spider weaving his web. Usually we find them after the sun is down and walking into it with your face in the dark... very unpleasant. Enjoy.

In the pervious couple years when we have had our Straw Bale Garden we have used soaker hoses. Soaker hoses do not have a long life span and degrade within a year or two if in the direct sun due to the UV radiation. We decided to upgrade our garden to a poly tube irrigation with drippers. This video demonstrates my son and I putting in all the poly tube and connectors then putting in 2 GPH drippers every 12". This will allow us to manage exactly how much water the bales are receiving as well as turn off the system when it is raining. Make gardening and farming fun!

We are excited to be setting up our 3rd annual Straw Bale Garden. We have been very excited with how it works for the past two years and are doing it again. This video is a quick demonstration of setting up the garden. This is based off of Joel Karsten's book on Straw Bale Gardens. I am also a certified Straw Bale Garden Instructor, you can visit my profile on the Straw Bale Garden website HERE. In Part 1 I will be setting up the cardboard as an underlayment that serves as a weed block and ten the bales. Part 2 will show setting up the rest of the cardboard, spreading out the straw and getting the bales all ready for the growing season. Enjoy!

In our last blog titled, Worm Hotel Vermicomposting... Composting with Worms I gave several reasons why a gardener would want to have a vermicomposter. The bucket style, or as I call, the 'Worm Hotel' is perfect for the typical backyard gardener that is wanting to create worm castings and make compost tea for their garden.

In this video we take it a whole other level by converting a 55 gallon barrel into a worm trough. I decided this was a better route for a few reasons, 1) this year we plan to really develop our farm. We live on an acre and are only using a small portion of it so far. We could really use a lot more worm compost tea and casting. 2) as we scale up and build out our farm we will begin doing a lot more tours, demonstrations, and classes. With those events happening we will be able to sell worm castings, Worm Hotels,  and compost tea kits.

​To learn more about the power of vermicomposting read this blog.