Growth is a double edged sword. Unchecked, growth can be cancerous and destructive. It is this type of ceaseless expansion that has put our society into the precarious environmental and financial positions in which we currently find ourselves. On the other hand, growth can be regenerative and life-giving. Following a forest fire or a bitter winter, the first green shoots to emerge from the earth bear witness to the earth's ability to restore life in the wake of disaster.

My goal for this blog is pretty simple and open-ended: I want to document and share with family and friends my efforts to incorporate an ever increasing degree of self sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, and environmentally-conscious design into my life as a would be urban homesteader.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Mending Fence pt.2


The new fence from our front yard. All of the white slats were salvaged from the original fence.

Way back in March, I undertook what I anticipated to be a weekend-sized job: replacing the worn out and collapsing fence on the South side of our back yard. The actual demolition only took a couple of hours. The rebuilding, on the other hand, took a bit longer. As per usual, conflicting schedules caused the process to stop and start multiple times. It proceeded very slowly. I finally finished building it within the past week or so. It still needs to be painted white, and I'll have to play with the grade at the gate so that it opens smoothly; but other than that I'm pretty happy with it. Pushing it forward to the front edge of our house has added about 30'x23' of space to our back yard.

Right now it's a great space for the kids and chickens to rummage, and will hopefully have raised beds going around the edges in the near future. Down the line, I'd like to put a trellis or arbor over the gate and some fruiting bushes on the front side of it. For now, though, I need to dig up some exterior paint and let the twins get their inner Tom Sawyer on. At the current rate of progress, that'll happen sometime at the end of summer. We'll see...


Inside the fence, I've got eight 2'x3' pop-up raised beds that are going to be filled and planted .
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