Our Homestead Work

This bed (the round one with what looks like a chimney, because it is LOL) was the original herb bed.  The chimney was part of the original homeplace's cook/smokehouse.  Our house was built in the late 1800s according to family members of the original owners.  Real Estate agents told us 1920, but a great grandson told us differently.  The red building pictured is the original homeplace, a simple one room building.  I call it the red wasp cottage because the red wasps are abundant in there (I'm getting around to IT being a project and restoring it for uses other than storage). We have to re-stack rocks every few years as they are dry stacked so this past year I decided to cut out a bit of weed eating and expand it so that our work was reduced even a little AND we have more room for herbs and/or vegetable plants that are semi-shade tolerant like lettuce, greens, rhubarb.  The bed contains fennel, marjoram, peppermint, spineless nepal cactus, lemon balm, walking onions, strawberry, comfrey, lavender, stevia, and some edible/ornamentals.  The daffodil are the only things NOT edible or medicinal.  I may move them but they give you a lovely punctuation of beauty after months of drab Winter. I used hugelkultur (a permaculture practice) in the expansion portion, the triangular shaped portion.  I also figured out that I needed a walkway around it to reach everything.  Luckily, I had only placed ONE giant rock before I realized I need to amend my design.  I should point out here that I am terrible at documentation, labeling, and/or thinking something all the way through like this before starting.  I get started to have forward momentum and SOMETIMES I realize I should have considered something and have to rework a bit, but I have done the reworking enough in my life that I've gotten pretty good at the "flying by the seat of my pants."