When I moved to the heart of a coastal Virginia city in 2024 after our wedding, we lived in a very small apartment, which was quite a change for this Appalachia girl. I slowly went crazy (along with my very active husband) and I tried out some different ways to live a more holistic and back to the land sort of life. I made homemade bread and kombucha, went for walks, and I grew a garden on our little balcony. I don’t recall that it yielded much besides some tobasco peppers, as the birds ate pretty much every young plant beside the hot peppers! But it was one of my favorite things to have going on that summer before my pregnancy morning sickness kicked it and it fell apart. It was great for my mental health.
We moved about 8 months after our wedding to our current home, an 1800 square foot ranch house built in the 50s, on roughly 1/2 of an acre in a tiny neighborhood. We are blessed with plenty of young families nearby, including some fellow young Catholics.
It took us the better part of the first year we moved in to get the house as clean as we wanted (it had belonged to hoarders) but by the time spring rolled around, I had given birth to our baby girl and was ready to attack our yard and start a garden. I am a country girl and at times have the ability to lament the lack of more land, but I remind myself to choose gratitude, and thanks to the hard work of my husband, we have this half acre of land to make our mark on. It is an eagerly accepted challenge of mine to figure out how to utilize this piece of land for optimal homesteading.
The fall we moved in, we got six chickens of mixed variety from a friend, put them in our little chicken coop/tool shed, and eagerly awaited eggs. However, the chickens quickly started molting, and it was very cold that winter, so they really didn’t start laying until early spring. We got a variety of green, brown and white eggs and averaged about 4-5 eggs a day. We recently added 6 new chickens to the mix, and bought 7 chicks recently, so we have roughly 17 chickens currently free ranging in our backyard. The upside to free range chickens is that the storebought feed requirements are a bit less, so our grain stretches further, the bugs decrease in the backyard, they are content and happy, and our yard is well cultivated by their scratching. The downsides are that an occasional cat takes a bird out, we have chickens occasionally hop the fence into the neighbor’s yard, and we find chicken poop in places we would rather not, like our back deck. However, our neighbors are quite amiable about the chickens in their yards, and we occasionally share excess eggs with them. It is our humble opinion that when you are trying to homestead in the city, it is best to have the general support of your neighbors. It’s not a good look to be the source of friction in a quiet and neat neighborhood full of retirees and young families!
Anyway, current egg production with 10 layers is about 6 eggs a day. Chickens lay every 25 hours, so you don’t have all the chickens laying like clockwork at once, and also some of them are getting older and may not be laying. The 7 chicks we bought are their replacements. We will use the old chickens for bone broth and soup meat.
Our garden situation has been quite the learning curve this year. I was rather prideful in my gardening capabilities and was quickly humbled by this new climate and land. We planted a good deal in semi raised beds filled with mushroom compost and manure, but it was in our back yard, which didn’t get first morning sunshine, which is incredibly important. I got a handful of green beans, some beets, and some strawberries, but for the most part, my plants either didn’t sprout at all, or they failed to thrive once they did grow. The strawberries were the only thing that appreciated the well-drained soil and partial sun. We bought the Everbearers, and I think they produced for about 6 weeks straight. Basically everything I originally started, failed to thrive or grow, or was eaten by weevils.
However, all of my flowers and herbs planted in my front beds did wonderfully. I planted zinnias, sunflowers, calendula, parsley and lavender, and the plants absolutely flourished. I’m crediting it to the early morning sunshine and very fertile and deep topsoil in the front beds. I just replanted my veggies in the front beds last week, and everything except my dill has sprouted and is growing fantastically. I am so very excited to see how it progresses. I am currently fighting with caterpillars eating my carrots, so if anyone has a solution to that, please feel free to drop it in the comments!
I think the key for me here in the gardening department was that I needed to learn to utilize space that wasn’t being used for anything else. Front beds to me originally seemed only for decoration, just for me to see that from here on out, they need to be used for my veggies and herbs. Ideally the gardens would be in back, but beggars cannot be choosers with limited space, and we learn to maximize every area we can on half acre homesteads!
Please keep following along for more! I am intending on writing on our fruit trees and berries, bread making, our low tox living routine, my home birth and our life as a Catholic family in upcoming articles!
God bless,
Abigail
