Chicken Coop Roof Close up

Here is a closer shot of the inside of the right side of the chicken coop. There are two doors, one into each coop front and back. We added the three new posts to better support the wire and billboard roof. It's actually surprisingly dry and sheltered in the coop. The coop sits back in the woods about 20 feet so there is a light breeze, but it doesn't feel drafty considering how open it really is.

Wild Blackberries

Wild Blackberries

There are patches of wild blackberries growing all over the place, but there is a particularly large patch growing along the Northern edge of the garden. We left a strip 10' x 30' of the blackberries when we cleared the main garden this spring. The berries aren't managed in any way so the crop is small and difficult to harvest for the amount of area that they are currently occupying. We started trimming them back in early June as we began to harvest. June seemed to be more productive than July has proven so far, but that first harvest probably heavily weighs in on Junes total. 

Tree House Tree

Tree house Tree

This big old pine used to be home to a simple deer stand. It also happens to live at the entrance to the future food forest. You can see the old gate post laying on the ground in the front of the before picture. Just through that old gate is the turn around that was cleaned up in a previous post. Three strands of barbed wire still run from the tree off to the right. This morning I cleared out some younger pines, a couple of miscellaneous hardwood trees that just happened to be living in the wrong place at the wrong time and a lot of little privet shoots from the tree house area. In the after picture, from left to right, Meredithe, Amelia and Carley are marking the corners of a rectangle of pines that I left for possible supports for a raised deck area off of the tree house. Additional supports will almost certainly be necessary, but having the live trees on the corners would really be beautiful. I realize it's a fairly large area, but if you're going to dream, you might as well dream big.