Since starting this blog, I’ve done my best to publish a post every week. Last week was particularly difficult as we said goodbye to our dear sweet border collie, Lucy Valentina. It didn’t feel right to carry on with another post without taking some time to honor her very special presence in our lives. The…
Spring 2023 was my first season trying to garden in my new, large backyard. For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamt of growing my own fruits and vegetables. Living most of my life in apartments in San Francisco with little to no outdoor space, I was limited to container gardening on sunny windowsills. …
A Brief History of My Gardening 2024 marks my second year of gardening. Read more about how it all started in this post. Once again, I’ve learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes but I have also continued to be motivated to keep going and try new things. In 2025 I will be…
Admittedly, I am sitting here wiping off a thick layer of dust and clearing out the blog’s cobwebs. It has been almost exactly 4 months since my last post, and while I could sit here and make excuses for my absence, the true explanation is that I got focused on creating content on YouTube and…
July 6, 2024, was a momentous day here at Varela’s Farm. Rosie, one of our hens, laid her first egg! It all started as a usual Saturday morning. Dennis and I decided to spend some time outside drinking our morning coffee while letting the chickens roam freely around the yard. This is one of my…
It’s time for a Spring Garden Update! I can hardly believe it’s been almost two months since my Spring Garden Planning post because so much has happened since then. Thankfully, I’m happy to report that everything is going very well in my wildflower garden and in the greenhouse. The wildflower garden started coming to life…
As I am typing this, I’m sitting in our family room looking out into the backyard and watching our chickens hanging out in their chicken run. It’s a wonderful way to start the day! When we moved to the country, Dennis immediately started talking about all of the animals he wanted. Chickens, goats, llamas, emus….
In this post, I thought I’d do something a little different. I wanted to get more personal and write more about the blog’s origin story: Leaving life in a big city to live a country life. If you read the About page of this blog, you know the general story. After being born in San…
Since I already wrote about how I take care of the hummingbirds in our backyard in this post, I figured it was about time to write about the other ways I’ve tried to create a nice sanctuary for all of the birds in our backyard. This post is all about finding the perfect backyard birdbath….
After being so upset by how the squirrels, birds, and lizards destroyed my spring garden last year, this year, I invested in a not super-fancy portable backyard greenhouse. It’s called portable because I suppose you could disassemble it at some point and relocate it to another area but I don’t know how well that would…
I’m writing this on March 29. Technically, I should be way further along with my spring garden but it’s been incredibly rainy and as I’ve decided to implement some new tactics, I’ve been spending more time than usual planning my spring garden. The first major change I’m making is that I’m doing less seed starting…