Dreaming about seeds.

Every morning I wake up and see my land out of my window. No neighbors, no strange cars driving by. Just my fences, my pond, my room to grow. I've started dreaming about gardens and greenhouses. Dreaming about fruit trees that I want to plant and compost. I feel oddly free here. Less stress and worry. Less pain. Less fatigue. I'm ready to be me again.

Garden update

I went out of town for a week and my garden went CRAZY! My pumpkin plant has probably eight little pumpkins, this one is the biggest.

I have four or five little tiny watermelons.

Three deformed peppers, all on one plant.

Three of my sunflowers blossomed overnight. I will get better pics later.

My potatoes grew enough that it is time to add another box to the top. I couldn't get any closer because the bees get pretty pissed off when we mess with anything in the vicinity of their hive.

And I saved the best for last. This is my crazy, fast growing, gigantic tomato plant. All of my tomato plants have several green tomatoes on them but this particular plant just exploded. It is the same type of tomato, it gets the same amount of sun and water, but for some reason it is over twice the size of the other plants.

My corn is doing well but the wind keeps knocking the stalks down. I am going to build up the rows with more dirt tomorrow.

One of my chickens got out of the pen and made a dust bed in my new radishes and ate quite a bit of my lettuce and swiss chard. She's lucky she's one of my best layers or she might have ended up as soup. If she doesn't stay in the chicken pen, she will have to live in the empty dog run until after the harvest. My peas and beans doubled in size while I was gone and my onions are starting to blossom. (Do they need to be harvested before they do that?)

My carrots are almost big enough to start eating and my Jerusalem artichoke is getting a little bit taller.

drowning in produce

I never thought I would be growing "too much" food. My radishes are starting to taper off and I am getting ready to plant a second crop. My swiss chard is taking off and I can't eat it fast enough. I can't give it away fast enough either. It is a plant that tastes very similar to spinich. You can use it in a salad, you can put it on your sandwich, you can cook it, (my favorite is to boil it and serve it with a pat of butter and salt and pepper) the possibilities are endless. So is the plant...endless. The more you pick, the more leaves grow to take the place of the ones you harvested. I have a feeling I will be eating more of this plant than I ever thought possible.

My lettuce is also coming in thick. When I buy a head of lettuce in the store, I know I have to eat it within three or four days or it goes bad. When I pick lettuce from my garden, I can have it in the fridge for a week and it doesn't even WILT! It is still as crunchy and fresh as the day I harvested it.

My sunflowers are almost a foot tall and growing like crazy despite a neighbors claims that we can't grow sunflowers here. Because of that prior "knowledge", I planted every seed I had and well over 260 plants came up. I can't wait to invite this neighbor over this fall to see how hard it is to grow sunflowers here, lol.

The onions I planted are just as big or bigger than the onion plants I bought and are growing like crazy. I plan on dehydrating chopped onion pieces this fall to store for the year to come. I am toying with the idea of onion powder too, but we will see just how many we have. I have a sneaking suspicion that it takes A LOT of onions to make onion powder.

My pepper plants are doing good, but not growing much. they seem to have just stalled out and decided to stay this size. I am seeing new growth coming on, hopefully some blossoms in there as well. I would really like to make some salsa this year.

Speaking of salsa, the tomatoes are also doing good and they are actually growing a little taller. We are playing with the water system to fine tune it so that everything gets the right amount of water. The tomatoes seem to like what they are getting so we aren't messing with them much.

The cucumbers are putting out new leaves almost every day and I am looking forward to pickle making this fall. We tried a few new kind of cucumbers and I am hoping they will work well for pickles. We have four bush cucumber plants and four lemon cucumbers along with four pickling cucumbers. (gosh, I hate typing that word)

My jeruselum artichokes are getting really big and I think I will plant them a bit different next year. I want to do something similar to what we did with our potato plants. We have them in a small box that we can add layers to as the plants grow. If you keep putting dirt over the top of the plant, it will be forced to grow ever higher, producing more and more potatoes all the way up the stem.

My peas and beans finally came up (they were the last planted) and are 1 1/2 to 2 inches tall now. I have to figure out what will work best as a trellis for them to climb. Still pondering that one.

The corn is around six inches tall and can now flutter in the breeze. This is the crop I think the whole family is most excited about. We all love corn on the cob and I will also freeze any excess that we can't eat fresh. With three rows of corn, I think there will be plenty to freeze.

The squashes (zucchini, crookneck and pumpkin) are doing well as are the melons. I think those will be one of the more fun crops that the kids will enjoy picking and eating.

I am busy right now dealing with everything that is coming ready and I know it is only going to get worse as the rest of the crops mature, but it is certainly a satisfying kind of busy. And now I have proven to myself that I really can provide for my family. Now if I can only get a deer this year.......

Big radishes

I picked these beauties last night. I wish the fair wasn't so far away. I think these two could win a prize! Not only were they big and nicely colored, they were tender and very flavorful. So far the radishes have been mild enough that the kids will even eat them. Good thing since we only have one box that is producing yet.

Reaping the rewards

Tonight for dinner, I walked out the back door and picked several of the ingredients from my garden. The lettuce is so tender it rips apart when you try to pick it. I had a very hard time breaking it off near the stalk. The swiss chard is both in the salad and cooked like spinach and topped with butter and salt. I added radishes to the salad that I grew in the garden.

I can't WAIT for the rest of the garden to start producing. I am especially anxious for tomatoes. We bought four more plants today to replace the ones that didn't make it. Our eyes also got a little bit bigger than our plot and we came home with three watermelons, two canteloupe, three pumpkins, a crookneck squash, two zucchini and sixteen (you read that right, sixteen) cucumbers. We are going to have to expand part of the garden for the squashes and pumpkins. I am also giving away four of the cucumber plants. There will be lots of pickles this year!

Garden is producing

So we have been eating radishes we grew in our garden for a while now. Tonight I will fix some swiss chard and a salad with our lettuce. The carrots are coming up quickly, the Jerusalem artichokes are doing very well. I am going to have cucumbers coming out of my ears, but my zucchini and summer squash are still just thinking about coming up. The tomatoes are hit and miss but the corn is 2 inches tall. My peppers and onions are coming around (they were transplanted) but the cantaloupe and watermelon are a total loss. The peas and beans are in the ground so all I have to do is replace the cantaloupe and watermelon. This is shaping up to be a very good garden.

I almost forgot, I also have over 260 sunflowers that came up!! The bees will be very happy!

Garden

We actually got a garden in the ground this year. I didn't bother with starting seeds indoors as our weather is too unpredictable and crazy. Hubby and I built raised beds and a PVC framework that we could cover with plastic to make our own mini greenhouses. He figured out a way to incorporate a sprinkler system so it self waters too! We got two boxes built and planted along with a few rows of corn and some squash we simply planted in the yard. We got three rows of corn in the ground and four potato plants.

^Potatoes^

^Tomatoes^

^Green house^

Gardening, bees and other stuff by Gracie

I went outside to check on my garden today. I have potatoes, radishes and swiss chard above the ground. Now if the weather cooperates, I will get the rest of it planted this week. This is the first sucessful (knocking on wood and crossing every finger) garden I have ever planted on my own. Sure, I have a few flowers here and there but nothing that I can eat and feed my family with. I am pretty stoked.

My bees arrive in a few weeks and I am almost ready for them. I have the deep super and the base and top all assembled. I just need to paint it all, get it leveled out in the garden, install a water source and re-read my instructions a few more times. I am beyond excited for my new hobby.

The food storage is coming along nicely. I am wanting to jump aboard this couponing train and learn to do my shopping for a lot less than I do now. Maybe I can use my savings to put fuel in my car. That is a gripe for another day I guess. In the meantime I will just stay home as much as possible and only go to town when I have to.

Getting geared up for the summer!

Ok so I know I have been pretty absent (ok, totally absent for quite some time, but who's getting technical here?), but there has simply been nothing to blog about for a very long time. But now I have spring fever and I am ready to get ready. What am I doing to get ready, you may ask?
Well, for starters, I have got my garden planned out. Now I just have to wait untill the wnow melts to put that plan into action.
My chickens are getting ready too so I have to get the coop ready for them. This morning I braved the wind and cold in order to clean out the nesting boxes. Much to the annoyance of the hen who was waiting to lay in said boxes. I left all of the hay on the floor because it serves as an insulator and it is still just too cold to take it out yet. So I have one hen laying already and hopefully now that the boxes are cleaned out, the rest will follow suit.
Back to the garden. This year we are planing a new venture that will make my garden produce a thousand times more! Ok, maybe not a THOUSAND times but it will certainly make this year much better. We are going to be beekeepers! Yup, for real. I ordered my bees yesterday and with the next paycheck I am ordering my starter kit which includes my hive. I know this sounds like I am putting the cart before the horse, buying bees before I have a home for them but there is a reason. The bees will not arrive untill May but the hive will be here shortly. I have a neighbor with 20+ fruit trees and tons of flowers. I have a list of flowers that are favorites of bees that I plan on planting this year as well.
I am also working on getting back into the food storage game. Working on toiletries at the moment. A local grocery store has toothpaste and tooth brushes on sale for 98 cents so we got a few to put in the bucket.
I will keep everyone updates on my progress and hopefully this year will be a much more productive year than last year.

Lame

I didn't do anything I had planned this summer. I wanted to plant a garden..it snowed untill mid June. It is already freezing in August. That is a SHORT growing season. A garden wasn't going to happen.
I wanted to really get out there with my books of edible and medicinal plants that grow naturally in my area. Again, with the weather, most of them never really came up this year. Plus it was too cold to do much.
We went on a diet and most of the stuff in our food storage were things we were not alowed to eat. Food storage got ignored and never expanded on.
This summer has just flat out been lame.

Squash A Plenty

We got a very late start on our garden this year, because the PNW decided it wasn't going to be spring until mid-June. Which can be especially annoying when you decide to take the proverbial bull by the horns, and get over your gardening fears by planting a HUGE garden. Huge. Like 35x60 feet.

Okay so maybe that's not huge. But it is considering last year my 'garden' was two small planters. Sometimes things are all about prospective.

The issue is, since we didn't really have time to seed in the ground this year, we just went ahead and bought starts. I took my list, Monster in tow, and drove to a smaller organic nursery nearby. Now, I'm not insane about organic food. I think it tastes better, but I'm not going to go pyscho about it. One thing I have found though, is that organic vegetable plants tend to have better tasting fruits, on top of being tougher and more hearty in general.

I also found out that this particular nursery has much better prices then I had planned after looking at several other nurseries. So I went a little crazy. Okay, a lot crazy. Like a lot, a lot.

I bought 8 different kinds of squash, not counting cucumbers (pickling and slicers). And in multiples.

I think I'm going to be buried in it.

My New Years Resolutions

Personal:
1. Spend more time with the Boy having fun, and less time yelling.
2. Get back in some sort of decent shape.

3. Quit smoking (again).

Personal Stuff:
4. I would really like to get a hand grinder, but considering the price of the ones I like, this is more of a hope then a resolution.

5. Also, I want to co-op with a friend's family this year for a garden. The Boy is old enough to help out, they have the land, and then have school-age kids who are willing to help out. I love fresh fruits and veggies, we just don't have the space. Also start a small herb garden at the house.

Financial:
6. Start an emergency home-stash of cash.
7. Rebuild saving to 3 months of expenses.
8. Continue using Mint.com to better track/save expenses.
9. Continue to not make stupid choices.

Skills:
10. Go shooting at least once a month.
11. Take knitting or quilting class.

12. Enroll the Boy in Swimming classes.

Preparedness Stuff :
13. Add a stock of various Batteries.
14. Purchase some lighting setups. I.e.: various lanterns and flashlights.
15. Stock up on firewood this winter, perhaps get DNR permit.

Gun Stuff:
16. Save some money each month for a handgun. I know this sounds small, but seeing as my gun knowledge is extremely limited, I'm working with what I've got now.

Food Rotation:
17. This year, be much more realistic about what I'm canning and what amounts. Having lots of fruits and jams is nice, but realistically I should have canned much more veggies. I'm much more likely to use 10 quarts of spaghetti sauce then I am to use 10 quarts of pickles.

18. Purchase a small dehydrator to use for drying own herbs and veggies.

Thief!

A co-worker of my husbands asked him last week if we wanted any tomatoes. He said he had a ton and would give me all that he didn't want to use himself. Now, I got visions of spaghetti sauce, tomato sauce, bottled tomatoes, ketchup and all sorts of wonderful tomato based products dancing through my head and told Hubby to tell him I would take anything he was willing to give me. I would in turn give him some spaghetti sauce or whatever else I had made that he might want.
Hubby came home from work yesterday evening and told me this co-worker had sent me something. I got all excited untill he picked up his lunch pail. What I had in mind would not fit into his lunch pail. He pulled out a ziploc bag with four tomatoes in it.
The co-workers garden had been raided and these 4 tomatoes were all that was left! He spent all spring tilling and planting, all summer watering and weeding. He went away for the weekend and came home to an empty garden. They cleaned out everything he had grown. He has NOTHING to show for all of his hard work. Why would someone feel they were entitled to something they had no part of producing? I don't know how this individual feels. but I would be furious if it happened to me.

Snap Peas!

I stopped by a friend's house yesterday (the Boy was chillin' with Grandpa and having some 'man-time') and interrupted a pea-picking bonanza. The whole family was out (literally, 4 generations) picking both snap peas and snow peas. I'm not sure if it was a combination of the intense heat we had and the lack of moisture, but these bushes are just throwing out peas like it's going out of style.

We picked several grocery bags full of each, and I was lucky enough to be able to sneak some off before Nana (as the Boy call her) noticed. Well, she noticed and she just smacked my knuckles and told me I was naughty but didn't take back my pea contraband. Once I managed to pry the Boy back to our house, I showed him the snap peas, showed him how to pop them open and then watched him promptly inhale them all. I think I got one out of the whole bag.

At least he likes veggies.

Mini-Gardening Successes

My little garden(ing pots) have taken off pretty well, although some are doing better then others. My herbs are sort of struggling along, but my onions, lettuce and carrots are doing just peachy.

Now here's the really funny part. I'm scared to eat my lettuce. Gracie keeps telling me I need to or it's going to go to seed, but I just can't make myself. I don't know why. It's very intimidating for some off reason.

On an odd note: anyone have any idea when to harvest onions or carrots?

RIP Little Lettuce

I already killed 3 of my 4 lettuce plants. In only 48 hours. That must be some sort of record.

I'm hoping it's just shock from the transplant, because the last lettuce soldier appears to be quite happy. Of course that was this morning, it could very well be dead by the time I get home.

Your time on the Earth was short, little lettuce starters. But do not be sad, for tomorrow you shall be compost.

I don't care if it's small, it's still a garden.

Alright, alright. It's 3 planters. But they are BIG planters. Kind of. Whatever, it's my garden so shush.

This weekend I went to one of the big box stores (which I'm starting to hate a little to be honest) because I wanted to pick up the compost bin my sister had recommended to me (but that's another blog). Since I was there anyway, I decided to pilfer through their gardening section and see what I could find. I had a basic list of what I wanted: Planters, potting soil, watering can, yata yata.

I ended up buying 5 planters. 1 large deep round one (for my carrots) 2 medium long ones, and 2 smaller long style ones. I also bought 2 bags of potting soil (one organic compost, one Miracle Grow. Normally I would have stuck with organic but I need all the help I can get). I also bought a trowel and some gloves. I looked at buying watering cans, but couldn't find one under $15, so I scraped the Norman Rockwell picture in my head of me watering plants while the boy plays with a puppy in the background. Instead I bought one of those 42 level hose nozzles and called it odds and evens.

I got home, lugged the bags of potting soil (soooo heavy) out of my trunk and got to work. I ended up filling the tall round pot, and one each of the long pots. I tried to mix the soil about 50/50, but with the Miracle Grow most concentrated on the top and tapering off towards the bottom. Gracie recommended I put gravel or sand in the bottom to help with moisture control, but I didn't have any, and I was impatient. So if they all die, this is an official disclaimer that she told me so.

The carrots went in the tall round, since Gracie and I discussed it and we figured they need lots of 'down' and less 'out'. In the larger long planter I put in the onions and my lettuce. I don't think it'll be big enough for ever, but I plan to move one species over to the other pot in a couple weeks. The small planter is the home of my chives, sage and English thyme.

They all need full sun (at least for Spring) so I have them in the front of my house where I have the most sunlight. So my little garden is tentatively up and running.

Here goes nothing.

topsey turvey

I ordered a couple of these things online a week or so back. Of course the next day I find them at our local Walmart, go figure. Anyway they came in the mail and today I bought two tomato plants to put in them. It's pretty simple to set up and get going. We will see how well the tomatoes do. You get three basic parts; the topsey turvey itself (going to refer to it as TT), and two pieces that will form the lid.

You are supposed to use seedling plants but of course I was impatient and bought plants that were almost grown. I had to gather the leaves and gently push them through the opening in the bottom of the TT. I did good and only broke one branch on the biggest plant. You then add the dirt. I found that the 8qt bag fills the TT almost to the recommended depth.

Use the hook they sent with it or something equally strong. It gets HEAVY at this point. Put the green ring part of the lid on the top and line up the wire hangers in the slots. (If you buy this you will understand) Hang the TT and put the other lid part on lining up the slots with the slots on the ring part. Congratulations! You have an upside down garden!

It's Market time!

I don't give a hoot about April Fool's Day, April showers, blah blah blah. But I'm super excited that today is April 1st! Why? Because that means the Farmer's Market is opening tomorrow!

Our local farmer's market is open Thurs-Sun from April until Oct., and weekends in Nov. and Dec. I'm very excited for all the fresh produce, flowers and meats! Even honey! We have a quite large farmer's market that actually has it's own allotted space by the city, and is housed in an honest to god open air building!

One of the best things about this is that all the local places I would normally go to (or not, because some aren't open to the public) are all in one place! I can get my hand-ground meats, veggies and flowers for my table all in one place! Another good thing is that the majority of the merchants at the Market are small family-owned farms and ranches. They grow as much as they can, and sell what they can't use themselves. Some even have co-op programs, or buy-ins; where you pay a small deposit and two or three payments pre-season and from July through October you have a batch of veggies dropped off on your doorstep each week.

This summer, I'm making a very big effort to eat as natural is possible, with buying as little food as I have to. I don't have my own garden yet, and frankly don't have the know-how to implement a large enough one in the near future. I'm hoping to start small this season, planting some Walla Walla's, maybe some corn, and a few strawberries. Maybe I'll lose my mind and go a bit further, but for right now, that's the general plan. But since there is no way in hell I'll be able to realistically self-sustain the Boy and I this year, I'm going to try to take weekly trip to the market, and hopefully buy anything I need there.

An amazing friend of mine and I had a conversation last night, and we ended up at one point discussing how we didn't want to eat organic, we wanted to eat food that was more then that. Grown by people who grow it because they love it. Food pollinated by bees, and feed by sunlight and good ol' dirt. Both of us are fairly health conscious, and have been slowly moving left on the food spectrum. My friend is expecting her first child, and has even bought a food processor with the plan to make her own baby food, and I don't blame her. With the recent outbreaks of nastiness in everyday foods (tomatoes, peanut butter, pistachios) it's a bit scary to think that basically anything I'm feeding my son can potentially make him sick. I'd rather risk a bit of the "you're losing your mind" and know what it going in his mouth, where is came from, and where it has been.

Composting on the Small Scale

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not looking for some sort of rotting trash pile hanging around my house. Especially because I rent, and I can see my landlord having an issue with it. I found an interesting blog on Little House in the Suburbs, but it seems a bit more of a large scale operation that what I'm looking for.

My dad has a 'compost pile' (and I'm using that in the loosest terms, because I'm not sure what he thinks that actually entails.) but what he adds to it seems to me to be pretty haphazard.To me, it just looks like a giant mound of mole-hole dirt, dead Christmas trees and random rotting food.

I'm looking to do something very small, I'm just sick of throwing away egg shells and everything else because my place doesn't have a garbage disposal. From my research, it seems everyone suggests having a compost be at least 3x3x3, which really seems a bit ridiculous for me. Our family is 1.5 (The Boy only counts as half) and since I generally cook from scratch, most our food doesn't go to waste. I don't really drink coffee anymore, and tea bags seem fairly innocuous.

However, I am planning on doing some gardening this year, and having some nearby insta-plant food cannot be a bad idea. Another friend of mine is very nicely offering to donate a chuck of his land to me for use as my own personal garden as long as he gets a portion of the spoils (I'll detail this out in another blog). So it might be nice to be able to throw some compost at that endeavor as well. I even have a friend who owns a coffee stand (this is the Pacific NW) so I'm sure I could ask from some of their grounds.

I'm going to roll this idea around a bit more, I'll be sure to keep you updated.