March flew by                                                    4/5/14              

   Wow where did March go? I think we got some stuff done, we must have right? We've been working on so many things around the homestead.  We did some work on the garden fence to keep those darn deer out of it.  The hubby put a big dent on the log pile, getting close to have it all cut up.  We put together some compost bins/areas with some free pallets we found on Craigslist.  The seedlings are growing rapidly and keeping us busy.  We started the process of putting a fence up around our front "yard".  I put that in quotations because we live in the country not sure what to call it, maybe play area.  Plus doing the usual everyday up keep.  

 

   The garden seems to be our biggest project at the moment.  We've been working in the garden and on the seedlings going into the garden.  Our seedlings are doing so good this year.  Most of the seeds we started did pretty well, we've had some plants we lost but overall good outcome.  Our tomatoes are growing so good that we had to transplant them into 1 gallon containers.  We started 17 of them so we've had to add another table to hold all the seedlings.  My dining room is getting smaller and smaller.  To see some of the pictures of transplanting click here.

 

  The soil in our garden isn't that great and we've been trying to figure out a way to amend it.  We got lucky and found someone who was trying to get rid of alpaca poo.  We learned that alpaca poo can be directly tilled into garden without waiting for it to compost and break down.  So far we've got one load in the garden which covered half of the garden we'll be getting another load next week.  I never thought I'd be so excited for poo.  Keeping our fingers crossed that it helps.

 

   Our second batch of ladies or some might call them laying hens are now laying. There's been around 10 eggs a day waiting for us at night for pick up. So proud of what a great job our ladies are doing for us.  It's a pretty good feeling to be able to provide our family and other families with fresh eggs.  I didn't realize until now how much we did last month and all while chasing around a 2 year old.  

 

  

 

Planting                                                      2/18/14

 

   Well we’ve started some of our seeds. It’s been two weeks ago yesterday that we did it. We came to the conclusion that last year our tomatoes didn’t have enough time outside to ripen so we started those early plus some cold weather crops that way we have more than one harvest of lettuce, swiss chard, broccoli, and cauliflower. We also wanted to experiment with those cold weather crops by starting some inside and then we plan on direct sowing some outside in a couple of months. I was super excited to plant seeds because my awesome hubby built us a potting bench. Last year we crowded everything on our picnic table and crouched over it to plant our seeds. Let me tell you that wasn’t very good on my back. Using our potting bench was so comfortable I could plant all day if the weather permitted.

 

Once we planted the seeds we put them on trays and brought them inside. Last year we put them on our kitchen table which was a bit of a hassle. This meant we couldn’t eat at our table from February to May and if you can tell it annoyed me. We don’t eat dinner there often but we are trying to get better at it. Last year though I picked up a 6ft utility table from my favorite store Target so we pulled that out from under the guest bed. I picked up a tip about starting seeds from Grow Veg newsletter video…it suggested wrapping newly planted seeds in plastic using bags. Using my brilliant noggin I came up with wrapping our pots with plastic wrap. We buy plastic wrap at Costco so we have an abundance of it, plus it doesn’t take much.

 

We planted our seeds on Monday and by Thursday we had sprouts already. I’ve thinned some of them out since so many shot up like weeds. I’m experimenting with the swiss chard, there were a minimum of three seedlings in each start so instead of just pulling some out and tossing them, which I feel horrible about doing. I grabbed another nine pack starter and pulled some and replanted them, we’ll see how that goes. We’ve been watering them daily and today I touched one of the tomato starts and I got a whiff of that awesome fresh tomato smell. I believe it’s one of the best smells almost as good as new baby smell. To see more pictures click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Year                                                   2/13/14

 

I know it’s been way too long. The joys and stress of the holidays plus some unexpected family tragedies got the best of us and our time. We did have a good holiday filled with family and good food. We are just now getting back to our normal life.

 

We’ve been doing some work on the inside of our home. We scraped off the popcorn ceiling in our living room at the end of last year and we’ve made some more progress on it. To check out the progress we’ve made click here.

 

We also did some more work on the stack of Madrone logs we had delivered back in October. The plan is to get it all cut up in rounds and stacked so it can dry. Once it’s dry we have to split it and when I say “we” what I really mean is the hubby will be doing that. I do my part in helping with it. I get to use the incredible pickaroon the hubby made me to roll the logs into the area we allotted for them to dry. It’s a lot of hard work but it’s what we have to do to keep our home warm for our family. I never realized until we started processing wood to warm our home by cutting up trees, splitting it and stacking it how much we take for granted homes that have heat pumps. Like the saying goes cutting your own firewood warms you three times; splitting it, stacking it, and burning it.

 

We’ve started on our 2014 garden. We did some work on the fencing because we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the height of the fence that was letting deer in but the spacing of the wire. I would like to enjoy some vegetables this year unlike last year. Last year we used the website Grow Veg to plan our garden lay out and planting times. One great feature we like is how it helps with crop rotation so we decided to renew our subscription and we have our new 2014 plan.

 

Organization is an issue we are trying to work on for the garden. We’ve put together a homestead binder which includes a garden section. We need to keep better track of what works along with what doesn’t. Some other information we will include is dates we start seeds and tips and tricks we want to incorporate in our garden this year. We are hoping this will be helpful…so many times we want to try something and we always think we will remember but we often don’t.

 

I know this entry is a bit long but I wanted everyone to be caught up on what we’ve been working on. There are some projects coming up and I’ll try my best to not fall behind. Now I’m off to work on some laundry, don’t be jealous now.