Cucumbers, Reading and Science Fairs

I am so excited and ready for spring! I find myself just lying out in the sun whenever I have the chance. My indoor gardening is going well. The cucumbers are still growing like crazy with several big ones nearly ready to harvest. After three months I feel like I'm getting the hang on this Tower Gardening thing. I'm experimenting with many different plants to see what grows best and have several winners in the spinach and herb department. It's very cool to walk over there and harvest your salad each day.

We've been battling some behavior problems with the kids lately (mainly Greta). They have gotten very used to have regular screen time, whether that's computer, tv or tablet. I don't have too much problem with computer time as long as it's educational but usually it's not educational and more Roblox (their favorite online game). It had gotten to the point that it was a constant question coming out of one of their mouths..."Mom, can I play on my tablet?", "Mom, can I watch a show?", and so on. I hit a point where I couldn't take it anymore and Sean and I decided they needed to earn their screen time. So now they have to read for an hour to have an hour of screen time. This has been particularly helpful on the cold weekends when we are stuck inside. So far so good!

Wesley has made his way through the Harry Potter series and is now on the last book.

This year Wesley entered the Science Fair. It's open to all fourth and fifth graders. He had to research projects and pick one and then present all of the information he gathered on a tri-fold. He chose "How much salt will it take to make an egg float?". He did the experiment and took pictures and then typed out all of his findings to present. There were around 10 entries and he took first place. I'm so proud of him!

Basil

The Tower Garden has been planted for over a month now and is growing like crazy. The lettuce is nearly at its end and new seeds have been started to replace them this week. The cucumbers are all full of flowers and baby cucumbers which is super exciting (yeah my life is pretty dull). When you grow flowering plants that need pollination indoors you don't have all the bees, moths and butterflies that normally do the pollination for you. So each morning I get up and take my small paint brush and brush the male flowers and then brush the female flowers. I had to watch a YouTube video showing me the difference between the two flowers but now have the hang of it. I'm excited to have fresh cucumbers to eat.

The four little chambers of basil I planted produced a ton of basil leaves. Far more than I use fresh in my cooking so I was trying to figure out ways to preserve the crop so it didn't go to waste. It dawned on me that I have a dehydrator sitting unused in the cabinet so, once again, I went to YouTube to learn how to dehydrate basil. It looked simple enough, put the basil leaves on the dehydrator trays and let it run at the lowest heat (95 degrees) for 12-24 hours.

I filled all 6 trays, cramming all the leaves in there. Twelve hours went by and they were just limp little leaves. So I left it going over night, the next morning still limp leaves. That next evening I checked it and it was still the same, limp not crispy. At this point it had been 36 hours and I was about to give up. I got online and found a site that said to just pop it in an over at the lowest temperature (which on ours is 170 degrees). I put them all on a cookie sheet and popped them in the oven for 20 minutes. They came out nice and crispy and beautifully green. I crunched all of them up and put them in an empty spice container. This is what a big mixing bowl of fresh basil produced.

I do have a newfound respect for the price of organic spices. :)

Tower Garden

I've become pretty obsessed with tower gardens. What is a tower garden you ask? Well, it's a hydroponic tower that circulates water around while growing tasty vegetables. I was intrigued the first time I saw the gardens at our church (they have three) and then the gal that tends to them asked me to help. I was hooked. Once a week we would meet at the church and add water, plant seeds or harvest goodies. It was fun!

I started researching them and after running the numbers decided we needed one at the house. It will take about a year of growing my own greens (and not buying them from the grocery store) to pay for the unit. It is a large investment up front ($525 for the unit plus $250 for the grow lights) but growing your own food is so satisfying.

Right before Thanksgiving we arrived home to a giant pile of boxes on the porch.

It was like Christmas! That is all the components to the tower garden including the base, LED lighting, extension unit, minerals and rock wool.

Thanksgiving day my parents were over and helped us put it together. It went together a lot quicker than we all thought it would. There isn't much to it.

 Here is the unit built but without the lighting. I did opt for the extension which makes it two rows taller (an extra $70). I waited to order mine until the new LED lighting was released. I didn't expect the lighting to be so bright! It was blinding! Should grow some great food.

We pushed it over where we wanted it and ordered a hot water heater pan to put it in (in case of drips or leakages). I filled it up and added the mineral blend and let it run for a week. I started seeds after a week. I started them in their own rock wool in a tray and once they were coming up I popped them into their own little chamber on the tower. I planted the top two rows with kale, then a row of romaine, a row of basil, two rows of black seeded lettuce and the bottom row is cucumbers.

It's been growing for a month now and I've harvested lettuce for the first time this weekend. I made lettuce wraps and used these big old lettuce leaves for the wrap. Growing food in your own home in the middle of winter is very cool. I really love it!

Juicy Fruit

I do love growing my own food. It's very satisfying. The thornless blackberry bushes are growing like the weed they are. The three pathetic tiny bushes I put in the ground a few years ago are gigantic and popping up suckers in all different directions.

Daily harvest

 The kids and I go back there daily and pick several bowls full. The stash in my freezer was to the point I had to do something. In the past I just freeze gallon bags full and use them throughout the year to make cobblers and sauces for waffles. But this year I wanted to become a jam maker. It has intrigued me for awhile but I always put it off. Wish I would have started years ago, it's super easy. I made 14 half pints of blackberry jam. Half with seeds and half nearly seedless. So delicious!

 This made me want to make more jam. There is a peach orchard not 4 miles from us with big banners out telling customers to come pick their own peaches. I'd been meaning to take the kids there for a couple summers but the heat index has kept us home. Well this year we went out early and were there when they opened up at 9. It was so fun, although the kids were whining about half way through of the heat....it's been pushing 100 for the last few weeks so even at 9 am it was in the 90's. We picked 15 pounds with a nice mixture of white and orange flesh peaches.

I wrapped them up in brown paper bags and let them ripen on the counter top for a few days before a majority of them were ready for jam. I got twelve half pints of peach jam and still have about 6 pounds to do something with.

Can't wait to put more stuff in jars this year. I have about 20 pounds of tomatoes on the counter right now....what to do with them. I'm thinking salsa.

Spring!

Boy spring has sprung around here! I love this time of year. So much to do, and it's fun stuff! The garden is being planned and I got a fresh plot rototilled this past weekend. We generally rent a rototiller from the local rental store but we've decided it's time to stop relying on the rental store and just start accumulating the things we use most often (tiller and trailer are the top two). So we bought a little electric tiller made by Sun Joe. It's a 16 inch, 13.5 amp tiller that I just hook up to an extension cord.

For places away from the house I use the generator that is placed on a little wheeled garden cart. It worked great! It helps that it rained all last week and the soil was in perfect condition to till. I will admit that the reviews were correct saying that you'll feel like you wrestled an alligator when you're done. My arms hurt and felt like jelly afterwards. It was quite the work out.

I tilled up a 6X20 foot plot up by the house to just be a big flower garden (I might mix in some cucumbers). I like the idea of attracting and feeding the bees with a big flower garden. Can't wait.

It doesn't look like much now, but it's going to be packed full of zinnias (my favorite garden flower).  The back garden will be full of tomatoes and squash. We are looking forward to the blackberries arriving and I planted three raspberry bushed yesterday. So I hope to have raspberries next year. Yum!

Sean spent the weekend working on the F250 trying to make it start better. The fuel pressure has always been weak so you have to turn the key on and off several times until the pressure is high enough for it to start. He decided it was time to replace the fuel pump which, of course, is under the bed of the truck. So after watching a few YouTube videos and enlisting a little help (thanks Mom and Dad) we got the bed of the truck removed. Turns out an engine hoist works great. He was able to replace the fuel pump and now if starts great! Yeah!

2016 Garden: The Year of the Flower

In the past I'd had some rather large gardens. Gardens full of over 20+ crops. Gardens that took hours a day to maintain. I needed a break this year. A break from weeding, watering and smashing squash beetles between my bare fingers. I wanted something that was fun, happy and easy. I think I accomplished it this year. I dug three rows, two for zinnias and one for tomatoes. The zinnias have come in so lovely, they are by far my favorite garden flower. So easy to grow: water, mulch and forget about them. I did mulch this year with the contents of the goat house (hay and manure) so things are well fertilized. I find myself just going back to the garden and looking at the flowers. I nestled six tomato plants, one cucumber plant and a bell pepper among the zinnias, and they are all doing wonderfully. What a relaxing garden this year, I might need to do this again in the future.

 

 

I've been making this wonderful vegan "cheese" sauce that consists of potatoes and zucchini and found myself buying 4-5 zucchini a week. I felt guilty buying this when I could easily be growing it in my backyard so I started a small zucchini garden over by the blackberry bushes late in the season. I was worried they would be attacked by the dreaded squash bugs but I haven't seen them at all. I'm thinking it might be because I planted them in a new garden. I'm hopeful they stay away.

The flowers on the deck are doing great. I do love double petunias. The year of the flower has been fun. I do think more flowers next year would be fun.

Summer Day

The heat of summer is upon us! It's nice actually after all that rain and dampness. With this time of year comes many lovely things, one of them being black berries! There is not a day that goes by that I'm not thankful for putting those three little blackberry bushes in my cart at Lowe's. They have grown by leaps and bounds and are covered with hundreds and hundreds of ripening blackberries. The kids and I love to go back there daily and fill up a bowl and munch on them all day long. Growing your own food rocks!

That wet May we just had brought with it a crop of baby toads like no other season I've seen. There are hundreds of them jumping around the yard. The kids think this is magnificent and spend hours collecting them into an old lettuce container. Then I make them release the babies back in the garden. Take that squash beetles!

A Fine Summer Day

This is the time of year when all the hard work done in the spring starts to pay off.  All the planning, buying of seeds, digging in the dirt and watering....so much watering. There are blooms all over the yard, large tomatoes hanging on the vine and giant sunflowers looming overhead. The funny thing about the sunflowers is I didn't plant any sunflower seeds. I have a little "mini me" that took it upon herself to scoop out a handful of black oil sunflower seeds (or goat food as I like to call them) then prance around the property pushing them into the soil. There are sunflowers growing all over. I didn't think the black oil sunflower seeds sold as bird food would sprout. I always assumed they were treated or something to keep them from being used as flower seeds. Nope, they grow some really nice big sunflowers it turns out.

The wisteria vine always tries really hard to produce it's large clusters of fragrant flowers in early spring but they usually succumb to a late freeze. Apparently all this rain we've gotten made it pump out some mid summer blossoms. I wish you could smell these flowers. It's like I'm in Hawaii again. Such a wonderful smell.

We planted three blackberry bushes that I found on clearance a couple of years ago and haven't thought much of them since. They get mulched each year and watered but left to their own devices. Well this is the year they decided to produce blackberries. So many blackberries! The kids and I love going back there each day looking for the ripe beauties.

This is the first year I've really just completely slacked off on the koi pond. Each spring I empty all the nasty brown winter water out, rake out the 400 pounds of wet oak leaves and make it ready for the season. The extremely wet May put me back a month and I just barely got it cleaned out before we left for vacation. I didn't get the pump up and running so without running water I couldn't go buy goldfish for it. So there it sits, empty. Usually by this time of the summer it's already got baby goldfish growing in it. I went out this morning to see if anything was using it as a home and was pleasantly surprised to see a ton of these guys:

I think they are bullfrog tadpoles as they are big guys! There are also a ton of dragonflies dancing around the air so I'm sure there are larvae in there as well. I love seeing both of these things around the pond as it means there will be very few mosquito's around.

That's what's happening in our yard this fine summer day.

Seedlings

What to do on a lazy Tuesday morning. Oh yea, re-pot oodles of baby tomatoes. They were quickly out growing their little peat pots and needed more room. Greta was a big helper taking over soil duties. She's very gentle with the seedlings. We got 35 replanted. It's a bit much, but we do love home grown tomatoes. This year we are trying three varieties called Heritage, Atkinson and (or course) Cherry tomatoes. Yum!

Update through pictures

As I write this post I'm smelling the lovely scent of dehydrating mango and bananas. Every time I go to the grocery store I scope out the produce section for new and exciting fruits to throw in the dehydrator. This past weekend I found organic mango! Score! They smell heavenly. I'm enjoying the dehydrator.

We've encountered a new challenge to dog ownership. Chance, our little 13 year old terrier mix, has decided to start marking our house. He does it primarily when he gets super excited. So, for instance, say the neighbors dog walks past the back fence, he and the other two idiots go barking madly at the window. Then he finds the nearest thing to urinate on and lets loose. It is incredibly maddening. Sean mentioned perhaps he needed a diaper (the dog, not Sean) and so after a search on Amazon I discovered this is a common problem amongst male dogs. So much in fact that they make a product called a "male wrap" that wraps up the problem area much like a diaper. So I ordered one and once it arrived I strapped it on the little leaky terror terrier. He absolutely hates it. He's normally a frisky little dog, with oodles of personality. Well he turns into a statue when I put on his diaper. Will not move. He just moves his eye balls around in their sockets, head perfectly still. It's pretty funny, but also a little sad. I don't want him to stop being Chance, I just want him to stop urinating. Maybe he just needs to get used to it.

Greta and I started a whole lot of seeds last week. We planted kale, cabbage, lettuce and three varieties of tomatoes. Now a week later and they have all come up and look pretty good. The nice weather is enticing me to think about garden designs and ponder tilling methods. Greta seems to find enjoyment in watching seeds grow so perhaps I've passed that hobby on to my youngest.

The beautiful Spring like weather is making all the outside livestock happy campers. The goat family has weathered another semi rough winter. Each winter I think might be Dym's last, but she keeps on truckin'. I've created a pretty good combination of warm beet pulp, alfalfa pellets, a nice warm fleece jacket and regular de-wormings to keep her in decent condition. Older animals take quite a bit more work to maintain, but she's worth it. Such a sweet goat.

Wesley is a crazy tooth losing second grader. He lost his other big front tooth so he's got no teeth when he smiles. It's actually his sixth tooth. Poor kid can't figure out how to take bites out of food. I bet it feels odd to say the least.

With the nicer weather comes more eggs! The chickens have been ramping up production with Spring on its way. This winter I didn't try to force egg production with a light bulb in their hen house. I usually do that and it keeps me in eggs year round. But after last winter and the dreaded January molt (losing feathers in the coldest month sucks) I decided to give them a break. They look great this winter, five fat and happy hens. They are back up to giving me three eggs a day, which seems to be the perfect number for our family. It's great not buying eggs anymore.

In the back yard

Oh July where you have gone? Crazy to think this month is nearing an end and next month the kids go back to school. July is usually the month where I harvest the most out of the garden. But not this year. I have not been into gardening this year. I planned it out, planted the seeds, mulched the tomato seedlings and that's pretty much it. Everything came up pretty good but the weeds came up too. Oh and the grasshoppers. Well, let's just say they were worse than last year and last year was bad. I had thought the super cold winter we had would have killed off some of the eggs but to no avail. They've stripped every plant in the garden down to just bare stems. Everything but the tomatoes. I've read tomatoes plants are toxic, that might be what's keep the grasshoppers away. The tomatoes are flourishing. I started twenty organic tomatoes from seed and now I can say there are hundreds of tomatoes back there.....mostly cherry tomatoes. One new variety I tried is called Organic Green Zebra and they are really pretty. It's hard to tell when they are ripe though. We'll see how they taste.

Every day I trot back to the garden and pick as many cherry tomatoes that I can fit in my t-shirt. Then I walk up to the goat pen and am treated to this sight.

Goats love tomatoes. GoatMan, there on the right, is nearly blind I think because he just snorts around with this mouth open until you put a tomato in it. Then there's Dym (the black one with her tongue sticking out), she could survive on nothing but tomatoes and would be quite a happy goat. Her offspring are learning to love produce by watching their mom eat it. I'm happy to say Heston survived his blocked urethra problem he had earlier this summer. He's now getting ammonium chloride daily sprinkled on his black oil sunflower seeds to prevent that from happening again. He's one lucky goat.

I then walk over to the tortoise pen and offer each tortoise a cherry tomato. They gobble them down. It's a special treat and one they get rarely since the majority of their diet is grass. The other day I had a melon that was past its prime so I chopped it up and went to see if the tortoises would be interested. Talk about a treat! I had to take it away or they would have eaten the whole thing. Here is Billy Bob, the young sulcata, and Big Guy the 30 year old leopard tortoise.

 About a month and a half ago the kids found a few seed packets that I hadn't planted back in the garden. They really wanted to plant them so we decided to do so in some non traditional places (you know since the garden is a hot bed of insect activity). We planted the giant pumpkin seeds under the swing set. They don't get morning sun so I don't know if they will actually produce anything, but they are flowering right now so we'll see. The kids enjoy watching their progress as do I.

Last night I put on my gardening gloves and proceeded to catch as many grasshoppers as I could. I think I had about 12 in my fist when I finally called it quits. Do you want to know what I did with those grasshoppers? I fed them to these lovely laydies. Call it retribution for eating my garden.

I have six hens and they were looking pretty bad. It's kind of like a molt that would never end. So a few weeks back I decided to stop locking them up in their outdoor enclosure. I thought maybe if they were free ranging they would get the needed nutrients to stop looking like roadkill. Well after a few weeks now I can't say they look any better but they are much happier chickens. They stay in the fenced in goat pen in the walnut grove and lounge under the horse trailer during the heat of the day. There is not a single insect in that entire pen. They put themselves to bed every night in the hen house and I shut their little prop door every night at dusk to protect them from predators. It's a good arrangement for now.

That's about all that's happening in our back yard on this hot summer day.