Spring?

What I think of as spring might finally be here! It looks like we'll at least be consistently hitting the high 60's or low 70's from here on out and more flowers are starting to bloom. Now I know it's technically the first day of summer, but I just can't believe THIS is summer.

In the flower bed in front of our house, a few huge flower buds finally opened up to reveal peonies (which I'd never knowingly seen in person before). Our landlord told me how you need ants on peonies to eat away a sticky layer on the bud and allow them to open. The skeptic that I am did an online search and turns out that's just a myth, but the ants are still beneficial. The peonies excrete a sugary substance, which attracts the ants and the ants fight off (eat, I guess?) some of the bad bugs.

We also had a bunch of these super cute little blue flowers come up. I looked on the Montana plant life website and I'm pretty sure they're forget-me-nots

And this little guy came up that kinda looks like blue flax, but I'm not sure because it's more purple than blue

Our tomatoes plants are doing well too. In front of the house, there used to be huge cottonwood trees and the stumps are still there. Josh's brother pointed out that the centers of the stumps were pretty rotted out, but still moist--like the tree's system is still pulling water up from the ground. He thought it'd be a good place to plant and we agreed. A week after we arrived, we got some tomato and basil plants along with a few squash seeds and we added a little soil to the stumps and planted everything there. All the plants are happy and the tomatoes are blooming. Here is a picture of me standing on one of the stumps to show how big they are...and I have size 11 feet, just for reference. Oh, and yes, that is the beginning of a baby belly in the way. Just yesterday I made the comment, "I'm starting to pooch out" and Josh immediately answered back, "YEAH you have!" (just because you have a PhD doesn't mean the brain to mouth filter is always in place when talking to your pregnant wife).


And last, but not least, the girl's riding their bikes the other day

Long Term Goal Planning

I have really vacillated in the past about long term goals. My first instinct is to say that my long term goal is to own enough land and be capable of producing and preserving food well enough to provide (and barter) for most of our needs. On the other hand, I don't want to be tied to that piece of land. When my children are grown and having their own kids, I want to be able to go to them for extended periods of time if the need arises. This seems like a real conundrum to me. You can't have something like a dairy cow or goat unless you are there to milk every single day.

Then I went grocery shopping yesterday. It was a little bit eerie. The produce section had many many bins (at least 1/3) that were completely empty. The produce that was there was not really great quality. There were signs posted everywhere about weather patterns affecting supply. Despite the rest of the shelves being stocked, it pretty much freaked me out. It solidified my idea of continuing to improve garden skills and settling long term in a place where we can have extensive vegetable gardens and fruit trees. Because the thing is, if food should suddenly be in short supply, it will be too late to start from scratch. Providing for yourself is something you have to learn about ahead of time and practice on a regular basis, even if some people think you're nuts for doing so.

I've realized that where some people might feel secure with things like retirement savings, my sense of security is very much tied into having a reliable source of shelter and food/water.

P.S. More quilt updates coming later today, we've made A LOT of progress, I just haven't taken pictures yet

Pear Juice--The Update

TennZen was kind enough to supply me with the instructions for canning pear juice. As a happy coincidence, her instructions were for 24 pounds of pears and we had 24.5 pounds.

We started out by washing all the pears:


Then, the stem and blossom end was cut off and they were chopped (I didn't core them...was I supposed to??):


We added 2 quarts of water and cooked until the pears were soft:


At that point I stopped taking pictures, but we strained the juice through flour sack cloth and hung up the cloth with the pears in it (like a bag) so the juice would drip out. No squeezing the bag, it just gets your more sediment. The juice was refrigerated overnight and then heated up and canned the next day. I had two small problems. The first is--I never get as much juice as I "should". We got 4 quarts and the instructions said 6 quarts. This happened when we made apple juice last year too. I don't know what I'm doing to lessen my yield. The second problem was the juice was slightly bitter. Now, I know the ideal when making apple juice is to use more than one variety of apple. I assume pear juice is the same way, but we're working with totally free pears off the neighbor's tree, so we stuck with what we had. I'm not sure if the taste was due to the pears or because I didn't core them (ideas??). No worries, I added a little sugar (1 cup for 4 quarts of juice) and it's just fine. Perhaps not quite as healthy, but oh well. Of course, we took some over to the neighbors and they said we are welcome to more pears when they're ripe. It is a LARGE tree (taller than the house) and there are a lot of pears left, plus we have our little tree with several pounds of pears on it, so I need to figure out how to best make good use of them.

I also have a garden update. We finally got a good, long, soaking rain. For days, it rained a little, stopped for a while, rained a little, stopped for a while.... It was perfect. We didn't have any flooding, and the ground got completely saturated. Our plants look very happy with it and I'm hoping the extra moisture won't give us blight and powdery mildew problems (even if it does, I'm not complaining though...). It has been two weeks since we planted and here's what we have so far:

The cabbage and broccoli:


Two tomato beds (going to have to put in supports for these this week):



The beans (I really didn't expect such a high germination rate, still debating whether to thin them our or leave them as is):

The corn (again, wasn't really expecting anything, the seed was just thrown in there):


It's time to plant a fall crop of english peas, so I think we will be trying those. Last spring was our first time trying them, but they were very tolerant of our winter weather, so I think they'll work fine. I'm only a little concerned because our planting guide only gives a small window to get them out (9/15-9/30), so I'm guessing any weird weather will throw them off. It's also time to put out carrot and onion seed for harvest next year.

While we're on the topic of food preservation, I've come across an interesting site about food storage and disaster preparedness. They are doing an interesting challenge this week where they are giving a scenario for each day and you are to attempt to live out the scenario. At the very least, it's worth checking out and thinking about how you'd get through each situation. I think especially with hurricanes around here, it's easy to get in the mindset of always having a little advance warning to prepare for an emergency situation, and it doesn't always work that way. Are you prepared to take care of you and yours without any outside help, electricity or water for a few days or even a few weeks if need be? What if fuel wasn't available and leaving wasn't an option? Worth considering.

Fall Garden Going Strong

Well, I guess that "old" seed we planted wasn't so bad after all...we have A LOT more sprouts than we anticipated. Beans, corn and beets have all sprouted and will need to be thinned out. The transplants (tomatoes, cabbage and broccoli) are all happy and we got a nice, long, slow rain yesterday, which is a first in a LONG time and the plants look like they appreciated it.

We've gotten into our school routine, I think. It takes more work than I thought to get 2 girls ready for school.......breakfast and clothes and hair and brushing teeth and packing lunches--it adds up! The girls are definitely more tired. Sedona is taking a good nap when she gets home (she only goes half the day) and both girls are in bed and asleep at 8pm with no complaints. Besides that, they are both loving it!

Last night Josh had a soccer game to ref, so the girls and I made brownies. It's all about teamwork:

Cheap food

I mentioned earlier about having to go to Kroger. Normally, I shop at HEB, but when Kroger runs their mega event, I sit down and stage a plan of attack. TennZen wrote out a post detailing what happens earlier this week. The short story, Kroger's mega events ($5 off when you buy 10 items) are fabulous ways to get name brand foods for cheap or free. Are they always the healthiest? Of course not, but we're a typical "gotta have convenience foods sometimes" family. So here's what you do....

• Sit down with the sales paper and your coupon book
• For each thing included in the mega event that your family will use, look for a coupon (even if it seems expensive)
• Add up how much it will cost you.....usually the sales paper lists the "price if you buy 10", so you can just use the number shown. Remember that Kroger doubles and triples coupons, so those 30 and 35 cent coupons will give you steep discounts. Also remember that Kroger will let you "stack" coupons--the rules get a little tricky there, but the manufacturer coupons you get in the paper can be used along with some internet coupons.
  
• Some things end up being free or 10 cents, so check prices on anything you might use
• Remember that you can mix and match your items, you don't have to buy 10 of the same item
• Make your list (I do this buy just putting my coupons in one spot, I don't buy anything I don't have a coupon for) and be sure it's a multiple of 10. If you have 19 items, you may be able to find something for 50 cents that's included in the sale(this week it was Quakes rice snacks, which the girls love)
• Marvel at the shelf price versus what you paid. Kroger tends to be more expensive, but this saves me money over the usual HEB prices too.
  

Yesterday, I bought $60 worth of groceries (Kroger price) and paid $19. Not the best I've done, but a great way to start re-stocking after a long vacation.

We also planted our fall garden today. We are a little late on some things. Around here, tomatoes and such should be planted first of August, but technically they say you're okay through August. Lately, it has stayed warm through Christmas, with just a few light frost nights, so we decided to try anyway and I will start putting together row covers this week so we can easily cover the plants when needed. After the horrible drought we dealt with this year, we also moved toward a less self-sufficient watering method...we installed drip irrigation lines several weeks ago. So, today we planted:
36 tomato plants (roma)
24 broccoli plants
6 cabbage plants
3'x15' bed of beets
about 3'x12' bed of beans (kentucky wonder)
about 3'x12' bed of corn

The seed is all older stuff, so we sowed it densely and are hoping some of it comes up well. We've never ever done well with corn, but we had this on hand that we received as a gift, so we just sort of threw it out there. In a week or two, we will be planting carrot and onion seed.

A Canning We Will Go....

Well, I get depressed every time I walk out in the garden. (Unfortunately, I'm not joking) So to cheer myself up, I decided we needed to do some home preservation! We've been canning every night since Saturday. So far, the tally is:
2 pints and 20 half-pints of sliced peaches
2 pints and 5 half-pints of grape jelly (from wild grapes we found)
2 pints and 4 half-pints of peach peel jelly (made from the peels and pits of the peaches we canned earlier)
3 pints and 3 half-pints of strawberry jam (made from the strawberries we grew)
About half of a watermelon cut into half-inch slices and dehydrated
one tray of yogurt dallops dehydrated (first time for that--need to tweek it a bit)
two trays of strawberry leather (made from our berries)

I feel much more productive looking at my shelf of canned goods than I do looking at my garden!!

We have had trouble lately with cardinals getting into the chicken coop (no small feat...they have to crawl along the ground and squeeze under a 2x4). We're pretty sure they're coming after water because the drainage ditches and small creeks close to us are all dry. I think we're losing what tomatoes we have to the same problem. When I sit outside to watch the wildlife, it sure seems like the smaller critters are going after the tomatoes more as a water source than a food source. I'm thinking about picking all the tomatoes while they're still green and letting them ripen inside so we get some.

Sad Garden Update...

...as in, the garden looks SAD. I posted months ago about the water situation in our area. Well, it's turned out even drier than I expected. I looked back through the history for our area and we had just under 1.5" of rain for the entire month of May, and none at all for the month of June (and none in the forecast). Just walking to the car saps you of all moisture and makes you feel thirsty. We had twice the normal amount of rain in March and April, which means young, tender plants got assaulted with the blight and powdery mildew that are rampant around here, then stressed with drought conditions once they were bigger. Our high temperature has been between 98 and 100 for over a week and the forecast shows 100 or higher each day through the end of June (and I'm sure long after that). We had late freezes this year too. Not fun. We've done really well with carrots, onions and potatoes. Our green beans did well and our peppers, okra and some of the black eyed peas are still very happy as it heats up. Our tomatoes are miserable. We have plenty out there, but when compared to how many plants we planted, the yield is the worst we've ever had. Usually the northern states are the ones complaining about a short growing season, but it's like we just went from winter straight to summer and as much as I like hot weather, the plants didn't appreciate it. Next year, I'm thinking we may have to steal some ideas from gardeners up north and put out everything in February.

On a better note, we got some peaches on sale and canned peach slices in half-pint jars. Those are the perfect size to open and split between the girls without any going to waste. We had been going through the fruit bowls available at the grocery store, which cost about $0.30 per 4oz bowl. Our home canned peaches end up being $0.20 per 4oz serving (and we know exactly what went into them). Then, this morning, we went to pick wild grapes a friend had found. Word to the wise, it's a good idea to wear gloves when taking wild grapes off the stems, because the acid in the skins before cooking can irritate your skin. We didn't know this until poor Sierra started complaining her hands itched. A quick google search (thank you internets!) pointed out the problem and we avoided further drama. Josh is working on grape jelly as I type and tonight we will can more peach slices and tonight or tomorrow we will use the peach skins and pits to make peach jelly. We may be low on salsa and spaghetti sauce, but we'll have sweet jams and jellies comin' out the wazoo!

Always Learning

Looks like the blog updates won't be too terribly frequent throughout the summer!

We'll start with the garden:

Ollas: The ollas are still working well. The bed they are in does not get watered except through the ollas and the plants all look as healthy as the rest of the garden. The one problem I did start seeing was some blossom end rot on those tomatoes. Since I'm not seeing it in other areas of the garden, I'm assuming calcium deficiency is not our problem, which leaves us with lack of water. I had only been filling the ollas every 3 or 4 days and finding them just about empty at that time. Since researching the blossom end rot, I've started topping off the ollas every day and that seems to be working better.

Early Blight: Darn the stinkin' early blight! This is a problem every year in our area. Since this is a fungal disease that splashes up from the soil, I preventatively prune the plants as they get bigger. Typically, I cut off all the branches/leaves that are within about 12" of the soil. Then, as the season wears on, I go through once a week and cut off any leaves that are showing signs of blight (I see brown spots first, then yellow/brown rings, often starting at the edge of the leaf). I bag these diseased leaves and throw them away so I don't contribute more blight spores to the compost/soil. Every year, I start to panic about how much foliage I'm cutting off, but every year we get a good yield and very little if any fruit affected. We had a humid and rainy start to the season, which contributed to blight problems. While my Neem oil spraying has kept the powdery mildew completely at bay, it doesn't seem to be helping with the blight. Our tomatoes are in new beds that we just put in this year and I have noticed that two of them don't get sun until late morning. These shadier beds are definitely more affected by the blight, which makes sense because their leaves are staying more wet in the morning. Ideally, we would have no overhead watering (and go purely to ollas and/or drip system) to combat this, but it's so prevalent in our area that the rain alone would keep it going to some extent. Since the Neem hasn't worked, we are trying an organic spray with sulfur in it this week. I'm not holding my breath that'll make a huge difference, but thought it was worth a try for future knowledge.

Yield: Our strawberries are giving less. There are still a few berries here and there, but they either get eaten right away, or thrown to the chickens...they aren't making it in the house anymore. We got a big handful of blueberries off the bushes we planted this year, which was unexpected and exciting. We have eaten one pound of fresh picked green beans so far and the tomato plants are heavy with fruit, but nothing ripe yet. The black beans have put out lots of pods and we will those dry on the vine. Black eyed peas are fattening up in their pods and the okra looks like it will start to bloom any day now. Those are the only exciting things at the moment.

Sierra is still bugging me to do workbooks every day. On Tuesday we headed to the local library for "big rig day". It is part of their summer reading program to have some activity every week and I expected this to be a small event---maybe a fire truck and police car and that would be it. Well, it was a HUGE set up. I think they probably had one of every type of vehicle the city owns there! We got to talk to several very polite city workers about what the vehicles did and what different parts of the vehicles were for. The kids could sit up in them if they wanted. They also handed out free popsicles for everyone. She mostly chose math to work on this week, so we did lots of addition and worked a bit on subtraction. Today we read a book about tornadoes and made a "tornado" with two 2-liter bottles and a little connector. Our neighbor is an "archery in the schools" teacher and had family visiting, so he set up all his equipment and invited us over to join in. Sierra enjoyed her little archery lesson and Josh got a chance to pick up a compound bow (he was on the archery team in college, but shot recurve).

How does your garden grow?

Sierra finished pre-school this week. Her teacher does a little end of year party for everyone and she had a blast and is very excited to be starting Kindergarten in the fall.

We took her out for pancakes in the morning

Here she is getting her surprises from Ms. Lydia.

Then I made the mistake of letting her know I had a list of fun "summer school" activities to do (she's upset we aren't putting her in school for the summer this year). I've got three months of activities planned and I'm sure she'd get through it all in one week if I let her. I did break down and go ahead and do the volcano activity:




Her other big accomplishment this week is learning to ride her bike without training wheels!! We had been talking about getting her a new, bigger bike and by coincidence, one of our neighbors put a bigger girl's bike out on the curb for trash day! We had to replace one tire, but it was cheaper than a whole new bike! Starting on Tuesday, Josh took her up and down the street a few times every night. By Saturday, she had it down! She still can't start and stop completely on her own, but she's getting there! We're trying to figure out how to upload clips from our video camera to the computer, but need to find a different cable. In the meantime, I have a short clip from the regular camera (hard to tell, but he's not holding her at all, just ready to catch her just in case):


And lastly, some updated garden pictures:

Carrots, a few onions and nasturtiums:
Green Beans and Cucumbers climbing their archways:
A few different squashes:
Peppers and Okra just getting started:
Tomato plants:

Potatoes

To limit the spread of Early Blight to the tomatoes, I decided to pull all the potatoes this weekend. Also, I haven't seen evidence of blight on the potatoes, just the leaves, so I figured it was better to get them out now. Had we left them longer, we would have gotten more, but I think we did well anyway. We planted 12 pounds of seed potato and got 41.5 pounds back. Next year, I only want to plant Red La Sota potatoes--they gave us a MUCH higher yield (over 4 times what we planted, as opposed to barely 2 times what we planted on the White Kennebecs), and seem much more resistant to the blight.

For pest and disease control, I have been spraying everything with neem oil about once a month and spot treating where necessary once week. It has made a big big difference in pest control and I believe it's helping with the blight and powdery mildew too. I have gone out and cut diseased leaves off the tomato plants and removed them from the garden, but I haven't had to do as much of that as I usually do. We got a really really heavy rain yesterday, so it'll be interesting to see what sort of fungal problems crop up this week (the rain makes it all splash up from the soil).

Also an olla update: I give them two thumbs up and want to add more to the garden. The upside is that the plants in the olla bed are doing just as well, if not better than the other plants. The bed with the ollas has not been watered since the seedlings were transplanted and got established. I add water to them every day or every other day and find I end up using about 2 gallons of water over 6 ollas each time---this keeps twelve 3-4 foot tomato plants happy in 85-90 degree weather. It also greatly decreases the weeds in the bed. I'm only finding I need to pull weeds immediately around the ollas. The downsides are it's not fun to reach between the plants to fill them (I don't like the smell of tomato leaves) and occasionally I find spiders under the lids when I raise them. I don't have any good data or anything, but I'd say these save a significant amount of water, which also decreases the amount of rain water storage we need. I would like to have "real", larger ollas, but I'm not convinced the benefits of that outweigh the huge difference in cost.

Potato Soup

We had another homegrown meal today. I made bread bowls and potato soup..yum!!

On the bread bowls, I used this recipe from AllRecipes.com. The only change I made was I only split the dough into 4 portions, not 8, to get decent sized bowls and I didn't do the egg wash. On the soup, I started out with a recipe from The Best Recipe (awesome cook book, highly recommend it to anyone learning how to cook because they explain WHY they tell you to do certain things). I made a few changes though, so here's what I actually ended up doing:

2-3 tbsp olive oil
2 small onions, diced (from the garden)
3 pounds red la sota potatoes, peeled and diced (from the garden)
4 cups vegetable broth
2 cups whole milk
toppings

1. Saute onions until translucent. Add potatoes and very briefly saute
2. Add vegetable broth and bring to a boil
3. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, until potatoes are very tender
4. Ladel portions into food processor (I have a kitchen aid, a blender would also work) and process until smooth
5. Stir in milk and simmer until heated through
6. Fill bread bowls and top with shredded cheese, bacon and chives


Was listening to our local gardening show on the radio this afternoon. I didn't hear much of it, but the part I did catch let me know that we are primed for lots of early blight and powdery mildew this year. joy. Like it's not bad enough in a normal year. We have been spraying neem oil and have had great success in cutting down on pest problems. Hopefully this keeps the early blight and powdery mildew in check as well (since we've already seen a little of both). TennZen also did a great post today about making your own insecticidal soap. Very cheap to make your own and will work great on pests. You can use left over soap to make your own clothes detergent. I didn't go that route because it hasn't helped me with powdery mildew at all in the past and I didn't feel like I had time to "play around" before getting everything under control this year.

That's just peachy

I found out Monday that this weekend is Mother's day. Last fall I had started a quilt that I intended to give my mom for Christmas. It didn't get finished, so I figured it would be a handy Mother's Day gift. Fast forward to Monday when I realized I hadn't touched the thing since Christmas and had 2 days to finish (since I was seeing my mom today). I did it! I have a serious love/hate relationship with the Flynn Quilt Frame. I absolutely despise setting up the stupid thing and every time I contemplate it, I just about convince myself it'd be easier to just hand quilt. But then I manage to get a quilt completely quilted in 2 (crib size) to 10 (queen size) hours, and I'm in love again. I also have a love/hate relationship with invisible thread. I like the "forgiveness factor"...I'm new to machine quilting and this covers up my mistakes while I'm learning, but it can be a major pain to work with. While I finished binding the quilt this morning, Sedona did this:


At first she was crying that I wasn't playing with her, and then she got quiet. Any mom knows that quiet is a BAD thing. Quiet is not the universe giving you a reprieve, it's your child finding something SO interesting that it must be forbidden. Sedona got out three boxes of cereal. The raisin bran was the most fun, I suppose. In her defense, she did this right next to my sewing table and I let her--I figured a happy baby that let me finish my project was worth a box of cereal. She pulled handfuls out of the box, threw them on the floor, picked out the raisins and yelled "Ree Ree!!" until I said, "yes, raisin", then she ate them. Periodically, she stood up and did a happy dance on the bran flakes. Took two minutes to sweep up when I was done sewing. Well worth it.

And yesterday, we enjoyed our first homegrown peach. My wonderful husband is a serious peach fiend and could focus on nothing besides eating that fresh picked peach, so I have no pictures. I must say though that I am not a big fan of peaches and I relished my share (we split it in fourths) and wished there were more. It was fantastic!

Another Homemade Meal

Well, I'm just not a photographer, what can I say?


Second homemade meal of the year. This is a "spanish tortilla". They're sort of like an omelet and Josh got hooked on them when he had a business trip to Spain a few years ago, so they've been a staple around here ever since. The eggs are from our chickens, the potatoes and onions are from the garden and the tomato was purchased at the farmer's market on Saturday. We did throw store bought cheese on top, but overall, quite the homemade meal!

Homemade Meal

We had our first "from the garden" meal of the year today. We used chicken we raised and peas, potatoes and rosemary straight from the garden. Served with apple juice we made and canned last fall. It was a "Chicken Vesuvio" recipe from Cook's Country Magazine, and the pictures don't do it justice--it was delicious!!

Pears, Peaches and Onions, oh my!

Another Garden Update

I think Josh has hit on the real reason our seedlings didn't do as well this year....I was suspecting it was just too cold in our back room and he just reminded me that last year, we had our dryer venting into the room for extra heat (panty hose on the end of the vent tube to catch lent), which made the room one big ol' humid, hot green house. I'm gonna have to add that note to my garden log.

Outside, we finished planting spring crops. The last of the tomatoes, peppers and melons were transplanted, lots of black eyed peas and okra planted, kentucky wonder beans and christmas pole beans, pumpkin, more squash direct seeded into the ground, basil and oregano seed spread through out the garden.

Garden Update

The garden is slowly expanding and will soon be taking a fair portion of my time each day. I have a lot of updating to do...

Ollas: The ollas are in the ground. We ended up putting 6 in a 4' x 12' raised bed. We planted 20 tomato plants in the bed. After burying the ollas and planting the seedlings, we watered the whole bed and filled the ollas. Each one held about one gallon of water. Since then, I have been watering the tomato plants individually only on the side of them that is closest to their nearest olla (I haven't read anything about this, but seems to me it'll help their roots seek out the olla?). The ollas are not yet covered (hoping to get out to buy something for that tomorrow) and they are losing about 1-1.5 cups of water per day. One is losing water a bit faster and I'm thinking it may have a slow leak, considering digging it up to investigate. The ollas have only been filled with collected rain water.

Strawberries: We are picking a big handful of berries everyday, sometimes more. Some of the plants are really full of berries just waiting to ripen up. I'm still seeing lots of new blooms in the garden. Since these are supposed to be June-bearing plants, I'm hoping we continue to get lots of berries. Right now, I pick berries every afternoon, leave them on the counter overnight and then wash, cut the tops off, pat dry, and throw in a gallon freezer bag. When the bag's full, we'll make jam and start in on "plan B" (eating fresh, fruit leather, dried berries, and selling them)

Potatoes: Are growing faster than we can keep up. We have shoveled dried grass clippings and leaves on top of the plants twice (the latest being at the end of last week) and they are already more than a foot taller than their highest covering. I saw a house with about 15-20 bags of leaves put out for the trash and I think we'll probably pick those up and cover the whole potato bed. Like the hay last year, the leaves may be too "airy" and not increase yield too terribly much, but it's something and if nothing else, it'll mulch back into that patch of ground.

Tomatoes: Well, I goofed on the seedlings somewhere. I'm not entirely sure where. I'm pretty sure it got too cold in our non-heated back room during the last few cold snaps, so they just didn't grow as fast as I expected. As soon as the weather warmed up, I just moved them outside and they seemed happier. Still looked like they could use a little compost tea or something. But, well, when you get right down to it, I'm a lazy gardener. I decided to take my chances and just transplant what I had. It's been about a week now and the plants are looking very happy in their home. I can see new foliage everyday. I had a little bit of cash we received as a gift, so I hedged my bets and bought two 6 packs of tomato seedlings at a local produce stand. One of the varieties I got was Homestead, which we weren't already growing and has given us fantastic yield in the past.

Melons/Squash: While I was buying the above seedlings, Sierra asked if we could get watermelon seedlings. I'm not a fan of growing watermelon. We've been completely unsuccessful in the past and the fruit we do get, we always manage to pick and cut into before it's ripe. To humor her, I got a 6 pack though. They're in the ground and I'll read up about increasing our chances of success. The other squash and melon seedlings were transplanted and they're already putting out male blooms (you know men, always trying to jump the gun!)

Onions: Some of our onions decided to bolt! Not cool! Typically, onion seed is planted in the fall, the onion grows a small bulb during cool weather, goes dormant in the winter, then puts out leaves and roots and build a large bulb in the spring and summer. The second winter, the plant goes dormant again and then the bulb sends out a seed stalk. Our onions were big enough this winter to "register" one winter gone past. Then it warmed up, then it got cold again, then got warm again. Our onions said, "man! that year sure went by fast, but I've had another winter, so this must be my second spring" and sent up a seed stalk. Once this happens, the bulb won't get noticeably bigger and the quality noticeably decreases, so the onions with seed stalks had to be harvest. We pull them up and have them hanging to dry. They are big enough to be usable, but it's still a bummer. There are plenty left in the ground and we're hoping they behave themselves and can be harvested at the same time as the tomatoes so we can use them in spaghetti sauce and salsa. these smaller bulbs we have will be used fresh and some will be dried for future use.

Other plants: The english peas are looking good, but we haven't given them anything to climb yet (remember? lazy gardener). We really need to get on that this weekend. Pole and bush beans will be planted this weekend as well. Carrots will probably be ready to harvest pretty soon. Bought a pack of cal wonder bell pepper seedlings (ours were from old seed and never sprouted). Chili pepper seedlings we started are doing well and will get transplanted this weekend.

Chickens: The egg layers are nearly back to full production and pretty reliably give 4 eggs a day. Meat birds are being meat birds. They stink and I'm not sure I'd want to do them on a regular basis, even if we had a large piece of land. If we could continue to get 4-H cast offs once a year and only have to put in 2 weeks of effort to get a year's worth of meat, that's worth it, but I'm not so interested in raising larger flocks for profit. If you read my comment on my previous post, you know there was an unfortunate run in with the dog. She managed to get into the part of the yard we'd fenced off for the chickens. The chicken she got had no bite marks, but I'm pretty sure she had a heart attack or something, because she could move everything, but she was very clearly NOT right. She was put out of her misery. There's a silver lining to everything...we now have 40 meat birds, and 40 is a much nicer number than 41 when I'm figuring costs up. Oh, and the dog is no longer allowed outside without supervision. Sorry chickies :-(

Ideally, the garden will be in full swing by the end of the weekend. I'll post pictures!

Spring Break!

We've had a busy busy week! It was Spring Break for everyone at some point, so we were completely off our normal routine.

We started out last weekend with both girls having a stomach bug over night. Fun, fun, fun. There are lots of things to miss when your babies grow up....I'm assuming cleaning up vomit soaked sheets and pjs (repeatedly) is not one of them. Then on Monday, I woke up with the stomach bug. yay.

After that, things were looking up though. We spent a morning at the park with friends, we took a day trip to Cameron Park Zoo in Waco with some other friends, and took a VERY long day trip to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo (super tiring, but WAY worth it). Sierra says she doesn't want to be a cowgirl and will never ever ride a horse (translation: she's not interested in barrel racing), but she was absolutely fascinated by the livestock show. 4-H kids were showing steers while we were there and you'd think that's a pretty boring thing for a 4 year old, but she wanted to sit and watch and know who won and why. I guess we might be joining the local 4-H when she's old enough. When we were home, we planted our ollas, transplanted some of the tomatoes, fed and watered chickies, transplanted squash, covered potatoes and just generally played in the dirt. The week in pictures....
Josh planting ollas
The giant moth that tried to break into the house
Checking out a giant tortoise at the zoo
Elephants
Sierra and Sedona cruising the backyard
Rodeo days!
My little outlaw (yes, I know the hat's on backwards--we were on hour 10 of a 14 hour day, you're lucky there's a picture ;-)
End of the rodeo
Aunt Brandie took Sierra on the ferris wheel
Sierra enjoying the carousel
Daddy and Sedona

The Eagle Has Landed

We have the chickens! A quick rundown of our preparations: Josh cobbled together a coop from materials we already had on hand. It's a simple triangular wood frame with chicken wire stretched over top and a tarp over that. Not the fanciest thing in the world, but we only had two days and it'll work for two or three weeks. We bought a 5 gallon waterer and a 40 pound feeder. We also bought 150 pounds of feed. All the broiler feed we found in town was medicated, so we opted to go with starter/grower feed because it's un-medicated. The important part was to get close to the right protein percentage (this is 21%)---too little protein and they take too long to grow (for instance, the laying hens only get 16% protein), too much protein and they grow too fast and become prone to heart attacks and broken legs and all sorts of not nice things. We fenced off a section of the yard with snow fencing so the chickens can roam the grass during the day and just return to the coop at night. It appears they were in a fairly small pen on plain dirt up to this point in their lives, so hopefully this is a little upgrade for them. We transported the birds by just using bungee cords to tie a tarp onto the bed of our little pickup--it made a closed in space that the birds weren't at all thrilled with, but it kept them contained.


The initial transfer from truck to yard was a bit stressful for them, but not horribly bad and in no time at all their little chickie instincts kicked in and they started grabbing bugs and grass to eat.
It also didn't take them long to find the feeder

We ended up with 41 chickens and they all seem to be handling the transfer okay. These are Cornish X birds. They are meant to be slaughtered around 8 weeks, though I've seen 12 weeks in some places. I don't know. They're 6 weeks now and when you pick them up, you can tell there's already a really decent sized chicken breast under those feathers (not at all like our red and black sex linked laying hens). I can't imagine letting them go to 12 weeks, seems like they would just get so big you'd be torturing them at that point.

Sierra has (of course) asked umpteen million questions about what these chickens are for and we've told her. We want her to understand where her meat comes from and also to respect the animals by caring for them well and slaughtering them as humanely as possible. She will not be in the middle of everything when the day comes, but we have explained the process to her and why we'll do it the way we're planning on doing it. She doesn't seem at all bothered---she's very matter of fact about it. Not the right way for every family to handle the situation, but it works for us and she is ready to handle the information (presented the right way). I'd rather her know the reality now than go through life blindly eating chicken nuggets only to find out later the horrifying things that happen in a factory slaughterhouse. Maybe when she's grown, she'll support (or run!) small scale farming operations.

The only other garden news is that some of the potatoes got their first extra layer. Josh had piled up grass clippings when he mowed the yard. They are thoroughly dried out and were shoveled onto the potatoes that had grown tall enough to be covered.


And inside the house, Sierra kept up her track record of amazingly loving and interested older sibling by reading Sedona a book (and yes, she really did read "Tails are Not for Pulling", which suprised me because I didn't know she was quite to that level of reading yet! She had to sound out some words, but she made it through!)