Spring has Sprung

Warm day - in the 70s - with (finally!) no wind. Last time we were here, we were battling the wind to put up a make-shift chicken fence, after determining that the reason our quinoa has not sprouted is that the chickens have been pecking it up as soon as we seed it. Grrr! Used some blueberry netting and old fence posts from the pig paddock and got a quick chicken-proofer up, which seems to be doing the trick. It is folded over double, and we need to get some white yarn tied to it to keep the blowing down and keep birds from flying into it, but at the very least it makes a strange enough noise in the breeze this way that no birds are likely to come close enough to fly into it!

We have sprouts! Despite the near-frost temps of the last few nights, we are pleased to see several crops sprouting. Peas are up:

As are the beans:

and radishes:

and lettuce:

Did some thinning of the lettuce seedlings, as they came up in bunches of about ten. When I planted the wind or dirt shifting must have gotten to them...that, or the damn chickens. They aren't nearly in the straight row I set up, either, so I suspect the girls' scratching for bugs is to blame.

Inside, we have most of the herbs up (no sign of the stevia yet), the tomatoes are up and thinned, and the peppers have emerged. The Johnny Jump-ups just sprouted, too. :)

Our potatoes arrived in the mail a few days ago: a book-size box full of mesh bags, each labeled and stuffed with tiny potatoes. Can't wait to get those into the ground! We're debating the usage of tires for potato hills, but are concerned about the chemicals that might leach from the tires. Some reading suggests that old tires aren't a concern, but we're not sure. More research needed, perhaps.

Suh-nee Days, Sweepin' the Clouds Ah-Way

After a Saturday morning of Elmo and fighting the cold wind outside at the local Literacy Festival, followed by a Saturday afternoon of cleaning house, it was such a treat to see the sun shining today. We still have wind, but the temp sans wind is around 65, and the snow we feared never came. Nor did the freeze. So far, so good (knock wood!).

Stopped up at the garden today to find that our lettuce have sprouted! First sign of life in the garden. We put in our starter flats of herbs, tomatoes, and peppers; those should sprout soon, thanks to the sunny front windows. We'll have a lot fewer cherry tomatoes than we hoped, as C-Dawg got over-excited about helping and opened the seed packet into the wind. We managed to find about 10 of what we think are the seeds on the driveway, and we planted 'em. If we're lucky, at least a couple will be the cherries.

What went into pots today (all SSE seeds, of course):
Johnny Jump-ups

Amish Paste Tomato

Sweet Pea Currant Tomato (we hope!)

Santa Fe Grande Peppers

Rosemary
Russian Tarragon
Cinnamon Basil
Sweet Marjoram
Thyme
Stevia (for Sam to keep indoors in pots)

We have a bunch of what looks like Queen Anne's Lace sprouting in the garden, which means (sadly) that our Dragon Carrots won't be seed-savable. They'll cross-pollinate. Bummer.

Layout

Today when checking the weather we discovered that there is a chance of rain for the next two days, followed by a chance of rain/snow on Sunday. That is neat. Erin may be up all night knitting little wool sweaters for all the little plantlings. Hopefully, with a little cover, the plants will survive. One wonders how anything survives if a little cold snap can kill off plants - how can they ever over-winter? So, with that logic, they should survive.

I hope the bean plants have heard of logic. Fingers crossed.

~Sam

P.S. We finished the layout for the big garden, which, incidentally, needs a name. "Big Garden" just seems so unworthy for such a beast. The dimensions we have so far (because we can't seem to get it right yet, no matter how many times we measure, scratch our heads, and come up with different numbers) are:

Quinoa Bed: 88' x 15' (1340 sq ft)
Main Beds: 1-6 88' x 5' each (2640 sq ft)
Herb/Misc Bed: 75' x 20' (1500 sq ft)
Total Seed Space: 5480 sq ft

Some measurements are off.  In the end all measurements and data may be wildly inaccurate, according to our soul discretion. In other words, objects in garden may be larger than they appear.

At least, we hope so.

(Retro-Post for April 7)

Got too busy and tired to post yesterday...

Today we planted more Seed Savers Exchange seeds: the Dutch Browns (50 seeds), Henderson Bush Limas (50 seeds), and the Bumble Bees (2 rows @ 20’ each), which we affectionately refer to as “the bumbles.” We also put in about 1/4 of the Dragon Carrots and our radishes (Early Scarlet Globe) in two 10’ sections of two rows each. Why only a 1/4, you ask? Did you just run out of steam? We want to stagger our carrots and radishes so we will have a longer period in which to harvest (and because Erin hates radishes, and will flip her lid if she is forced to deal with more than a few at a time. They’re mainly there to protect the other veggies from bugs). If we put a new crop in every week or two we will have new carrots and radishes for about the whole season, is a nice feature. We expect to harvest our first crop (radishes, of course - the fast buggers) in about 30 days. At least they're pretty.

Wait, I take it back - the radishes will be the second crop. We harvested a huge surplus from our rock crop today, so if anyone out there has need of about a trillion little stones, mostly granite, the perfect size to not be useful for anything, then please let us know. We know right where you can find them. At the present, most are piled into little cairns marking the seed rows, which Erin finds “aesthetically pleasing.” I’m more concerned about who will clear all those cairns once they’re covered in weeds and it’s time to till again!

The beans that were planted on the 5th (Vermont Cranberries) seem to be swelling, a sure sign that germination has begun. Supposing the chickens don’t like ripe beans, we hope to soon have plants big and numerous enough that giants will be attracted to our garden like moths to a wool sweater. (I wonder if we can train them to eat tax assessors?)

Erin put in a small row of nasturtium at the south end of the lettuce/cuke rows.


Just have to put in a photo of the Dragon Carrots - cannot wait to see these come up!

All in all a good day of work.

~Sam

Rainy Day

Light rain today, temp around 60. Considered putting clear plastic over the bean and cuke seeds to keep them warmer, but temp is supposed to go up to 80 with sunshine tomorrow. Overnight temp shouldn't drop below 50. Fingers crossed. At the very least, this is ideal for the lettuce seeds - nice damp, cool first day in the ground.

Second Seeds

Got the garden mapped out tonight, complete with the requisite scribbles and last minute changes:

Sam is working on translating this map to something more legible, and to that end is trying out some Garden Planner software he just downloaded. For now, we're following our maps and trying to be organized:

We spent some time admiring the box of seeds that arrived from Seed Savers Exchange,

sorted them out into piles of "plant as seeds now," "plant in pots first," "plant as seeds in May," and "we got a little carried away."

Finally we headed outside. The weather was beautiful all day, but clouds rolled in this evening. The rain stayed over the hills to the east, but the wind picked up a few times, and we might just find some lettuce growing across the yard as a result!

We got the first two beds raked to the half-way point. Each of the six main beds is 5' wide and 88' long, which seemed just fine when we were tilling it with the tractor. Raking by hand is a whole 'nother story, even just to turn the loose soil!

Sam put in the Vermont Cranberry Beans today. We might have jumped the gun on those a little - we got several conflicting reports on when to put in beans - but we'll see. We have about six varieties of drying beans, and even though we only used half the Cranberries we WAY overplanted the rows (including a few spillage oopsies), so if they don't come up - or only partially do - we can reseed in May.

    Pretty red beans!














While Sam was preparing the bean beds, I put in the Blue Pod Peas and SSE's Lettuce Mix in bed #6 (closest to the house). This bed will be the salsa garden at the other end when the tomatoes and peppers go in as seedlings.  The peas cover about 1/3 the length of the row on the south side, with the lettuce beside them on the north. We plan to build trellises for the peas so they can shade the lettuce as summer comes on.

While we were planting, little Miss K fed the chickens with her grandma:

First Plantings

Quinoa: Got it planted last week. Raked it into its bed (88' x 15' at the north side of the garden), then had four days of down pour rain. Checked the seed yesterday, expecting to find it had all washed away or rotted, and were prepared to reseed, but found many of the seeds had begun to germinate. Will possibly reseed the bed again in a week, depending on how much actually sprouts.

Ireland Creek Annie (beans) and Bushy Cucumber (picklers): Put those into the kitchen garden today, seeded directly. 

Heading to the Big Garden in a few to go through the seed packets and plot out the layout of the garden. Getting a late start on this, but hoping to get the early seeds into the ground by the weekend. 

Go Big or Go Homestead

Sam and I don't have any land. Heck, we barely have enough money to pay our rent, never mind go shopping for real estate! But we're disillusioned with the state of our world, and don't want to wait until it's too late to get out from under a system that is crushing us.

The frustrating thing is this: if you want to eat healthy, organic food; if you want to have your own self-sustaining farm; if you want to get away from all the things that cost too much money but are "required" for comfortable living, you have to succumb to the ultimate irony: having enough money in order to afford the release from that bondage.We'd love to not worry about money, but more important to us is doing what we love; unfortunately, in our situation, teaching and raising kids doesn't pay well! That leaves us in a bind. Can't afford to jump into a homestead all ready to go, can't afford not to. Hmmm.

So why not start small? Why not borrow land that is not being used (thanks, Sam's Mom and Dad!) to start an organic garden? Sure, we'll have to drive there, which wastes gas and time. But what if that garden is big enough to feed us through the winter? And what if we're shrewd enough to learn to save our seeds? Better yet, what if we use this as an opportunity to learn how to create a garden that will feed us through the winter AND save our seeds, thereby saving the cost of that much food toward our future, and gaining the know-how in the process?

Phew, I exhaust myself. Let's just get on with it.

And so, armed with Sam's love of research and my lifetime of mom- and grandma-taught skills with gardening, food preservation, and raising animals, off we embark. Last week we tilled an enormous garden at Sam's parents' house. We ordered nearly 60 packets of heirloom seeds from Seed Savers Exchange. We put in a small kitchen garden at our apartment for immediate meal usage, which I hope to plant this today. And we started this blog to catalog our successes (we hope for lots) and our catastrophes (but will more likely get lots of these), so that we can do it better next year, and the year after that, and so on. So that somewhere down the line, our two children will find it 100% normal that their home provides their food for them, not their supermarket.