There have been a lot of changes and more are to come ... mostly brought on by our church burning down. We live in a house next to our church and use the house property, church property and the parking lot across the street for our gardening/homesteading adventures. Our church property served as our 'orchard' (if you can call 8 fruit trees an orchard!); there was also a place for peppermint and spearmint. Last week the brothers and boys dug up our fruit trees and moved them to the new property, right on the edge of town. It almost looks like it's in the country but yet you can see the town start right down the street. The moving and re-planting seemed to be a success? Lord willing, some day we'll be moving out there too.
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| Ready to move! |
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| Planting and more pruning. |
Looking at the photo ... no one would ever guess we are in the Ozarks! Looks more like South Dakota or something :)
Also at the new property, and on the same day, Corban marked out and dug up our new garden plot - that's him in the tractor in the photo above. It is the nicest ground I've ever seen in these parts of the country!! Hardly any rocks to speak of ... WOW! And the soil looks somewhat rich. We are going to test it soon to see what it might be lacking. Also, the other day he hauled 3 dump-truck loads of composted manure to the site. Mmmm, good stuff.
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| Looking at the seed order :) |
Speaking of gardening ... in between cleaning up stuff from the fire and doing all the other normal things, I've been working on planning the garden for the upcoming season. I ordered seeds last week (we like Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds) and they came a few days later. We have been learning a lot over the last few years about seed saving and have managed to save many of our own seeds, however we still need to order seeds too. As each year goes by we save more and more kinds of seeds ... maybe some day we will no longer have to order any? I spent a few minutes last week searching for ideas on how to store our seeds and I think for now we are going to go with a mason jar(s) in the fridge. I have a food saver with an attachment that sucks the air out of mason jars and that seems like it will work well for storing seeds? It's something like THIS if you are interested. I picked the food saver up a long time ago off of Craigslist; I don't use it much but I'm going to start dehydrating more and that will really come in handy.
I'm not sure this is worthy of sharing or not but it's been an interesting experience to say the least. Brianna's dog, Sadie, had puppies [intentionally] 4 weeks ago. She only had 3 - one really big one and two half the size, 2 brown, one black with a little bit of brown. I don't care for them in my house ... but oh well, it's just for a few more weeks. They are 'cute' but I'd rather them be in a barn or something ;)
My laptop was ruined in the fire; a nice young man in the community offered to rescue what he could off the hard drive. Thankfully most of it was saved but some was lost - and I'm still discovering things that seemed like they were ok but then it turns out they are not. I tried using an older laptop but that could not keep up with the other work I have to do ... so I had to go buy a new one. Once I find something I like I tend to be 'brand loyal' if I can, and I like ASUS. The one I got was on sale and I had a 10% off coupon; I was so thankful to save some money. I REALLY LIKE my new laptop! It's a touch screen and it has been such a blessing to be able to touch the screen to move through things instead of doing the mouse pad which is pretty hard for my lack of coordination.
I have a few videos and posts in the works but not much time to get them on here. We'll see what the next few weeks brings. One is the sourdough English muffin video (almost done). Another is a peak into my pantry. I really like seeing how others keep things organized and now that we have a system that is finally working for us I thought it was high time to share. Something else I am working on is making dehydrated 'meals-in-a-jar' ... if you have any tips or links to share, please do!
Back to work.
Glad that things are picking up after the church fire. The new property looks fantastic...your trees in full leaf/bloom will look beautiful against the skyline.
ReplyDeleteLove your update...Sadie looks like a contented mom. Puppies are so much fun when they are small but they quickly become a handful; they grow so quickly.
I'll be starting to pull out my seeds soon as well to try and get a jump on the growing season here. Not sure how well my seeds are going to do, I forgot them outside in my sewing room this summer and they froze. Will pretest a few on wet paper towel to determine viability.
I got a new laptop back in December, and while I love the new touch screen, I'm disappointed with the mouse pad, it doesn't have separate buttons for the right and left mouse click. I went back and bought a wireless mouse. Now my wrist is much happier.
Thanks for the update...talk again soon. God bless.
:)
ReplyDeleteI just looked at the handy seed starting chart I have and we are already 2 weeks late starting our pepper seeds but right on time for the onions and tomatoes. Corban and I are getting those planted right now.
We finally got our first snow of the winter last evening; it was on my to-do list to plant lettuce seeds outside today but I'll have to wait until the snow goes away. The old-timers around here say I can just throw them right on top of the snow, however the bed needs worked up a little first.
We left our seeds outside all year last year!!!! We'll see how well they did in the heat. I was thinking of testing the germination rate on the paper towel like you mentioned but Corban said we'll just plant them and see what happens.
We PLAN to have enough plants AND produce to sell this year but we might be thinking too big!!
God bless you too!!
:-) Moved from my old blog the simplelife2017 to
ReplyDeletehttps://oursimplelife3.wordpress.com/