Category Archives: garden

First Fruits

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The garden is starting to produce, and I can’t be more excited. I love getting my basket and wandering the yard picking a bit of this and that to make into a meal.

Saturday after a long day of planting some early veggies I decided it was time to start picking. The carrots and kale are leftovers from last year.

(can anyone tell me what this is?)


The Kale is nice and sweet, when the temperatures are warm it turns bitter, but will become sweet again when fall weather turns cold. In the summer I use the Kale to feed my chickens and rabbits.

This year I am going to keep track of how much produce I grow on my little quarter acre. On my side bar I am going to keep a running total as well as periodic posts.

Planning the Garden

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March is the start of our gardening season. Even though it is too early, in our area, to plant much this is when we start to clean up and prepare the garden beds for spring and summer planting. So when I woke up to this one March morning I was a tad disappointed. We had garden boxes to build and fill, a chicken coop to rework and expand and the weather had a different idea.


So I figured this would be a good time to do one of my spring projects that I really enjoy, yet tend to put off.

Planning the Gardens and ordering seeds.

So I gathered seed catalogues and got out my box of seeds and went to work.


Planing the garden this year is a bit of a different job, we are adding 100 square feet of new garden boxes and I have to figure out how to fill them with yummy veggies to eat this summer and hopefully to store this winter.


We are doing a lot of the basics, zucchini, cabbage, tomatoes, kale and adding a few new things, rutabaga, celeriac root and cauliflower. I also ordered a few twists on old favorites such as: Apollo Broccoli (a small leafy variety) and Russian Red Kale.

On of the nice things about square foot gardening it the ease of planning what to plant where and how much to plant, it is nice to see it all laid out.

From start to finish it took about 3 hours to plan and order and at the end of it all I am excited and satisfied. Now, all I have to do it wait for those boxes of seeds to arrive, and for it to get warm enough to plan them all!

What are you planting this year? Something new?

Dadzoo the Builder

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Last Saturday Dadzoo decided to solve my storage problem.

(Punk#2 helping her Daddy)

(This is my punk brother, who spent the day “helping”)

My new shelves are so pretty and white. I am going to paint the wood cabinets at the top a nice white to match the shelves.

I love how nice and neat all my jars look lined up on the new shelves.

AND, empty spots!

Here is the laundry portion of this little bitty room

Dadzoo built a little movable table to give me a nice work surface, and can also be moved in case we need to pull out the washer and dryer. I am going to add a pretty, bright curtain to the table.

I Love my new laundry/ pantry. It is so nice to have a place for everything.

Everythings comming up GARLIC!?

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Remember this post back in October:
Planting? Food?

In it I showed y’all how to plant garlic. Once it started to get really cold I put my garlic patch to bed. I covered the box with about 6 inches of straw and then covered the whole thing with something called “floating row cover”. I then left it to sleep over the winter. Well now that the days have become longer and it is getting warmer I took a little peek at my garlic patch.


And what do ya know, little green spears are pushing up through the straw.

I will leave the row cover off the patch now, but keep the straw for a few more weeks.

The straw and cover isn’t a necessary step in the process, but since they were planted in a raised bed and the temperatures in the winter can get below zero I thought the extra protection would be worth it. I didn’t want those bulbs to freeze solid.


I love this time in February, it is like a little game for me, wandering around the yard looking to little bits of green pushing up here and there after the long winter.

"My Work Space" or "Composting Part I"

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This is my work space

This particular day I was washing and preparing green tomatoes to make relish and I paused, my area was clean and peaceful. There are so many times that I look at this area in my home and I hate it! Dirty dishes all over, sinks to be cleaned and food prepared. It makes me tired! I have learned that if I can stop and love when things are lovable it makes the hard times easier. Does that mean that I always love to do my chores and I sing a happy song and life is all flowers and butterflies? No, I still loath ironing and mopping floors gives me a headache, but the end results, are well worth the effort. If I can focus on that, it makes the work much easier.

Beautiful bowl of green tomatoes in the morning sunshine.

Getting on to the composting portion of my post.

Right next to my kitchen sink I have two plastic bins that I use for my composting. One is for the compost pile and the other is for the chickens.


In the chicken bin I put all of out table scraps. Chicken are omnivores and will eat anything that we humans eat. They also eat and compost, in their own special way, foods that I don’t want in my pile; including meats, pasta and processed foods.

In the compost bin I put any vegetables, peelings, and such, egg shells, paper and bread.

Composting Part II will cover my lazy-man’s versions of compost piles.