Welcome October!

Wow...October is here! Fall in the PNW can be a wet muddy affair on our little farm. This first week of the month has been decent. The last couple of days have been warm though, so that's okay. 

This week I pulled up tomato plants in the garden and removed the tomato hooks and set aside the veggie clips. Afterwards I got my Little Buddy Zeke into the garden first, without the rest of the swine, so he could do clean up on his own. Sorry no photos...He got the weird corn that grew and first pick of the leftovers before the younger swine joined him as well as little momma. After she showed up he decided he was done. They did a pretty good job with clearing the veg and some of the plants. All I have to do is gather up the stuff they didn't eat and dump it on the compost pile. Then try to clean up the weeds that I let go out of control. The plan is to get some raised garden beds for the 2024 growing season. More on that later. 

This week the last thing from my Territorial Seeds order arrived! Garlic!!!

After a poor harvest of this year's garlic I decided to order a different variety of garlic. After a checking out all that Territorial has available I landed on this variety. It's a hardneck variety and seems to grow well in different climates. The next thing I needed to decide on is where to poke these into the ground. My plan is to put a cover crop in the garden before tarping it for the winter. My current garden boxes are not big enough so I decided that I would plant as much as I can into the hoop house and if I have leftover, those could go into one of the 4x4 garden boxes. I'm excited to try out a new variety, just because I had been growing the previous garlic from cloves that I kept from a sampler that I purchased and grew a few years ago. 

The other thing that happened this week is this....

After watching a homesteading family explain what these are - Egyptian Walking Onions - I decided to try them out. Evidently, this allium is very forgiving and does alright in a variety of conditions. Early this week I went to spray some water on the bed and saw that they sprouted! So very exciting. I'm a learn as you go type of person, so I'm not sure how this is going to go, but so far so good. 

Besides these two things I've been busy getting ready for an event at our church and running errands and doing all the things. Today I plan to take it easy and do some stuff around the house. If it weren't for prepping for the event a couple of days and picking up stuff that I had on order I think I would have a better attitude. I'm just feeling run down and tired lately. It could be fall, but then it could be living. I'm usually pretty good at balancing my time between home and other activities. It just seems that the running around activities are increasing when all I want to do is hang out at home. Life is supposed to slow down a little bit right? Meh, I just need to adapt I guess.

Here's to the first week of October! May life start to even out, just a little bit. 

And Just Like That...

Summer is over. 

Yep, summer is over and the temps have plummeted into the 60s and 70s as is usual here in our part of Washington State. Not only that, we had an Atmospheric River/Bomb Cyclone come through this past week HERE. Fortunately the rain wasn't too bad, mostly at night and into the early morning hours. I suppose there was a day that we had constant showers throughout the day, but even so, it wasn't terrible.

This past week was quite busy for me. I like to have one day a week to do all my errands, maybe two days. Most of the time I like to spend my days doing stuff around the house. Whether it's in the kitchen or out with the critters...my happy place is being home. Mon-Thurs was going here there and everywhere. So today (Friday) I'm going to spend the majority of the day at home doing the things that I keep putting off. Later after Tom comes home from work we'll head out and run a couple of errands. At least I will have the majority of my day to do stuff around the house. 

Not a lot happening here at the farm, so this is a brief post. Here is a cute pic of the two itty-bitty pigs that we sold a few weeks ago...

Ya'll!!!

OH

EM

GEE

SWEET POTATOES BAY-BEE!

I have tried for the past couple of years to grow sweet potatoes - this was year three in my quest to grow these things and I finally got something that we can eat!!

My understanding is that sweet potatoes like warm weather to grow...we have warm weather, but I don't think it's warm enough, LONG enough to get a decent harvest. By decent I mean 4-6 good size tubers.

The first year I tried was in 2021. I may have started the process a bit on the late side. I think I thought about growing slips when spring hit so the slips weren't ready to plant until summer. That year I successfully grew vines with a few itty-bitty fingerling tuber. This gave me hope that if I started them earlier then I might get something more than just a bunch of vines and itty-bitty sweet potatoes. Last year I tried growing them in the hoop house. Slightly better, but not much. I started the process earlier in the year and probably got the slips into the hoop house before June. The plants thrived and I had plenty of vines, but still itty-bitty tubers. I think they may have been bigger, but not much. 

THEN...

This year I got my sweet potato into water way early (February I think)  and by early March I had a few slips growing and buy the time I decided to start getting my garden planted - in June I had so many slips! Before I planted I did get some of the slips off the tuber and into a pint jar of water to root. Some of the others that I was able to include roots from cutting were placed into pots immediately. 

My thinking for this year was to go ahead and grow them in the crop garden and do a kind of raised bed situation. Also, I thought hoops and some green house plastic would help the plants to grow better. The plastic would give the plants a perfect microclimate and it was easy enough to water from one side after lifting the plastic. Unfortunately, the winds can get a little crazy in the summer so the plastic eventually tore and I ended up taking it off of the hoops and just hoped for the best. The temperatures here in SW Washington state have been consistently in the 80s and low to mid 90s. So maybe the time the plants were under the plastic helped them to establish.

 Now I'm thinking about how to do even MORE next year :) So much to consider - how many plants to grow, should I create a special place for them for next year or ???? I do know that I'll be getting more green house plastic and figuring out a more permanent area to grow them. 

But first, it's time to cure them. We'll see how that works out. I don't have a very good place to cure them. So I hope that they will cure okay in the hoop house. I have them in a small storage bin with some water in a mason jar to keep the humidity up and covered with my plastic rain poncho.

More on that later!

Other than that, the week has been not as busy. Last week was totally spent in the kitchen processing peaches and tomatoes. There still is evidence in the kitchen and the dining room that I have been canning food. Since I'm planning to go to Long Beach to get more cranberries in a few weeks, I'm reluctant to store away my supplies.

It was also my week to take care of the Food Pantry Garden at our church. It's the end of the season and the plants are pretty much spent, so my goal will be to go and clean up all of the tomato plants and other plants that are languishing. The green bean plants have made a come back - some of them did at least, so those will stay just a little longer. Earlier this summer the team and I were talking about possibly doing to fall crops, but I haven't got my fall stuff in my garden yet, so I don't think that I'm going to get fall stuff in the pantry garden done. Overall, I think the garden was a success, just for a summer garden. Next season we'll start up again in the spring and plan to go into the fall. I also have another fun idea to get people involved in providing food for the pantry. More to come later.

There have been reports of an Atmospheric River coming to our area in the next few days...oh boy. It's going to get wet around here. I might have to get my garden work done sooner than later.

It's been long enough....

So, my last post was waaay back in January. At that time I decided it was time to take a break away from posting and from this blog for a short while. Here we are in August and the Pacific Northwest is in the midst of a Heat wave. So much fun. I was really hopeful that we would actually not get into temperatures in the 100s. The heat arrived over the weekend and Sunday was day 1. It's been 100+ degrees since then. Yes, I'm a whiner, leave me alone!

The problem with temperatures over 90 degrees is that our old, old house holds the heat and it is downright miserable. We do have a couple of window AC units that we keep in key areas. One being the TV room and the other in the bedroom. Once the house heats up, it takes several days for our house to cool down to make sleeping or general living comfortable. Also, being a woman in menopause I'm experiencing sweating in brand new ways. It's awful.

Anyway, since the day is shaping up to be hot I'll be spending time inside today. Yesterday I was all over the place running errands and joining in on a prayer meeting for Operation Christmas Child. All good things really, but then I had to come home :( The rest of the afternoon found me in the TV room playing a game on my kindle and watching miscellaneous shows on Prime. Oh and I baked up some rustic bread - that doesn't help the kitchen that much.

What have I been doing up until now? Besides trying to get my head straight - I had the opportunity to go to Global Connect in Orlando, FL. It was an amazing time of fellowship with our OCC brothers and sisters from around the US AND world! That cool time was at the end of March and into the first of April. Afterwards, my friend and I tagged along with our OCC Area Coordinators on a little road trip to Savannah, GA. That was a fun trip! We spent three nights in an Historic Inn located in the historic part of the city. It's been said that one of the floors is haunted.....Okaaay. 

Some of the things - 

Took a Trolley Tour

Shrimp & Grits on the water front.

Ice Cream at Leopold's. I guess it pretty popular. which I can believe since the line went down the block and our wait OUTSIDE was around 45 minutes.

I wanted to go to Sweet Potatoes Kitchen. Waaaay back earlier this year I was watching Jolly on YT and the guys went to this restaurant and it looked so good! 

On our way out of Savannah to the airport we had time to stop at Waffle House. 

So that was the biggest thing that happened this year! Other than that, the regular farm stuff keeps happening. Piglets, garden, and piglets... OH and we also processed another 25 meat chickens and had a couple of hogs processed. 

In my last post I had lamented about my sewing machine and how it has been acting up. It was disappointing to see things not working like they should - especially since it was just serviced. So, I still worked on some projects despite some things not working. After a few weeks of sewing my machine really started to go haywire. It started to make a clunking noise while I was sewing. This is unacceptable! I continued to sew for a few more days, but it was not getting better. After some searches on YouTube I landed on a video that went through how to take apart a Viking Sewing Machine. Thank you YouTube University! Over the course of a weekend Tom and I took apart my sewing machine once together and I found that there was a lot of thread wound around the part where the thread is taken up and and down (I'm not technical). It seems that after all of the times that the thread has broken it got stuck inside the machine. Something that never occurred to me. I spent quite a while cutting away the thread and clearing it out. Once I was finished I got the machine back together. Afterwards I turned it on only to find out that even MORE things went belly up! This is when I decided to take my machine apart by myself and investigate what might have happened. As it turns out, the plug that goes into the circuit board was not properly seated. Whew, I thought we might have really ruined my machine.  This is what happens when simple things go fancy. Stupid circuit boards!

Anyway - machine is up and running again and I was sewing again, like crazy! Here are a couple of quilt tops that I finished. Over all I finished three quilt tops and made a tablerunner. 

My Stash Buster Quilt

Another Stash Buster that I pieced together on National Quilting Day. 

I also made a few tote bags for Operation Christmas Child, but that task is on hold until I go through my fabric again and set aside more fabric for more bags.

Also, in this year, Tom was laid off from the company that he started with last November. To be honest, I wasn't terribly saddened by that. The company had created the position for him because they were excited about what he had to offer, so he was hired to be a Design Engineer/Inspector. Well, he did a lot of work on a project that is a little bit of distance from here and it wasn't in the best shape overall. The job was a train wreck and Tom was able to identify some issues that should have been caught by past inspectors, but wasn't. It was up to him to get the people involved in the job to understand what needed to be done. In the end, some people were unhappy that Tom was doing his job and that was kinda rude. Fortunately, he didn't work on that project for the last couple of months he was with them. In the end, they didn't get contracts that they hoped that they would and wound up needed to cut a couple of positions. Yep, not sad about that place.

That was at the end of April. Since then Tom applied for quite a few jobs and got a couple of interviews. The first one I didn't have good feelings about and I'm glad that they went with someone else. The one that he did get is a small company that is located not far from where we live and the atmosphere of the office is super relaxed and everyone (that I met) is so nice! Before he started work there we were invited to join the team at a Portland Thorns game - we aren't soccer people, but thought it would be a fun outing on a Friday night. He is in his second week with them and he really is enjoying working there. He has his own office and has been working on a few different projects and even went on a field trip yesterday. He is fitting in and is enjoying the other people in the office too. The good thing is that they have quite a few projects that need to be worked on and the timeline for the projects is pretty relaxed. Kind of a get it done when you get it done kind of feel. I have visited for lunch once and got the tour and talked to a couple of people. Once lady is a quilter :) She invited me to go to a Clark County Quilter's Guild meeting. Ummm, that's too social, no thanks. She said that they also do a thing called sit and sew on Zoom. I could do that one! Anyway, I'm feeling really positive about this company!

It's a little bit of a process getting used to being home alone again. I guess partly because since I retired Tom has had two jobs and was let go from both of them after a few months. So, I guess part of me is trying to get into a new routine (again) and trying to be grateful that Tom has a new job that seems to be a good fit. For now Tom is still taking care of the animals in the morning and after dinner. At some point I will take over the care and maintenance of the piggies and the chickens/water fowl. Oh and Carl too. 

Going forward I will be posting a little more often. I think I'm over my major funk that I was in earlier this year.