February 2017

Heading out during my lunch break. It was wet, Wet, WET!

This month has been rainy...and it seems more so than last year. The only reason that I can tell is because there has been water in our basement. Not once, not twice...but THREE times. This all since the January Snowpocalypse. Just when we think it's okay to leave piles of laundry on the floor...there's another puddle.

At least the grass in the field is green.

Winter Garden
It's Saturday and I have been trying to get back into a routine around here. So, that means getting out and checking what our Winter Crops are doing. Everything looks good under the big low tunnel so much so that we can start using the Pac Choi in some stir fry this week. I would have to say that the experiment of the winter crops/low tunnel has been successful even after the snow from last month and the very cool temperatures. This Fall/Winter will be much better as we'll be better prepared to start the seeds at a more appropriate time and get the plants into the ground at a time that we might get some veggies at Thanksgiving time!

The crops in the garden box under another tunnel aren't looking that great. So that experiment was only partially successful. The plants didn't die, but they also are not thriving. We'll have to get those dug up and amend the soil again for Mary's garden.

When we got the plants into the ground last October I wasn't 100% sure about a couple of the variety of plants were what. When they were smaller, the Flower Sprouts and the Purple Broc plants looked similar. After a little investigation this morning I figured out which was which...

The bigger plants in the front are the Flower Sprouts - which I confirmed with a quick google search. What would we do without the Google? The smaller plants in the back are the purple broccoli. They both look pretty good and I am hoping that when things quit being so wet and the temps are consistently above 50 degrees these plants will grow even more and there might be something to harvest.

I must have had amnesia when I decided to grow the purple broccoli. My previous experience with growing regular broccoli yielded nice broccoli crowns AND...

Broccoli Pest - thanks to Google for the pic

Yuck-O green catepillars. I was so grossed out I thought I would NEVER grow broccoli again. I think I was enthralled with the idea of purple veggies. If I get these pests again, I'm not sure if I'll grow broccoli of any variety again!

Plant A Tree
This past Christmas I had the thought to just buy a tree that we could plant on our property after the holidays. As you can see on my cover photo - our property doesn't have many trees. Also, the ones that are in that field will be going away. We'll keep the pear trees that are to the left, but the others are so bad that they have to go. So we are going to buy and plant trees for special occasions from now on.

So, we haven't planted the Christmas tree yet, but we did get a special occasion tree for a memorial tree.

There is a homesteading family in North Carolina that we follow on YouTube and I follow on Instagram. They are @thebluemountainridgebus on Instagram if you wanna take a look...

The Blue Ridge Mountain Bus family (Jeff & Stacie) had a son named Noah. He was 19 when he passed away due to complications from his Cerebal Palsy (I believe) and the family had fir tree seedlings for their friends and family to plant in memory of Noah. Once planted a photo of the tree with the hashtag of noahtree was attached to the photo for Instagram or Facebook. This was such a neat thing to do and since I wanted to plant more trees anyway, I wanted to get our own "noah tree" to plant.

One day the tree will be bigger than a stick!

#noahtree

During my February Girls Breakfast Club Tom went out to run a couple of errands and found a Leyland Cypress. This little guy has the potential to grow to 50 feet tall and 15 feet wide! So, there will be some shade on the west side of our house at some point!

Now, the Christmas tree is a type of Cypress as well, but I'm not sure which one. I guess we'll have to plant it and once it starts to look like something recognizable I'll try to identify it then. The tag would have been helpful, but it is gone. Well, it's been removed from the tree. If it was saved, I'm not sure where it would be.

Farm Land?
There are times when I get weary of all the busyness of the area where we live. There are a lot of houses and more are being built all the time. Beautiful farm land is being sold and subdivided into postage stamp size lots. We have seen it over and over and over. Somehow there is what is called a housing shortage - which I think means there is a shortage of brand new homes or fairly new homes.

Why don't people want to buy a fixer-upper like we have? Oh, I know what it is...we live in a high maintenance house - no HVAC...no fancy kitchen, no fancy rooms. A dusty & dirty fireplace that burns REAL wood...creaky floors...etc.

As much as I love our little house and the last of the former Thornton farm property (2.71 acres total) I have been longing to get away from this part of the country. It rains a lot which I'm used to. However, watching all of the homesteading videos by Justin Rhodes, Wild Roots and Sew the Land - and all of the sunny weather they are having right now (which might be a fluke) just makes me want to go there! And there is North Carolina. Or anywhere really.

So, I've been checking out farm land for sale which may or may not include a home and have come across a few interesting homes on acreage that I can't even imagine the size of! 10 - 20 acres sometimes even more! From Maine to Texas and all over the place in between.

Some of the properties have cool old barns -

I WANT!!

This same listing included a photo of a cute furry animal -

I know that I will never move. I couldn't leave the place where I grew up even if it rains through most of the winter months!

Also, our cute furry animal wouldn't enjoy a move across the country -