What Does My Future Look Like?

It seems like my dream to become more self-sustaining is a dream that comes to mind more often all of the time. As much as I have enjoyed the many years that I have worked at my job, it just doesn't bring me a sense of contentedness. Like when I reach the end of my work week and all I want to do is "play" in the hoop house and check on the veggies under the low tunnel.

This past weekend we started working on things to get us to that self-sustaining lifestyle - or agrarian if you will. Actually if we were to back up a couple of years we have been working toward becoming more mindful of the food that we eat. While we still grocery shop at the chain grocery stores...I just don't always like what I see in the produce area. I mean it's fine and all, but after growing our own food for a little while AND actually cooking up stuff and EATING it...

O.M.G.

HOW could we let that happen?! Well, it was great last summer! We harvested potatoes and beans and kale and stuff from Mary's garden boxes and cucumbers and it was GREAT! We felt like we were living a little healthier too!

So much so that this year we are actively working toward getting a mobile chicken coop built. It is in the very super early stages of being built....

Yup - early stages - I wasn't kidding.

This will be for the chickens we'll keep for EGGS! Oh how I love a fresh egg...and OH how long it has been since I have seen a fresh egg. That's the thing about growing up with chickens, you don't appreciate it at the time because, as a middle schooler / pre-teen and all, why would I give a hoot about fresh eggs? Only recently have I thought about all of the eggs we had when I was growing up - they were quite literally everywhere. My mom's one weakness - the variety of chickens and other birds that we had on our property. Think Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds only without the hysteria.

That will not be me. I promise....I hope...

The coop will be ready to roll (literally) sooner than we think, but we still need to get the chicken fencing before we can get those chickies.

We watch Justin Rhodes of Abundant Permaculture and he is the "Apron-Wearing-Chicken-Ninja-Master." With the knowledge that I gained growing up with a crazy mom who wanted ALL the chickens and watching Justin Rhodes videos, I think we got this! Seriously, I don't think that it really has to be so difficult. Just need to get the home (chickshaw), the protection (electric poultry netting) and the food (bags of feed and kitchen scraps AND what's in the field). It's doable especially with all of the resources that I have at my fingertips I believe that raising chickens will be a snap!

However, I am going to cheat, just a little bit. I have found a source for pullets and they will be ready to lay eggs so much sooner than if we were to head to Wilco and pick up a dozen chicks - although that might happen "accidently." I have been keeping an eye on their ad on craigslist and will continue to do so until we are ready to bring the young ladies to their new home.

I'm so excited - I'm gonna be a farmer...YAY!

Another thing I've started would be this...

An old portable wardrobe frame holding my seed trays

I'm already crowding out the living room with seed trays...

There's still room...seriously - there is ALWAYS room!

I'm going to have myself a little plant sale. I have some cool flower seeds in the trays and I am thinking maybe some herbs wouldn't be a bad idea. Perhaps put together little herb gardens in plastic planters...hmmm...

We are treating each year as an experiment. How will we ever know what works if we don't try? I don't remember who said it, but one of the vloggers that we watch said "Try doing something even if it's wrong."

Indeed, even if it's wrong.

Here's my trying to do something. Last year I had the wild idea to try to grow celery. How hard can it be? Well, it didn't work last year. Alright, so there is a trick that I'm not getting.

Well, I've decided to try growing celery again. Aannnnd - so far nothing. Maybe I need to find out how long it takes to germinate. That might be helpful...ooh...just looked...14-21 days! What the heck?! Okay, so we are at 10 days. I'll quit getting my hopes up whenever I take a look. It doesn't help that my tomato seeds have germinated and the basil seeds too. I check daily...sometimes hourly...

Yes, I'm obsessed....check these out...

What can I say, I like progress. Wouldn't you know it, if you follow the directions on the seed packets the success rate is much higher! There are a lot of onions going on here. However, I like a success story when I can get it so I'm going to start ANOTHER packet of seeds once I get these in the ground! I'll be the crazy onion lady!

This week needs to go by quickly! I am taking a week of vacation to be a farmer-in-training type person. So many things to do. Hoping to do things right...but probably will do them wrong anyway.

Until next time get out and get your hands dirty!

Thursday!

This has been a long week and I'm tired. All I dream about is being able to spend more time in my playhouse and getting seeds started and getting garden beds prepared and all things gardening! I would also like to get  my chicken coop and tractor (both portable) started and grow even MORE of the food that we eat! There will be a day when I can leave my job behind and do what brings me joy and in the process maybe even bless the people around us!

BIG DREAMS...until then though...

Last weekend Mary came by with some of her seeds and I got out the trays and the soil blocker so she could get some of her stuff started. I don't know what all she has in the tray, but she was having all sorts of fun with the soil blocker.

Not bad for a first try! Once she got it down she was having all sorts of fun...I love sharing tools! She was thinking that she would also love to use the blocker just to line out her garden boxes - she loves symmetry and the blocker will get her there. I used to be more precise, but now I think I just want to get things planted and grow FOOD!

After she was done and I promised to spritz them when need we leftthe tray out in the hoop house. It would be fine, on a nicer day. However it was still coolish - even in the afternoon and I was getting my tray of seeds started. There were moments of warmth, but that didn't last.  So once I got my tray all ready to go I brought it in and placed it in the Living Room in front of the big window. At first I left her tray out in the hoop house, but then decided the next day to go ahead and bring her tray in as well. It took only four days for sprouts to happen! I think she started a bunch of leafy items and they tend to sprout easily.

Mary's tray -  photo taken on March 1

My tray on the other hand hasn't done anything yet, but I'm hoping that by the weekend there will be some sort of action happening - if not sooner!

My tray - photo taken Feb 25

I also decided to start my onion seeds - which according to the package should be started in a container 4-6 wide. So I sprinkled the entire package on the top and I think those are already doing something. The things that I think are sprouts aren't big enough to show up in a photo - so I'll be keeping an eye on them! This is also in the living room in front of the BIG window. Maybe tonight there will be something "impressive"

photo taken Feb 25

When I last looked, the veggies under the low tunnel in the garden box are not doing that great and I had it in my mind to pull them up. After looking at them, a couple of things are looking pretty good - the chard and romaine looks decent. So on Saturday afternoon we took a little time to weed the box. We'll see how things go this week. It would be really nice if all our effort would end up with something we can put on our table.

At first glance, the romaine lettuce looked REALLY good. Healthy with nice glossy leaves - same for the chard. They are both smallish, but I think that now that the weather is improving we'll actually get something from this box. The bunching onions are a little iffy, but I think they will be okay.

Look at the huge patch of yuck-o grass!

There was one little weird bunch of stuff that grew in one block - Swiss chard, Bunching Onion and Purple Broccoli - 

It really didn't do a whole lot, the broccoli looks to have grown, but other than that - nada. We'll just let it go and see what happens until it's time to clean this box out. I do love an experiment!

At long last, we finally harvested our first Pac Choi. I think it might have been a little on the large side, but it was so good. Made some bami goreng over the weekend and pulled up one whole PC to cook up with the store bought veg. These will definitely be somewhere in the garden this year and through the fall and winter (again).

Overall, I'm pleased with all that we have grown through the Fall and Winter. I am hoping that there will be more to harvest as the weather improves and things finally get a little late winter warmth. There has been more than enough rain and the rain is welcome to stop for a little while. If only I could the watering of my plants! 

So what's next? I'm planning to get out and see what flower seeds I have and get some of those started either this evening or tomorrow evening - during the weekend for sure. Last summer I bought a package of a 100 four inch pots. So I'll be putting those to good use once my flower seedlings are big enough to be transplanted. I better get on that! I may be competing with Fred Meyer's Fuschia Event if I don't get going on these seeds! If I can get away with not buying flowers for our planters I'll be happy!

Get out and get your hands dirty and come back and see what's happening :)

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 -

Almost Time

The seed catalogs have been arriving in the mail which means it's almost time to start ordering seeds!

Normally I just go to the garden center at Freddy's or maybe even shop at Yard 'N Garden Land. It's awfully convenient to just pop into the store and pick up some seeds. There really aren't many places to get "specialty" seed varieties so I'll be making a list of my favorites and then pouring over the catalogs and checking out where to get the majority of my seeds for this year's garden extravaganza!

These are the ones that I have been carrying with me in my bag...

All are "local" except for Johnny's. I am acquainted with Territorial & Johnny's and look forward to making some selections from both of those. Uprising Seeds is located in Bellingham, WA and Siskiyou Seeds is in Williams, OR. Uprising has a cabbage variety that is so awesome it is called Filderkraut

(photo credit Uprising Seeds)

According to the catalog these cabbage heads can grow up to 2 feet tall and 1 foot wide!! Man oh man,  I want to grow those in my garden! I can hardly imagine just how large they will get in my garden, but all I know is that I might be making a lot of sauerkraut! It's time to start looking for REALLY BIG fermenting crocks!!

As soon as the seeds are ordered and the weather improves slightly, I'm gonna get out into the hoop house and start making some soil blocks and getting my seeds started! My gardening buddy, partner in crime - Mary will be itchin' to get things started too. I have a feeling that the hoop house may not be big enough for the both of us...hmmm...