Another Gardening Year

A new season has begun and with that comes a new Season of gardening.  So happy to have my feet and hands in the dirt again.  Trying to grow many things from seed this year, which I started in February.  Now that I am home full time, I have more time to give to my gardening and sustainable living endeavors.  So, I must learn how to make the best use of my time. 
We have also started maintaining our own fields and those that we rent for the planting of corn and/or soybeans so we have invested in a few new pieces of farming equipment to help with that.  Robby is having a great time learning about this part of farming and is quite happy with his "new to us" purchases from auctions.
I will try and keep up with posting new photos of the gardens as they are growing and new things go in.  It is helpful for me to go back and look at over the years to compare.
I am also starting a new on-line workshop through Heather Bruggeman, at beauty that moves, called Whole Food Kitchen.  It will highlight many of the practices I already incorporate into our daily lives plus teach me many new things and ways to make the best use of the produce I will be growing this summer as well as our fresh meat and milk that we have.  So looking forward to that starting tomorrow!!!!

Peas just starting to come up.

Peas growing bigger.

Asparagus just starting to break through.

Few days later and they just keep coming and growing.

Now we harvest daily and incorporate into at least one meal a day.

Lettuces in lettuce box sprouting.

Now their true colors are showing.

Kale beginning to grow.

Georgia Sweet Onions planted.

Tomato plants grown from seed getting a little real sunshine.

French Breakfast Radishes starting to grow.

Me in my element with a garden of dirt waiting to be planted.

New toys to make life easier in the fields.

A "new to us" disk.

And a "new to us" cultipacker.

Time for Happy Hour while we watch chicken litter being spread on the fields.  Life in the country at it's finest, hahahaha.

Living Life and Loving It!!!!

So, I have been away for quite a bit, but no need to worry..... I have just been living life.
After reading so many wonderful blogs and wishing my life was a certain way or different, I realized I needed to get off my butt and go live it.  And so, that is what I have been doing.  Working towards living my life they way I want to and love to.  And then, in the late hours of the evening, when I am worn out from living, I sit back and look at a few photos and blogs of my favorites and say, "Wow, my life is just as awesome, yay for me!"

One of my all time favorite blogs has been Amanda Soule's, SouleMama.  Amanda is the editor of Taproot  magazine, my all time favorite publication.  Every year, she does a series on her blog that is a follow-along of her family's veggie garden and shows the projects and progress their garden is making thru the growing season.  I LOVE seeing people's gardens, real people's gardens.  People who do the work themselves, make mistakes, learn from mistakes and are happy and willing to share with other like minded souls.  Amanda also encourages all of us to join in her little project and share photos of our own gardens, our trials and errors, our successes and ideas.  So, this year, I have decided to take part.  My little garden takes care of my family just fine and in time, when I have more time, I hope to enlarge it and garden on an even larger scale.  A scale that is big enough to possibly take care of more than just our family, but that is a future dream, not the reality of this growing season.

We are adding honey bees to our property this year.  At this time, the hives are ready to go, we are just waiting on our bees to show up.  We don't have the hives in our vegetable garden, but I am thinking it may not be such a bad idea to put them there.  I have noticed in Amanda's posts and photos, their bees are in their garden area.  I may have to follow suit and move our hives into the garden.

So without further ado, here are photos of our 2014 Growing Season so far.  Please join this fun thread if you would like and check out Amanda's beautiful and oh so inspiring garden, life and everything over at her blog, SouleMama.  But remember, just read a little and then, GO OUT AND LIVE LIFE!!!!!!!!!

Beauties that I got for Mother's Day to adorn my gardens and help the plants.  Companion gardening is a great way to fight off unwanted insects and other larger animals from you garden.  Here I have Marigolds, which keep the deer out, Calendula and Borage which help with tomato hornworms and other garden pests.  The borage also attracts thousands, I hope, of honeybees and I am all about that this season!

A second story window view of my veggie garden.  Each year it gets bigger and better :) The raised beds on the right are my cooler weather crops and my asparagus bed.  I experiment a lot here and sometimes grow things a little less familiar to me.

One of my raised beds where I grow, beets, spinach, Swiss chard, carrots, and garlic.  We will see how it all grows, carrots always give me trouble.  

Our asparagus bed which is now going to seed.  It's in it's 4th year and we were able to pick a lot this year.

Beets, carrots, spinach, Swiss chard and garlic grow at one end and at the other end is a variety of lettuces that we pick for salads.....Mesclun Mix, Arugula, Simpson, Red Leaf, varieties of Kale, Freckles and Romaine.  I also have Sunflowers planted in here to honor my mom, who i lost 2 1/2 years ago and love and miss so dearly.

A view of the garden where the magic happens.  This garden is 50ft. x 60ft. approx.  We plant our tomatoes, cukes, squash, onions, potatoes, peppers, beans, basil, parsley, cilantro, onions and many other herbs in here.

Nasturtiums that I panted from seed to grow in the veggie garden where we plant most of our veggies for eating and preserving.  We use the leaves and flowers in our salads.

Those little green things?  Those are potato plants bursting up out of the ground.

For Mother's Day, my youngest son Trevor helped me plant 43 tomato plants of different varieties.

Every year I try a different vegetable from the usual.  This year will be my first year to plant Kohlrabi.  The plant is beautiful when it is growing and I look forward to trying it out in my garden :)  Also trying a perennial vegetable called Mashua, a tuberous plant very similar to nasturtiums.

Close up of my beautiful Calendula.  So very pretty, bright and cheery.

Beans are breaking thru the soil.

 View of the garden from the far corner, looking up towards the house. We are enclosing the whole thing in fencing so that the chickens will stay out of it and we can expand a little more over time.

 As with most of what we do around here, post holes are dug the old fashion way, with a post hole digger.  Fun work indeed.

No, these aren't groundhog holes, just a few of the many that need to be dug.

So there you go, a little glimpse at what we have so far.  I will update once a week or so as things grow and progress.  Please feel free to join in and check out Amanda's blog for more links.
Happy gardening.

Family always makes it better

There is just something so wonderful about having family around.  Family that you can completely be yourself around, know you are going to have tons of laughs with, maybe shed a tear or two with, say silly and stupid things with and just know it is all okay!!!!

That was how this weekend was for me.  Two of my nieces came for the weekend along with my one niece's husband and their two dogs.  It was such a great weekend filled with food, crafting, food, baby chickie lovin, food, some Skeet shooting and shooting lessons, food, garden planting, food, baby bump lovin and last but not least, food.  Yes, I guess you could say we did a lot of eating this weekend.  Well, I do have a niece who is expecting in August and she is married to a wonderful man who has the most incredible appetite for food.  So, I was in heaven to say the least.  I got to cook for people that I love the most, and they in turn, made the past 2 and a half days perfect. 

I will let the pictures tell most of the story and fill in the words where needed.

Prayer Flags I hung on the deck Friday before our company arrived.  I purchased these in Frenchtown, New Jersey at Elizabeth Gilbert's store, Two Buttons.  Love the way they blow in the breeze.

 



Mesclun Salad greens I planted from seed and harvested for our Beet and Orange Salad we would be having for dinner that night.

Baby Spinach to be picked for the salad also.  Love that I am able to once again go to the garden to pick fresh veggies for dinner.

Beet and Orange Salad with fresh baby greens and pistachios.  It was so yummy and fresh!!!!

First thing Kristina wanted to do was get her hands on the baby peeps.  This girl loves her some chickens, just like her Aunt Deb:)

This is a little propaganda photo to make my brother feel guilty and agree to let Kristina get some chicks of her own.  See how sad she is because she doesn't have chicks?  How could any daddy say no to that cute pouty face?

Once Jess and Joe arrived, Kristina had to show her sister the babies.  Jess was won over immediately and agreed that yes indeed, peeps are just the cutest little creatures ever.

It was time to focus on real baby love.  Jess is expecting her first child in August and Kristina is so excited about being an Aunt.  She can't help herself and has already started buying lots of little gifts for sweet baby girl.

Saturday morning Robby and I had some planting that needed to be done in the veggie garden.  Kristina was more than happy to help us plant over 30 tomato plants and some other veggies.  Jess was bit by the Veggie Garden Bug too and began making plans for the garden she and Joe could start once they got back home.

We decided to channel our inner Brit and do a little Skeet shooting.  Kristina has never shot Skeet before, so Joe gave her a little lesson.  I don't think Kristina will be doing it again anytime soon.  Her little body isn't use to the kick of the gun.

Next it was time for a little DIY craft time.  Kristina is the Queen of DIY in our family.  There is nothing this gal can't make when she decides she wants something.  She has become a pro with power tools and this former clothes horse now would rather go shop at Loews than shoe for clothes.  She had a little project she wanted all 3 of us to make as a little token of our weekend together.  She brought everything with her we needed and we provided the power tools.  FUN TIMES!!!!!

We started by sanding our blocks of wood Kristina had brought for us to use.  Rounding the corners and creating a super smooth surface.  Let's just say the palm sander is now my favorite power tool!!!
After we sanded our wood, we stained it and then either left it stained and applied a tinted wax to it, or we could paint it like I did to give it more of an antique, weathered look.  A few bangs with the hammer to add some dents, and you have an instant "old" piece of refurbished wood.

Next Kristina showed us how to attach a mason jar to the board using a pipe clamp so that the board could be hung and used as a vase, a planter or for storage of just about anything you could think of that would fit inside it.

Our finished project.  Love how they turned out and can't wait to get mine hung in the guest room so I can use it to put fresh flowers in when guests come to stay:)  Thanks Kristina, it was so much fun and I will think of all our fun laughs the three of us had every time I look at it!!!

I was officially bit by the DIY bug at this point.  Robby had found 6 really old wooden doors that had belonged in a farm house that was built in the 1800's.  I snatched those beauties right up but I wasn't really sure what I would do with them.  Jessica suggested I use them to make a  headboard for the guest room.  I have a bed with no frame in that room and I hate that there is no headboard.  So, that is what we decided to do.  Kristina said it was really easy to do and we could finish it in a day.  But, it was getting late and I still had dinner to make for all of us, so it would have to wait a day.

Dinner was going to consist of roasted chickens and asparagus risotto made with asparagus picked from our garden.

With some help from the girls, we got those chickens roasted, that risotto stirred and cooked, dinner rolls made, green beans cooked and homemade gravy that was delicious.  It was a perfect meal and another great time around the family dinner table with people I love.  I am such a firm believer in eating meals together at the kitchen table!!!!  We have the most awesome, sometimes inappropriate,  conversations during dinner and then during the time we are just sitting at the table once the food is gone.  I highly recommend all families incorporate at least one family meal at the table a day.

This morning after we ate a huge breakfast of sausage gray, scrambled eggs and homemade buttermilk biscuits, it was time to start back to DIYing.  Time to make my headboard.  First up was sanding the very rough and worn doors down to a nice smooth finish hopefully without losing all of the lovely chippy paint that was on them.

First door before we put the sander to it.  Hard to tell in this picture, but it is a really nice, worn yellow.

After we were done.  The grain in the door was exposed and it turned out so very pretty.  We rubbed in some finishing wax, sanded it one last time with very fine sand paper, and it was done.

The second door had old blue paint on it.  We sanded that down too and it became a really nice light turquoise color.  I was in love and in awe of what these doors were turning out to look like.

 

 

After it was sanded, we applied the finishing wax to it too.  Now all that was left was to use the original hinges to attach the doors together and put it in it's place.  I just love the old, tarnished hardware and handles on these doors.  I love to think about all the people who ever opened those doors to the rooms of their home.  Oh, if those doors could talk........

 

 

 



Here they are in place.  Now I just need to get a few finishing touches, like a different duvet cover and pillow cases, re-paint the room and find some new lamps and I will have a guest room I can be proud of.  Just have to avoid making it too girly so that when the boys come home for a visit from college, they will still want to sleep in their old rooms:)

 

I really love it and just can't believe we got it done in one day.  Pictures just don't do it justice because my cameras kind of suck.

Our weekend was winding down as everyone needed to get back on the road to go home.  This weekend was such a nice treat for me.  The week was a long one worrying about my dad, who is getting stronger and better with each passing day, and knowing I had my extended family to make my weekend special, made it so much easier.  I love having girl time with my nieces!!!!!!  And being able to walk past a room in my house and see the fruits of our labors makes it even more sweet.  I hope that you all were able to do something really special this weekend with people that you love being with. I know I will start my week with a little extra spark in my heart and a smile on my face thinking about the fun that was had by all.

Hope you all have a wonderful week and look forward to the upcoming weekend:)
XXOO