Garden Stragglers

Found a few stragglers in the garden this morning. Our carrots were slow growing, and we'd pretty much figured the garden was done before they really started shooting up. Then the deer and rabbits found the garden and ate most of the tops off the carrots, so we only got a few. This morning I stepped into the garden to see if I could spy anything of interest. Some of the carrot tops had sprouted again.

And I learned a couple more things about gardening-
1. It's really hard to pull carrots out of the ground without the benefit of their big bushy tops.
2. Your fingernails probably won't thank you for scrabbling them out of the dirt with your bare hands...But your kids might.

Where did summer go?

Here I am back to my woefully neglected blog. Last time I posted was the middle of summer. My husband wonders why I even have any followers left. Didn't bother explaining to him that it would probably take more effort to remove somebody than to let them just sit there doing nothing. But nevertheless, I'm happy to see that nobody removed me from their blogroll. So I'm back now and will try to make my posting more regular again.

Here's a quick (thought I could be quick, but turned out, I couldn't) re-cap. We did our first real garden this year, and it did surprisingly well! We canned potatoes, salsa, hot pepper butter, and pizza sauce--maybe some other things too, but that's all I can think of right off the top of my head. Oh, pickles! We had yummy fresh cucumbers for weeks. I miss them already. I have never loved a cucumber like I loved those! And my picky boy, Finn, would just gobble them up.

We sold Bambi's boys (above) and because of several issues, I didn't manage to ever get her milking. Hopefully next year. We kept Betty Bob's doeling, Star (on the right below). I am milking Betty Bob and Bella and getting a little over half a gallon most days just milking once a day. Plenty for our family, and it leaves us enough to try cheese making and plenty of puddings and yummy stuff.

We sold half a dozen of our pullets, but we are still getting around a dozen eggs a day. The guineas are all grown up, and I'm pretty sure they are both females. Kind of bummed about that as I was hoping we would get a pair so we could have little keets next year. We hatched a duck out over the summer that I called Uno because it was the only egg that hatched and Ivy called Sparkle because I think she wanted to embarrass it, but one day it just disappeared. (I think this may be the only picture I got of it because my camera apparently decided to take the summer off with my blog--see it right in the middle?) No clue what happened to it--just totally gone without a trace. Also down one chicken like that. I managed to convince myself we were down another chicken and spent a few days counting and recounting chickens until it finally dawned on me that the one I was looking for was one of the ones we sold. Feel free to share the long laugh I had at my own expense.

We have two pigs that are ready to head to market. I don't think I have any pictures of them. Sorry, will take the camera up there in the next couple days. Along the lines of not naming your food, these two never did acquire names. We put them far, far from the house because we had many, many people telling us how they would smell, but they really aren't that bad. Yeah, you can smell them when you stand outside their pen, but they weren't all that people made them out to be.

I've been doing a bit of sewing lately and have some things to share over the next few days. But here's a little peek at a pattern I was delighted to be given an opportunity to test for Whimsy Couture. I am really liking her patterns. This is the third one I have made up and have more to try. I'll post a bit more about this pattern in the next few days.

So to end things up, here's a shot of Holly and Finn that I really love. They were sitting together on the couch like this the other day, and I actually managed to get to the camera in time. Nobody told them to sit like that. I was doing things in the kitchen and looked over and there they were. So cute! Can't believe how big they are getting.

Make Something Monday #17

I read an article a while back from Mother Earth News about planting things where the soil wasn't ideal. One of the suggestions was simply to take bags of soil, poke drainage holes in the bottom of the bags and cut a window from the top of the bag. Then you lay the bag where you want to have something growing and plant directly into the soil in the bag. Easy!

I've wanted to plant something right in front of my porch since we have lived here. I've actually tried a couple times, but between birds snatching the seeds and the rock hardness of the soil, nothing seems to take off. So this year, I made use of the potting soil bag suggestion and planted an herb garden out front. I used one bag for each type of herb and planted basil, dill, marjoram, oregano, parsley and spearmint. I got the basil and dill planted about a week before the others, so they are just a little bigger. The spearmint hasn't quite sprouted all the way like the others, but I see some hopeful signs, so within the next day or two, some green should be showing nicely there, I think.

basil

Are you turtle-y enough?

This evening Paul and I walked up to check on our newly planted garden. As we were getting ready to walk back down to the house, we noticed a rather large snapping turtle in the grass. Paul was concerned about it raiding the garden, so he attempted to roll it back down the hill toward the pond with a pair of post hole diggers. I was surprised to see it such a ways from the water and stepped forward to see what it was doing.

Turns out it was a lady turtle, and she had climbed out of the pond to lay her eggs. She had laid quite a few of them down into a tight little hole. It was very interesting to see, and something I had never seen before. The eggs are quite small, a little smaller than ping-pong balls which they resembled. We took one egg from the nest to check it out. The shell isn't hard like a chicken's egg shell, but is kind of leathery. She seemed to be making her way back towards the nest when we left her alone. I felt bad for disturbing her on her nest, but then again, we really don't need a whole new slew of snappers heading into the pond. She was quite a biggie herself--close to a foot and a half across her back and a big strong jaw. They have a lightning quick bite, but don't really move terribly fast as long as you are out of range of their immediate bite area.

First Day of Spring!

Spring has sprung
The grass has ris'
I wonder where the flowers is.

Daffodils have been spotted waving their lovely yellow heads. Yesterday we traveled an hour south and saw pretty flowering trees in bloom. Things were greening up!

We planted 15 raspberry bushes this afternoon. When I say we, I mean I took the twisty ties off the plants that were in bundles of three and carefully separated each root and placed them with the utmost care in the holes that Paul had dug. While I was doing this, Paul was putting Quikrete around the bottom of posts he had cut down from small trees and put into holes he had dug. Then I supervised while he crawled around on the ground packing the dirt in around the bushes. Then I took some water and gave each new plant a tiny little drink because the soil was already very damp. Tomorrow we are going to put fencing around the berries in the hopes of keeping the deer away from them. Meaning, I will cheer Paul along while he does the majority of the work.

raspberries, originally uploaded by Caramdir.

Back on the Net Again!

We're finally connected again. Not really sure why our other router crashed, but crash it did. We hoped it might be able to be reset so we didn't rush right out and buy a new one. But it took a while to find time to check it out because it's more complicated than I feel like going into and presumably nobody really cares anyhow! But I'm back now. Yay!

Things have been going well here. The baby is growing a bunch, but he's taking all the milk. I have been getting so little that I've been just dumping the couple tablespoons into the cats bowl before I come in the house! The plan was to shut up the babies from the mama overnight and milk her in the morning. But when the one baby died, I didn't have the heart to shut the remaining one up all by himself. He's a little bigger now and the weather is a little warmer, so I think I'm going to give it a shot this week. From what I've read, babies on the mama can actually take more milk than they really need. So I know that's why I'm getting so little from her right now, he's just taking every last drop! I'm anxious to see how much I will get with him off her for the night, though. And we settled on names for them. (Or I rather I did!) We're calling the mama Bella and the little guy Heckle. I was calling both babies Heckle and Jeckle after those two old cartoon crows, and it just stuck even when there was only one. (And thanks to those who added their condolences on the loss.)

And if you were wondering about the picture at the beginning of the post, Paul bought 30 pounds of seed potatoes to plant. I was like 30 pounds?! And he said, oh, it's not that much--only three little bags. It will be our first time planting potatoes, and I didn't even know he was planning to until he bought them! He got three different varieties, but with a typical male attention to detail doesn't know what varieties he bought. He's planning to get them planted this coming weekend. I have no idea how many potatoes we'll get from them, but I guess we'll have a better idea after this year! And here's a fascinating link to a page of potato myths. I found the last one particularly amusing and thought they should have prefaced the answer with, Potatoes taste best when prepared in fattening ways, but...(lead into healthy potato habits.)

He also set posts for our rabbit shelter. He decided to make it half for rabbits and half for greenhouse. He is just having them share a common wall between. So one side will be his greenhouse and the other side will be my bunnies. Hopefully we'll be able to get some next month. I've seen someone advertising New Zealand rabbits with regularity in our local Trader's Guide, so I think they probably breed them. I haven't called about them yet since we aren't ready for them and usually when I do something like that, we wind up deciding to get them and then scrambling to get living quarters together! So I'm trying my best to hold off and not wind up doing that again, since I am normally the one who winds up talking him into taking these things on.

Well, I should wrap up now, but I'll be back tomorrow for Make Something Monday--which I've missed participating in for the last couple weeks and am so glad I can participate again!

Trying to be Healthier

I'm trying something new today. I just put all the stuff in the pot for chicken stock. It now has to simmer for several hours, but the house already smells all warm and homey. I've never made my own stock before, but since we've started raising our own chickens, I feel like I should use them all up. It's partly the time and money investment, I suppose. It's also partly in our efforts to eat healthier. I've pretty much always just used bouillon cubes when I have had recipes that call for stock. But in the effort to help our family eat healthier, I've been trying to use less processed foods, and I guess those are as processed as you can get. Chicken broth isn't square!

So far, having our own chickens hasn't saved us a bit of money. We have fed them for seven months and have probably had about 2 dozen eggs off them and two chicken dinners. But we like knowing that we are eating healthy foods that have been ethically raised. My daughter loves going and collecting eggs. Actually we all do, but considering we only get two a day, it's whoever manages to visit the coop at the right time and most often, it's her!

We're doing a few other things to try to eat healthier. We planted some fruits trees at the end of last year. We've got a bunch of strawberry, blackberry and raspberry bushes ordered for the spring. My husband has been poring over the vegetable gardening books so we can make a second (and hopefully more productive) attempt at a garden this year. We need to cut WAY back on fast food--that's a big thing we have fallen under the convenience of. We don't buy soda for the house anymore. I've been trying to make more things from scratch and rely less on premade/prepackaged things.

So what have you done or do you plan to do to make your family healthier this year? I love reading about what other people are doing because it just gives me more ideas.