Settling In and Moving Dirt

Yesterday, we finished moving our daughter, Kait, and her boyfriend (...soon to be, fiance?), David, into our home, now "their" home too. They had much of their day-to-day stuff moved, but they were able to secure a truck and trailer yesterday and move the larger items in. It means that they will soon set up "the death room" (AKA ::  a room that sits off of Cora's old room, now Kait and David's room - big enough for some storage, a couch, a computer desk etc. In no time at all, they'll be able to set up their space like a little apartment with a bedroom and sitting room. It'll will be nice for them, until they are ready to venture back out on their own.

Today, we got to get dirty...really, really dirty. We readied the raised bed that is closest to our front porch. We put in a layer of alpaca poo and compost, over the existing good dirt from last year. We all took turns mixing the soil in with the compost/poo mix. After everything was fully mixed and spread out, we put garlic cloves into the mix. 53 cloves in all were planted into three rows - hoping that all of them will grow into beautiful new bulbs. This will be enough to get us through, until next planting season, and still be able to make spaghetti sauce etc. DELICIOUS!

53 garlic cloves, ready to grow into new garlic bulbs

Our overachiever, already on its way to a knew bulb!

In addition to planting all of our garlic, we took our saved toilet paper rolls to create seed start pots. Yes, we save our TP rolls - I guess we knew that we'd find some sort of amazing project for them. We were right! To make the "pots" - you make the roll flat in two directions, to square it off.

The roll will now look something like this.

In the corners, you cut slits in the roll, approx 3/4" long.

Fold in the flaps, crisscross, like you would a box.

Overlap the last flap.

We put ours into a plastic shoebox, you can see the crisscrosses in the bottom.

28 rolls ready and waiting for seeds. I really hope these will work.

If anything, they look kinda cute all squished in there.

Garlic, resting now, will hopefully grow so beautifully in this southern facing yard space.

Off to get cleaned up and head into Dayton to see Mark's side of the family, in celebration of Mark's grandmother's life. She passed a year ago, a wonderful lady, indeed. She is deeply missed in our family.

PTO and Go Time!

We've had a couple warmer days around here...by warmer, I mean, slightly above freezing and no snow on the ground. These temps, after a few months of Mother Nature being so vicious, make people get the itch for Spring. Mother Nature is tempting us to dig our dirt and plant our seeds, but we all know in our hearts that she likely has that one last brutal storm waiting for us (hoping I'm wrong on that one, but she always seems to come through). So what are things we can do to prepare, to give us the feeling that we are working on our Spring, without putting our precious seeds in any risk???

We finger through Lehman's catalogs, talking about what fruit trees we want to add to our yard (cherry? meyer lemon?...), sorting through our seed packets (we received our last order of seeds, in no time at all), wondering if we should have enough, do we want to try something else, we prepare the people around us for when we will likely be unavailable for a bit.
I recently sent my employer a list of days that I will likely not be "coming in" to work (I put that in quotes because 90% of the time, I work from home)...the PTO request went a little something like this...

2/14/13 – Volunteer 1/2 day, Kiss a Llama Event for Heifer International

2/22/13 - Leaving around 3:30 or 4 PM – Having a trainer come and help train our Border Collie

3/1/13 - Leaving around 2 PM – Cora has an ENT appoint, for tonsil consult.

4/17/13 – This is a tentative date – our honeybees are schedule to arrive this day; however, it has not been confirmed. I will likely need the day in order to get them pick up and settled into their new home.

Week of April 9-11 – During this week, our baby chicks are scheduled to arrive. I need to be on standby to get the chicks from the post office and settled here

After that, my boss reached out to tell me how much he cracked up at my request and thanked me for the most unique PTO request that he'd ever received. LOL

As for new things in the garden - we are growing artichokes, birdhouse gourds and luffa gourds - it'll be neat to see if the grow and how they develop. While growing tomatoes isn't new to us, growing some 40-60 tomato plants at one time is very new and we are hoping that we'll have a nice variety of tomatoes to be able to can for use throughout the non-growing season.

Something else new...we are hoping to get some supplies for tapping our maple tree this year. I know that it won't amount to much, but it'd be fun to see what we are able to get. Not to mentioned it would be great to have multiple sources of sugars on the property (honey, maple and maybe sugar beets? eventually). A local State Park, just a few miles down the road, is hosting a Maple Syrup Festival and we are hoping to learn a few tricks of the trade. 

Over the next couple of days, we'll be putting asparagus in the seed start planters. We are putting a table in the basement with a daylight grow light, since it is still too cold to put them outside. Our set up is simple, just the way I like it. :-) We'll be breaking up garlic cloves and putting them straight into the ground - a task we should have done last October (but I didn't realize until now that I built my calendar - from the last post) - however, since we are still in the cool weather zone, I think we are OK. At least I'm willing to try it out and see what we get.

Our garlic cloves, waiting to grow.

Our neat things we are doing around here...

Growing celery, from a cut celery base. Who woulda thunk you could do that??

Exploring "Narnia" - the wooded area near our house. The kids found, what looks like remnants of an old barn? There is a rock and concrete foundation and tin roof material. We found old bottles, piece of broken pottery, an old chain etc. just neat, exploration type things.

I usually get such great inspiration from old gardening books...I think I'll take a pass on this one though that suggests I grow my seeds on top of a radiator, on top of a sheet of asbestos. Mmmm...Asbestos!

Alright team, it's almost Go Time! Are YOU ready?

Seeds and Poo

Last night, we placed an order for the seeds that we need for this season. These aren't the only things we are going to plant - either because we have left over seeds from previous seeds orders, or were able to save some of our seeds from last year's harvest...and today, I received a notice that they were already on their way to us! Exciting!!! I can't wait to dig my hands in the dirt, ahem, poo and get some seeds started.

So let's talk poo - not necessarily the most fascinating subject; however, a necessary one. Yesterday, we were able to take a five gallon bucket and fill it approx 1/3 full of pure rabbit poo (uncomposted, fresh from the cage), 1/3 full of alpaca poo (partially composted, mostly fresh, from the "dung pile") and 1/3 full of toward the bottom of our compost pile. Digging into the compost pile, we weren't really sure what to expect. When we were at our apartment, we attempted composting, using an Earth Machine composter (that we earned attending a composting/vermiculture/recycling class)...it never seemed to really do anything. Just more of a container holding our compostable goodies and never transitioning into actual compost. Did we do something wrong? Can you compost...wrong? I mean it's just letting your compostables break down into "black gold"..right? I don't honestly know the answer to that. However, now that we live here, we've been keeping kitchen and barn waste in an area of our back yard, near where the chickens will live. Soon, (by soon, I mean that I'm hoping this year, but likely next year) we will be building compost bins - where we can separate the pile into three separate sections (new, cooking, almost ready/ready), but for now, one...fairly large..pile of cooking compost. Mark grabbed a few shovels worth of uncomposted straw and poo off the top of the pile and then...GOLD! Did we make compost??? We sure did! There's beautiful, dark black compost gold under that pile. Awesome! Today, we mixed the three components together by dumping back and forth between two larger buckets - I took a shovel and chopped up some of the "bunny berries" and "alpaca jelly beans" and it is actually beginning to look like rich potting soil. We'll give it a few more days of mixing and churning and I think we'll have some pretty nutrient rich goodness to help our seedlings get off to the right start.
Alright, enough with the poo talk, for now! Come on seeds, hurry up and get here.
Oh! Thought you might want to see the planting calendar that we are going to try to stick to this year. We went through and tried to determine the best dates to plant (either set directly in the ground, starting the seeds inside or transplanting seedlings) - these are specific to our (estimated) frost dates and I'm sure we'll find out that some will work out and others will be a bust. I'm hoping to take better garden notes/photos this year...we'll see.