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.

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.