Garden Starts!

Been busy in the last week or so. We've set up and planted a bed of sun chokes, as everything I have read on them (minus 1) says to plant them while it's still cold out, especially since they all also state you can just dig them as needed. Unless you are diabetic then they say dig them after first hard frost and store till you use.

I started my tomatoes and bell peppers today as well (here's to fingers crossed on the peppers), I have 12 pots of each set up. As I want six plants I am making sure I'll have at least six, I can always plant the extra (more for us then).

I went with my favorite tomato the Cherokee Purple (granted I like the orange smudge Cherokee's better but I can't find them), Silver eats them like they are candy. I am trying the Horizon Bell pepper, from what I read on them they seem to be fairly easy to grow. I just hope they start as I've always had issue starting them.

I have looked around and seems now Seeds of Change has my favorite beans again for sale as seed. So I am going to try to by maybe a pound of them to grow. If they produce enough I should have seed for saving.

We have to start cutting more firewood for this year as we're close to running out (YEAH second burner!), and our blasted chain saw keeps not wanting to start. So that is making life difficult for us there. I am hoping to get my apple trees this year so we can get them in the ground. We have decided on raising some pork, I'm thinking of starting with three animals one boar, one sow and one castrated one for butchering. This way we can raise our own and maybe if we get enough of the piglets sell a couple every year.

Well , that's about it for now.

Be Well, Be Safe, and Blessed Be

Freebies!

We all like freebies right?  Even I do, this particular freebie only cost me some gas and the effort to get it into the truck bed.

That is half a truck bed full of composted sawdust with a sprinkling of fresh saw dust for our sawdust toilet on top.  The local lumber mill (well one of the 2 anyway) allows us to pick up as much of either as we want free if we load it ourselves.
If I wanted to pay $10 I could get one front end loader "bucket" full, the guy at the saw mill said it'd prob take 2 to fill the truck bed.   I'm alright with shoveling the stuff myself if it'll help my garden.

Thing is (sorry it's not in great focus), it looks more like dirt than just some composted wood.  It also has a nice "feel" to it.  This with some of the manures I have around here will make a lovely bed for my newest crop!  SUNCHOKES!
Before anybody comments about how invasive is can get I already know and I hope that it does take over as we have killed horseradish here!  I also have a rue plant that I started 3 years ago and it's maybe a foot tall and not even a foot wide.  As our soil is mostly clay I'd like to see something I want to plant become so "hardy" it takes over especially since we like the taste of them.
We're also hoping that when we get even more of this "dirt" maybe we'll do a good sized potato patch that'll eventually be for carrots, turnips, salsafy, etc.

So we are going to be busy as long as we have gas in the truck!  Yeah!   I also have my bell pepper and tomato seeds to I can start the plants soon.  I'm figuring if they produce as well as they did next year'll I'll only need 6 plants, so I'll start 12.  I am hoping I can get the peppers to sprout I've had lots of troubles getting pepper plants to sprout.  Growing peppers from starts no problem, but if I try from seed they do nothing.   SHRUGS   I'll get them eventually.  I can be a very stubborn and tenacious person sometimes.

That's it for now.

Be Well, Be Safe, and Blessed Be...

Winter Fun

You know the fun thing about living in an area where you get to fully experience winter in all it's glory? We'll if you don't let me tell you how much fun it can be.

This morning it was a balmy 12F outside at 4:30am this morning. ...and why did I know this? Well, I woke at about hat time wide awake ,checked the time realized I needed to wake in 30 minutes anyway to get moving so I could have some tea in me and have fed at least some of the beasties before I wake my girls for school. I figured with that much time till I was to get up anyway and I was wide awake I might as well get up. Granted... the ice cold eye balls kinda told me I had to get up because we just experienced the. “Oh my Gods the wood burner went out and the house cooled”. Now over half of our overnight piece of wood was still in the burner. Seems it didn't like the wood enough to keep burning, go figure right?

It is always fun to have those mornings where you see the icicles hanging off your eyes and nose because at some point the wood burner went out and your head is the only part of you outside of the warm blankets. So you need to do the mad dash from bed to the wood burner to get it re-lit. Hoping the wood, and burner agree with your decision to make them work again. You know how inanimate objects get when cold.. they never like to work right.

It's almost scary when the outside temps though colder than your home feel warmer to you (me heading out to feed the dogs who as soon as they saw me decided to wake up and make noise till they got fed). While feeding the dogs I poke my head in my goat house, I see my two ladies doing fine, but don't see the buckling. Then he decides to say hello so because he didn't get up I figured it was safe enough for me to not feed them till the sun decided to wake up .

..have I mentioned yet how much fun it is to get 2 teen-aged girls to collect firewood when they don't feel the need to? I can't even get them to look at the fire when they are near it. I am hoping some day they'll learn. Fun parts about winter though are the soups/stews/chili/hot chocolate that gets made all the way through it.

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Side note here, I have not been posting on here due to the fact that we've been having some issues here with Silver's health. Over a year ago Silver wound up getting a unhealing wound on one of his toes (he diabetic). The VA doctor sent him to a specialist who spent the better part of 5 months trying to get it healed. During this process he was given an antibiotic that caused him heart problems... Enough “problems” that we wound up going to the ER numerous times. Thankfully 2 months after the prescription the doctors figured it might be a good idea to not use the drug on him anymore and the heart problems slowed. However I do have to keep an eye on him in regards to that. His toe did finally heal after over a year of being open.

Hope your year has had higher points...

Be Well, Be Safe, Blessed Be...