Garden update - April 2010

Well, my garden is doing QUITE well so far. Due to the warm winter and spring we have had I decided to be a little adventurous and plant some things before I am supposed to. I covered them with a row cover and it helped protect them quite nice! Mostly just that I planted my onions SUPER early and I also have planted carrots and beans which I am not supposed to plant for a few more weeks. Oh well :)

So here's some pics!
Here's my strawberries. I trimmed them all back and they are all starting to put out new leaves, although a couple of them are being slowpokes.










I've pulled the row cover back on one of the beds to let the green onions grow... those are left over from last year and they survived the winter so I am hoping for a batch of seed.









Some petunias we planted. Notice I finally have my irrigation system hooked up and being used! It's nice :)










Cute little garden helper












Can you believe she's almost two??? Oh and in the background there you can see my spring planted garlic which is ALMOST as tall as those volunteers in the last patch that got left last year.









Here's a peek underneath one of my floating covers, you can see onion seedlings poking up. They took so long to germinate I'd given up hope, but kept it covered because I planted carrots right next to them and lo & behold, both of them are coming up!







Here's a picture of my grass-invaded bed, this is where my garlic volunteers are from last year. i think when I planted them in the fall of '08 some of them just never made it past the thick layer of leaf mulch I had on them because I know I pulled up all the garlic that had come up last year but I have at least three separate plants, and then one of them is technically three plants of it's own because apparently it had a few cloves last year and each one sprouted.



And here's another shot of the spring planted garlic. On the right is a broccoli I unsuccessfully tried to overwinter.










And here's a shot of the whole garden. It's so beautiful to me :)


Anyway that's it for my garden update so far. My seedlings are doing well in my basement but that's for a different post. I don't know how much I will actually be planting in the garden this year, actually, because we might be moving in June. I plan on doing a lot of containers because there are a few types of tomatoes I need to save seed from since I planted my last ones... mostly just the Dad's Sunset and Tess' Land Race Currant tomato.

5-year plan update

I've got a couple blog posts to do here tonight or in the next few days so bear with me, but I'll try and keep it somewhat topical.

The biggest most exciting thing going on is not only is my husband almost finished with school (not even 2 months left!) but he has had several interviews for a company up in Colville that is looking for a Design Engineer. He's underqualified for the position but the fact is, it's RIGHT up his alley (they mfg wood stoves), it's 20 minutes away from where we want to build our home, and unlike many of their applicants he won't be looking for something else once the economy recovers.

They did put off the hiring for a bit so we won't hear back for another couple months but I am praying hard for this... those of my readers who also pray please pray for us! This job could mean big things, not only getting up there to the property quicker (we were thinking it could take 3-5 years after he's done with school) but the income, if we kept our standard of living the same, could allow us to build a home over a period of a few years with NO MORTGAGE. Of course, that's if things were at optimum conditions but I guess I'm trying to say that it would be AMAZING if we could get up there.

As of right now, my parents are up there and I am so jealous! They have gotten their Maremma sheepdogs, and the dogs are absolute gems. They also have a wire coop full of chicks! My mom and I spent an afternoon building the coop while the girls were napping on a day I happened to have off and she was here for the day. It was a wonderful day.

Which leads me to another topic... my emotional state right now is not very stable. I feel like me working has been unsustainable for so long emotionally and so I'm starting to run short. Kinda like an oil tank (anyone heat with oil?) when you run it and run it and it starts to get low, there's all kinds of stuff at the bottom of the tank that gunks it all up. That's kinda how I feel. I could sure use some prayers to lift my spirits also... it's becoming very difficult for me to drop my kids off with someone else and then go sit at a desk all day long.

Oh I almost forgot - Potato SEEDS.

I forgot to add on that last post that I'm doing an experiment :)

Last year I had gotten some heirloom seed potatoes from Ronniger. They were fingerling types, and 2 different varieties.

To my surprise, they set seed! Ever the curious one, I saved those seeds the same way I would save tomato seed and I am going to grow them this year to see what I get! Depending on who pollinated them they might just be duds but who knows, right? The potato seeds have also sprouted and so I think that will be a fun experiment for me to do this year, we'll see! I never had seen them before but according to my google searches this is a rare thing but it does happen occasionally.

Garden Update - seedlings!

Oh I almost forgot! I need to do an update.

This year I had promised myself I would get a soil blocker, and so I did. I got two actually, one 2" and one .75". I also have put my wonderful designer husband to the task of making me a 4" size, which he is mostly finished crafting out of PVC pipe. The 4" size was just too expensive to buy.

Anyway, the soil blocks are great! They were really easy to make, and I am looking forward to not having containers to deal with. it sure was a lot faster this way! I filled up two trays of blocks and started them a few weeks ago. Within 12 days I had tomato and even pepper sprouts.

Last year I had started my onions indoors but they did not do well at all so I figured maybe this year I should just start them directly outside. if the seeds don't germinate then I can always buy sets... but I'm just trying to figure out the best way. So I planted them outside a few weeks ago, we'll see what happens.

I have a few volunteer garlic plants coming up in last year's patch, I think some of them just didn't quite make it up through the thick mulch and so must have hibernated. I also have a new patch of garlic I planted this spring which is coming up quite nicely. And then I also have a few scallions that overwintered just fine.

As far as seedlings, here's what I have planted:

Tomatoes:
- Great White
- Principe Borghese
- Dad's Sunset
- Tess's Land Race Currant
- Litchi

Peppers:
- Craig's grande Jalapeno
- Purple Jalapeno
- Orange Habanero
- King of the North Sweet Pepper
- Orange Bell
- Sweet red mini stuffer
- Quadrati D'Asti Giallo Sweet

I also planted Thai Yellow Egg eggplant again.

Most of the seedlings are up except the Litchi Tomato, Great White and the King of North pepper (oh, and the eggplant but I remember it taking a long time last year too). Even the habaneros sprouted in about 12 days, it was crazy. All I did was prop up the seed trays with the humidity domes so that the bulbs are almost touching the plastic dome. The tomato seedlings that came up first already have their tiny set of first leaves but they are not leggy this way. They already need to be taken out of the tray to a new one, but the others are so small that I'll need to figure out something because I can't take them all out yet.

The one thing I am very happy about is that the Dad's Sunset was our favorite tomato from last year. It was so tasty and delicious but I never got any seed saved. I thought I had ONE seed left in the packet but then it turned out I had three. And all three germinated, and they were the quickest seeds to germinate! So lucky me, I will have more of them. And you know I will be saving seed from them!

Progress? maybe. Prayers? Yes.

Well here I am posting again because I have all this nervous energy.

You see, today my husband had a second interview as a design engineer for a company out by our property. This is overwhelmingly great for a few reasons:

1. we weren't expecting his first job out of school to be up there.
2. he would make quite a bit more money than anticipated for a cad drafter, nearly doubling my current income.
3. The money he would potentially make plus the decrease in cost of living in the area would mean we could realistically put significant amounts of money aside and build a home without a mortgage. Yes, WITHOUT A MORTGAGE.
4. I could stay home. Yes, I COULD STAY HOME :)

It's interesting, I've been working towards this goal of being able to stay home with my family for so many years and it's as if the reality is potentially going to finally happen! Part of me is waiting for a shoe to drop, and for someone to jump out and say "AHHHH You thought it would be this easy, but you are going to have to work for another three years to get to stay home!!!"

I guess it's almost being afraid of success. But I am also feeling very excited at the same time. Excited at the idea of not dealing with the junk I deal with at work. Excited at the thought of being able to homeschool my kids and make macaroni necklaces with them. Excited at the thought of being able to have another baby someday and NOT have to take them to daycare, to be able to breastfeed them without losing my supply from pumping, and to be able to use my stash of cloth diapers. Thrilled at the idea of being able to teach my daughters how to grow things and why worms are one of the most incredible creatures that God created. I am ecstatic at the potential to me able to have a pleasant and happy home with a hot meal waiting for my husband when he comes home from work, and actually to have time every once in a while to fold and put away laundry after it's been washed instead of just leaving it in a pile in the basement to pick through once a day for everyone's clothes.

This may seem like simple things to you, but for someone like me who thrives in the stay-home environment to have to go out and earn a living to support the family it is a tough thing. Some people are the type that would get bored being at home... I am the type who gets bored and burned out being at work because I wish I was at home doing things I consider productive. With that said, I am forever blessed to have a husband who has worked very hard in school (even made the dean's list!) and is now working hard on finishing school up and also looking for work. It is as important to him as it is to me that I am able to stay home, and in that small little thing I have a great asset - a partner in life that has the same goal as I do in many different ways. That's a lot more uncommon than you might think.

And really, the only fears I have are the fears that all this will somehow be taken away from me. That for some reason, somehow, I will be doomed to never be able to fulfill that basic need that is for me to raise my children as a stay home mom. it seems like a simple thing, but when you have spent so much time going past so many obstacles it almost seems like it would be natural for things to "not work out."

but really, if I had to just work forever, I would probably become clinically depressed. So I don't even want to think about it. Maybe I just need to refocus and remember that SOMEDAY it will happen and I need to just keep walking along because if you keep walking, you will get there, right?

The financial state of the USA and preparing

Something that I wanted to share and maybe it's just me wanting to put thoughts to paper. I work at a credit union as a lead, which means if there are any big problems with people's accounts I get to muddle it all out. Given that, and also the fact that I also trade currency on the foreign exchange market, I get a pretty good glimpse of what's happening financially. And I will tell you - the last few years have been scary. Our credit union has been repossessing a lot of BMWs and Mercedes. People have saddled themselves into $700-$1000/month car payments and are suddenly out of a job. Can you imagine? a $1000/month car payment!

I say this to say - we are in a depression. But I think about the Great Depression and it kind of scares me. Why? Because back in the Great Depression, people knew how to take a chicken and cook it. People knew how to grow food, and how to prepare meals from raw food materials like untrimmed veggies & meat. Nowdays, people don't know how to do that. You go to the supermarket, buy a box of food, and nuke it.

So what happens if that isn't there anymore? In our economy today, all grocery stores practice what is called "JIT" (Just-In-Time) warehousing. This means there are no big warehouses, and if the supply chain of trucks is interrupted for just a day or two you can see how quickly the store shelves empty. This is no big deal to those of us with pantries but there are people who never keep more than a day or two worth of food in their house... for them, what? Can you see with me how quickly this could degrade into violence?

I've been really making a commitment to myself to learn about how to store food and to learn more about putting it "by" just as a hedge against this. Yes, I know how to garden and that is a great skill because I also save my own seed and with this I will always have the ability to grow veggies but what use is that to me if we starve over the winter? I think about the earthquake in Haiti - those people were completely unprepared. Besides having a no suitable building codes and being as poverty-stricken as they were - there is NO REASON that people living in a country like that need to be unprepared. I think in their case, a helpful government as opposed to one intent on keeping it's people "under the thumb" would have made all the difference in the world. But then we think about all the other terrible disasters that can befall us and I really don't think there is any reason to be "Pollyanna" and think nothing bad will ever happen.

A lot of the people affected by Hurricane Katrina were not actually the ones with their homes destroyed. There were quite a lot of people forced to leave because there was 1. no clean water and 2. no food available. Can you imagine how much EASIER their life would have been if they had prepared for something? Even a 3 month supply of food & water would have made all the difference. Big huge snowstorms can shut off power for days. Are you prepared? I'm not. I have no effective way to heat my home without electricity. No good, huh. This year we lucked out. We had one short power outage that lasted a day and a night. The funny part is that I had some kerosene lamps I inherited from my granddad "Uncle Dutch" and I had actually bought kerosene for them. My husband and I spent the evening in relative comfort and our kids (Eleora is afraid of the dark until she falls asleep) were able to fall asleep to the soft glow of the lamps. I have some co-workers affected by the same outage and the night did not go so well for them.

So I guess this is my long rambling and all of it to say - I think we as a society need to be more prepared and to learn more skills. Who are we to be so arrogant and think that we won't need to be self-reliant?

A nice sunny weekend part 2

So as far as the rest of the weekend, this is mainly the part that I wish I had pics for. Both Saturday and Sunday were absolutely beautiful, no jacket needed sunny days. You know, it's funny, I think Eleora remembers gardening with me last year because she just jumped right in helping me.

The garden beds had shrunk quite a bit (of course) and I had put a bunch of leaves on them but needed to top them with compost in the spots I was going to plant garlic and onions. Planting garlic in the spring? Yes, I know, you are supposed to plant it in the fall, but I never got around to it and I have been SO burned out from work in the last 9 months or so that I had had zero energy after I get home or on the weekends to do ANYTHING besides try and stay caught up on dishes and laundry (and even that didn't get done).

So anyway, I was shoveling compost from the pile onto the garden spot where I was going to plant my garlic and of course Eleora immediately came over and got her little mint green trowel and started helping me... it was so cute! She loved watching the "warms" wiggle around in the compost and did a great job helping me plant the garlic cloves. I'd saved a couple of the biggest and fattest bulbs from last year so hopefully we'll do OK. Some of them were already starting to sprout in the bag. I do have a few volunteers from last year, must have been some that didn't quite make it up past the compacted leaf mulch. We'll see how those go!

The compost pile itself was pretty meager... I had stopped composting last year (sniff) because the neighbor's dog just loved to dig around in it (jumping the fence, same dog that left a dead SOMETHING - I think it was a mole - in my garden bed). Said neighbor has now moved out and so I am now free to compost again!

Sunday morning I dug out my box of seeds and the girls immediately zoned in on me. Sophia just had fun shaking the packets of peas to hear them rattle, but Eleora was a pretty intent student. Then we went out afterwards and I spread some potting soil for the onion bed (had run out of compost) and she helped me by carefully placing a seed into each hole. She is a very careful gardener... it's funny because last year she wasn't too much older than Sophia but Fia is just too busy running around and climbing on stuff outside to pay attention to what I am doing :) And that is OK, it's nice for them to be independent so that Tommy and I can do our work outside in the yard.

Last year I followed the instructions for onions which say to start them 6 weeks early indoors. Unfortunately, somehow I went wrong and those starts ended up so spindly. I did NOT do well with onions last year so this year I figured, we've been having amazing weather and a very mild winter overall (only an inch or two of snow!) and so I'll plant some seeds to see what happens. If all else fails, I can just get some sets to plant out in early May.

Then of course I completed my garden plan. This year's garden is more of an experiment than anything. I have a couple different kinds of pumpkin that I want to try out, some Litchi tomatoes, and lots of other fun things. I actually did not technically complete it because I don't know which varieties I'll be planting in all but I have it mostly done. I do have a schedule I made out (I even got a planner specifically for my garden this year) and so I can already tell you that next weekend is when I get to start my tomatoes & peppers! I got a soil blocker set this year so hopefully it won't be too hard for me to master it. I hated using the cups I did last year.

I already made my seed order a few months ago but some of those seeds were for "seed bank storage" and I lost the master inventory list that I made so now I get to go through them AGAIN and then I'll know which varieties I can grow. I think we'll have fun this year though! Probably in September I'll be done working so that will give us harvest time.

I'm also currently rooting some grape starts, Concord and Thompson Seedless. Those will be planted up on our family farm up north in a few months, along with a full complement of fruit trees this fall. I've also got some hardy kiwi seeds that I'll be starting so we'll see what will come of that! OH, and I'm also trying my hand at growing pineapples. One thing I would just LOVE is to have a big greenhouse full of tropicals.

When Tommy and I finalize the design for our home up at the property one of the "musts" is an attached greenhouse/sun room where I can grow small tropicals in pots. Did you know you can grow dwarf mango and avocado trees? I must admit working in the finance industry there are certain things that make me feel we have a not-so-firm footing. Specifically, the financial state of this country makes me concerned about the potential of bringing in food from other places. Sometimes that's good (eat local!) but sometimes that might not be fun, since I absolutely love bananas, mangos, avocados, and lots of other tropicals.

So my answer to that is to grow my own! We'll see :) Really, if I had a small greenhouse I could probably do it... we just need to find a good house plan to modify. And of course to pray that Tommy gets a job up north pretty quick when he's done with school.

And so I guess that's it for this post! Haha... Just wait. I sure can't!