Earliest Gardening Possible

I have to admit, I've been a little bit addicted to my seed catalogs lately.  They were delivered months ago, but I just can't quit them.  Each page is dog earred and a good number of seeds are circled, starred, and marked.  One of the best things about owning a home, for me at least, is the chance to really build our garden.  We've only had it for one year, but I really think that this year is going to be the best one yet.

Unfortunately, it is still a little early to put most of the seeds out into the ground.  We have been tending the soil in the main bed though, and cleaning up our garden area.  But there are a few plants that we have been able to start work on.

I planted potatoes for instance.  These are just circles of covered chicken wire.  The newspaper you see is to help hold the dirt inside the circle.  Then I filled them a little ways, maybe 18 inches with soil and planted my seed potato pieces.  The left is white potatoes, and the right is red.  I've ordered some blue so soon I will add that circle too.

We also started a few seeds inside.  This is probably my favorite way to start seeds because I can obsessively scan the soil every few hours for little baby seedlings.  Yesterday I was able to spot four baby butter lettuces and two kales. I immediately texted Marco to tell him the good news and he was just as excited as I was.

The onions that started to sprout in the pantry went into their own planter.  And I replanted the chives that reseeded themselves.  And I spread a few leaf lettuce seeds while I was at it too.

And tonight, finally, I will sit down and make my order for the majority of our seeds and plants.  We are trying a few new things this year, like beans and corn that you can grow in planters, blueberries and strawberries, a new kind of cucumber and even soybeans.  Add that to last years tomatoes, peppers, egg plants, zuchinni, gourds, watermelon, okra, and all the herbs we can fit- it's going to be a good year.


We have hopes and dreams (well, I do) of growing at least 750 pounds of produce this year. We were able to top over 300 last year so I thing it's possible.  We're also expanding our food plants into the front yard to help us reach our goal and to help develop some of the more ignored areas of our yard.  Peppers, kale, blue berries and beans are going in the flower beds as edible landscaping.  Add them to the two dozen irises, tulips and daffodils that are already coming up and we've got ourselves a pretty nice piece of property.  We have a half dozen new rosemary bushes and the mint planters are already showing tiny leaves.  I wish we had room for a few more fruit trees, but I think we may have a deal worked out with a neighbor.

Anyone else getting garden ready?  If you are looking for inspiration or just a little guidance, these are the places I've been stalking for a few months.  100 Dollars has great growing guides and I've been a subscriber to Mother Earth for years (happy birthday to me!).  Good growing to you!

www.100dollarsamonth.com- a family that lives on 100 dollars a month in groceries.  I love this site!  She is so smart and funny and real.  Plus she has chickens which means she's great.
www.MotherEarthNews.com- a gold mine of information about green living, growing, planting, home steading, whatever you can think of when it comes to planting and preserving.  Great search tools and constant updates.
www.urbanhomestead.org- my first homesteading experience.  I started reading this blog several years ago and that was when I decided I needed to buy a house.  I love the two sisters who run the blog, they are wonderfuly inspirational and so fancy.
www.rootsimple.com- I started by reading this couple's books a few years ago and then started following their blog.  The blog tends to be a little hit or miss for me, I can't relate to as much of it as I did the books, but they have a great search tool and wonderful resources.

Let's get growing y'all!

Bottles: Phase Two

Slowly but surely we are inching towards finally finishing our first bottle boarder flower bed around the house- and you know what that means!  Almost time to start the second one...

But first things first.  When I last shared our bottle boarder update it looked like this:

Bottles a plenty, yes, but top soil, prettiness, weed control??  Not so much.  Well it was about time I did something about that.  So on top of adding another 18 bottles to the end of the line (still about 4 dozen short, just need to get out there and do that already!) I also installed some free weed control.

I had a bunch of newspaper left over from a recon I did for the neighborhood (you can read about that here at OxfordHandmade), so I unfolded it and laid it out over my flower bed.  I tore holes/left space so that my plants could peak through, but I covered the weeds with two solid layers.  I went back every few minutes and sprayed everything with water to help hold it down.  Soon, my flowerbeds looked like this:

Classy right?  Well I didn't intend for it to stay that way.  I've actually read about this process several times online and several people swear by it.  The newspaper is supposed to suppress the weeds, then break down and just become one with the earth.  I'm so tired of weeds choking up my flowers I'd try just about anything, and this idea was free and easy- I figured it was worth a shot.

Well I added my newspapers, sprayed them with water, and then waited around for Marco.  He had spent all morning going back and forth from our house to the "free mulch place."  This place is for real here in Oxford- and most towns and cities have similar set ups.  Basically, when the city cuts down branches or trees, either from storm damage or power line maintenance, they mulch them up and pile it high.  The mulch is free to get, it just takes a little muscle power and you have to bring your own containers.  Well we had plenty of containers, so six trips later, we had plenty of mulch.  One of those trips went straight onto my newspapers until the entire bed looked like this:

Huzza.  We buried just about everything in mulch. Most things had died for winter anyway, but if it was still kicking, we went back and unearthed it a little.  There was plenty of great topsoil already composted in there, and it will settle with rain and time.  Now we just have to wait for spring when we can pour on a few bags of garden soil, toss in some of our own worm compost and watch it grow!  

Who else is excited for spring planting already??

Winter Yard Work

I spent the first weekend of December in the traditional fashion- outside in a t shirt doing yard work.

In fact, we had one of the most productive yard work weekends of the year except for that time we dug up a 100 square foot raised garden bed, poured in a ton of soil, tilled it and planted our 75 baby plants... so we are felling really good about this one.

Our to do list looked like such:

1. Clean garden beds (which means remove all of the old plants that were still hanging around, clean out the netting that was holding them up, hoe the rows and level)
2. Stir compost (especially important after adding a ton of new material, like all of the stuff we got out of the garden)
3. Clean out potted plants (mostly on the front porch and in the front flower beds)
4. Clean up trash near the deck/air conditioner/pallet storage
5. Clean up the second dresser we found on the street (more about the dressers on OxfordHandmade)
6. Fix the second dresser we found on the street
7. Paint the second dresser we found on the street
8. Fix the stairs that lead to the deck (there was a weird mini step at the top and the bottom, we needed to fix that ASAP)
9. Mulch the flower beds in the front
10. Split and divide all of the mint/spearmint/peppermint that had outgrown their containers
11. Transplant thyme plants from their beginner planters to new big plant planters
12. Paint the newspaper stand that has been hanging around out backyard for months
13. Relocate newspaper stand to be better used by the community 
14. Work on bottle boarder in the front of the house (hopefully this project will be D-O-N-E soon!)
15. Take a nap

Well I can assure you all has been done except paint the dresser- which needs to be done soon because it's supposed to rain this afternoon.  So I'll be back all this week showing off sharing pictures  and taking about dirt.

And p.s. we also did this on Saturday:

Congratulations Marco and Audi on a wonderful race at the Santa Run in Tupelo!!