These are the seeds we have started for the cold weather plants.

 This is our little greenhouse.

This is the little freezer we picked up for fifty bucks!  We'll use it to freeze the 2 liters that we have saved up this winter.  What will we do with them?  We'll keep the chickens and rabbits cool this summer.  Last summer was brutal and this summer is expected to be the same.

 These are our chickens.  We are expecting eggs this month!

MM did a fantastic job on the coop and run.  Haven't had a predator get in yet! 

Potatoes ready for planting in the tires.

Potato tires.

This is our new compost area where we are making the most of all the oak leaves and used straw from the chicken coop.

It holds about 100 bags of leaves and straw with room to spare.



This is the huge hole we are digging to capture additional rain run-off.  Once completed we will build a form and pour cement in it.  We can then use our sump pump to water the back yard gardens.

I forgot to take pics of the rain barrel system that MM built me.  They work fantastic and inspired this hole.








This is my son Nate and my sweet Sarah Anne digging the hole.

What a wonderful way to spend a lazy Sunday.

I'm sitting here, listening to a Dave Mathews concert and getting ready to review all the things that have happened over the last five months.  We have been very busy. 

The last time I checked in I had just been accepted into the Mater Gardeners internship.  Wow, was that an intimidating period of time!  It was such an intense time of study and learning.  The first few weeks I thought I had really gotten in over my head but as the time progressed I realized that either the weekly tests were getting easier or I was getting smarter, lol.  The first thing I learned was the difference between dirt and soil.  Dirt is what you sweep up off the floor and soil is what you grow your plants in.  I have always loved gardening and when I lived in Idaho I had thought I was a great gardener.  Then I moved to Oklahoma and quickly learned that I had been an average gardener that had been gardening in great soil.  Down here in Oklahoma we have to make our soil.  Taking that class was one of the best decisions that I have made.  The people that are fellow gardeners are some of the most wonderful people I have ever met.  What I enjoy the most is the sincere desire of the O.S.U. extension office to help us learn to grow our food.  No matter what the question is they will take the time to find an answer.  You would be surprised how many younger people are calling or coming in to find out how to rediscover all the lost knowledge of growing food.  In talking to them I discover that it is the economy that is driving them to do so.  Then they taste the difference in flavor of home grown food compared to corporately grown food and they are hooked!

We got the chicks in late October.  They have been a joy to raise.  The kids and I have had so much fun watching them grow.  I'm not quite sure how we are going to proceed in regards to butchering them and restocking.  It would be easier to just buy them, raise them, get the eggs while you can and then butcher them and start all over again.  You can't introduce chicks into a group of grown chickens or they will kill them.  I guess we could have a hatchery area.  I don't know...  I'll have to put some more thought into that.  They will be laying eggs by next month!  I am excited for that to start.  Once we can sell eggs we will be able to cover the cost of the feed.  I'm sad to say that we lost our camera and have not been able to replace it yet so I will not be able to post any pictures of all the wonderful times that we have shared in this new adventure.  I spent a lot of time yesterday reading up on all my chicken blogs and learned so much!  I will be adding a couple of wheelbarrows full of our oak leaves to the run.  It will accomplish several things.  The first being to help keep their feet clean.  Secondly, they love it and the bugs it brings.  Thirdly, it will help slow down the erosion from all their dust baths and last but not least, it will break down into compost for the garden.


Speaking of composting, we added a new feature this year.  While I was still in my MG classes I got the chance to pick Steve's brain.  He's the compost guy.  Until this year, we have always burned about 100 bags worth of oak leaves every fall.  When Steve heard this his face got this flustered look and the first words out his mouth were, "Shame on you.  Don't you know that oak leaves are like gold for your garden?".  So, having been properly chastised and motivated, this year we created a 25' x 25' area to compost them.  It was relatively easy and inexpensive.  Wish I could show you what it looks like.  Once we get another camera I will catch up everything.  We bought a hundred foot section of the orange material they use on construction sites to keep the debris from blowing off the site.  It's not the prettiest thing to look at but hey, this IS a working farm/homestead and it ain't always pretty.  By next fall I'll be able to restock the soil in the raised beds and I won't be spending the money on having a load of soil brought in!  Yep, I'm feeling pretty thrifty (and proud of myself, in case you couldn't tell) about it.  Between that and the double-barreled tumbler composter we have I don't think we'll ever have to buy another load of soil.



We are going to start breeding the rabbits this week.  We will be providing meat for our household and one of my brother's as well.  They have been the easiest and the cheapest to raise. Were you aware that rabbits are only pregnant for thirty-one days?  Lucky ducks, or rather rabbits, lol.  Another cool fact is that you only raise them eight weeks before you butcher them.  Easy!  If I could find a butcher that could handle rabbits I could eventually sell the meat to local restaurants.  That would be another stream of income for the farm.


We will be getting a bee hive this spring.  Did you know that honey is the only food that never spoils?  Not to mention how expensive it is.  If there was enough honey produced we could sell that as well making yet another stream.  It will also help revive the honey bee population in this area and help with the pollination of our own crops.  I am allergic to bee stings but as I've gotten older I learned that if you don't freak out they pretty much leave you alone and if they don't then squirt them with the hose and they will.  My new son Nate has agreed to harvest the honey for us and seeing how he has done it before I am more than happy to let him.


This spring we will be building a new stall (we turned the old one into a storage building) in preparation for getting two cows, one male and one female.  Why?  Meat and milk silly!  Speaking of real food, here are a few sites you all should check out.


http://farmfoodfreedom.org/
http://farmfoodfreedomfighters.ca/ 
http://www.100daysofrealfood.com/ 
http://nourishedkitchen.com/ 
http://www.thecompletepatient.com/journal/2012/2/13/maybe-dan-allgyers-decision-to-shut-down-his-pa-farm-will-he.html 




We are also trying to find some one to plow a few acres for us so that we can grow some wheat, hay and oats.  Hay to feed the livestock in the winter.  Wheat for the grains and for the straw that we use in the coop.  Oats to feed the chickens and us.  Haven't had much luck.  If you know of anyone please let me know.  Luckily, all three grow well in sandy soils.  Another crop that likes sandy soils are potatoes.  We will be doing the tire method this year.  I learned it from "Mother Earth News".  It is one of my all time favorite magazines.  They have the scoop on everything we are doing here and can help you too.  Here is the link for them.  http://www.motherearthnews.com/   We will be starting them this month along with the rest of the crops that do well in colder weather.

MM has finished all but one rain barrel  on our rain water system.  I am really pleased with it.  We get 1500 gallons off of our roof for every inch of rain we get.  Amazing isn't it?  If you are interested in finding out what your roof sheds here is the link.  http://www.csgnetwork.com/rwcollectioncalc.html  I am really hoping to make a dent in our water bill this year with the barrels we collect.  I'll let you know how it goes.

The morning is foggy and I’m home alone, listening to Natalie Merchant and enjoying myself immensely!  It's the perfect time to finish this post.  The kids are at the Tulsa Air and Space Museum. It’s a nice break from the homeschooling and I get to sort my seeds and get things ready for starting for the spring garden this year. We got the portable green house set up in front of my living room windows yesterday. I have the perfect windows for starting seeds. They get light from the time the sun comes up till it sets in the evening. It still surprises me how we live in such a small house, filled with six people, three dogs, five cats, a rat, snake, and a lizard. You’d think that it would be impossible that we could fit an area to start our seeds into the scene. Yet we do, every year. We, me and MM, always make the room, be it human, animal or vegetable, lol. I really like that about us. I get to live in a home of light and love, surrounded by the ones I love more than life itself, doing the things I love to do, living the life I never dreamed of yet can’t imagine doing anything else. It is all I could ever hope for or desire. It is so good to be me.  It is my prayer that this finds you all feeling the same way.  Till next time, God speed.

I have been accepted into the Tulsa Master Gardeners Internship!

I am so excited!  It is a very intensive, weekly class that starts September 7th, and runs through December 14th.  Once I pass the class, and I will, I will be an intern for one year.  I am really looking forward to learning everything about gardening here in Oklahoma!  

On another note, the last time I cleaned the rabbit cage I did not do the latch right and they all got out.  Two were killed.  I was left with one doe.  After spending three and a half hours on the phone last week, calling Texas, Missouri, Arkansas and ALL over Oklahoma, only to find out that most of the New Zealand rabbits have died due to the heat this summer, I finally found two five miles up the road from our house.  The bonus is that they are two months older than the the ones we "lost" so we will still be right on track for babies in the spring!  

We are ordering our chicks this week.  The weather is finally starting to cool off a bit.  The nights are even beginning to be quite pleasant.  I love it when a plan comes together! 


Our fall garden is in.  It is the smallest we have done in years.  I'm going to be doing beans, kale, cabbage, lettuce and of course, tomatoes.  I am refusing, yes, REFUSING to do any vine crops!  I'm going to try and starve the squash bugs out of my garden.  I'm not going to plant any vine crops until next  summer.  Unless I learn some awesome way to get rid of them in my Tulsa Master Gardeners class that is.  LOL!


Enjoy the cooler weather everyone!

I can not believe that it has been three months since I wrote anything here!

     Don't fool yourself though, just because there haven't been any posts doesn't mean that there have been many idle days around here!  The garden has been a frustrating adventure this year.  The heat has been so hard on the plants and the people.  The plants are growing, a little, and producing, a little, but most of the blooms are falling off before they can fruit.

The heat has been so extreme that at times it's been difficult to justify the water bill by the produce harvested.  This is the second year in a row that has been this way.  I say this every year but next year I am going to do things differently.  Next year I am going to get my cabbage, red potatoes, lettuce, spinach and peas out of the early planting.  For the summer planting I am only going to do peppers, melons, okra and strawberries.  They are the plants that love the hot weather and are producing in this heat. I am already clearing out spaces and planning for the fall garden.  Last year it was my fall garden that gave me the most.  I hope that it will do the same this year.  One of the wonderful aspects of gardening in Oklahoma is that we have an insanely long fall.  Last year I was harvesting tomatoes clear into October!  It still gets warm in the days but the cooler nights are what gives the fall garden the advantage over the summer garden.  The water seems to go a lot further as well.

These are all the materials needed.

     I did step it up in the garden this year and take two of my beds and really do the "square foot gardening".  I thought I could do it by eye-balling it, which is what I tried to do with the other three beds, but BOY, WAS I WRONG!!!  This year I actually did the square foot dividing and it blew my mind how much more I got out of the two beds I did the right way and the three beds I "eyeballed".

Dividing the bed into square foot gardens.

        






Needless to say, I will be doing all my beds this way next year.  Thankfully, the community garden that we joined has been wonderful!  We have gotten peas, broccoli, beans, kale, Swiss chard, all kinds of lettuce, collards and turnips so far.  We can buy all of the produce at wholesale costs and even lower if we go out in the heat and pick the stuff ourselves.  We always bring the kids to help so it doesn't take us nearly as long as if it was just me.  I bring them home, separate out enough for dinner and then clean, blanch and freeze the rest.  Now we are getting ready to head out there and pick zucchini, yellow, and flying saucer squash, okra, tomatoes, peppers, onions and other summer goodies.   

Sweet Sarah helping with the beans.  

Add caption

Grammy harvesting some beans.

Sybil podding the peas.

We have gotten three New Zealand rabbits, one male two females.  They are reported to be excellent meat rabbits.  My brother, Shawn wants to start selling rabbit in his restaurant, Amicci's Italian Eatery.  That is what inspired us to start raising them.  I figured he's got to buy them from someone, might as well be me.  They are the easiest livestock to raise, not to mention that they are sweet mannered and adorable.  I told the kids when we got them that they could not name them.  Once you name them they go from livestock to pets.





Each female can have up to twenty four babies per year.    They are pretty inexpensive to feed and once they start breeding  you only keep the babies for eight weeks before butchering them.  Ours should be ready to breed by next spring.  MM will be building a permanent hutch for them as soon as he is done with the chicken run.  I love being married to a man who can build anything! 


     We have also added the chicken coop to the property.  We will be ordering New Hampshire Reds mid-August.  Can you believe that they MAIL them to you?  Dad says they have always done that.  That is how they use to get their chickens when he was a boy, he's seventy-three now.  Fifteen hens and one rooster.  They are good for both laying eggs and are big enough to get some decent meat off of them.  We were going to do it now but I am worried about the heat.  We have some neighbors that have had some chickens die in this heat.  Babies are fragile.  I want to be careful.  Besides, by doing it the end of August we will still have three more months of decent weather.  By the time snow hits they will be fully feathered.

 

Michael has done a great job on the coop.  He has built it like a house.  I joke and tell him that if we threw some insulation in it we could rent it out when times get rough. This coop will easily last twenty to thirty years. 

Sarah has been his little helper through out the entire process.  Any time that Daddy is home I know where to find her.  To tell the truth, I really love that.  

I'll post pictures of it when it's finished.  The door and the window is in and it is primed and painted, sage to match the house and stable.  The only things that are left are the ramps and the little hole they go in and out of to get to the run and the run itself.  We have the materials it is just a matter of MM having the time in between his work to do it. Since I won't be letting the chicks out till they are at least eight weeks old anyway, we have a bit of time to get it finished.  

     The next projects on the board will be the rabbit hutch, the aqua-ponic fish garden and the rain water barrel system.  Slowly but surely we are getting closer to be self-sustainable.  Woo-hoo!  Hope this finds all healthy, happy and making the most of your summer!

Saturday was a perfect day!

     Mary Ann, me, MM, Sarah-bear and Jimmy went to the Annual Herbal Affair in Sand Springs, OK. It is our fourth year in a row and is now to be considered a tradition. I love those! There is something so comforting and fun about them. We start the day with making everyone an excellent coffee, meet up at Mary Ann’s house to load her wagon. Everyone gets out to go and look at their garden. Bob did a great job at building her raised beds! We’re about tied now in the square footage. We have a bit of a friendly competition going on between us. Then, we all load up, girls with the girls, boys with the boys and head out to spend the day in the sun, finding all of our deals.              As always, I bring my camera and get a pic of us unloading the wagons but nothing else till I’m home. I always get too excited looking through all the plants for my little treasures that will complete my well-planned masterpiece. 

     




I was able to find every single plant I wanted except for one. I was also able to get quite a few new and exciting ones as well. Wrap the outing up with a ten dollar pizza from Pizza Hut and head home to plant the beautiful bounty we purchased. It only gets better, Bob has volunteered to come over and help MM fill the final bed! 
There is something so special about an empty garden bed. When the soil is ready and beckoning you to fill it. It’s like a canvas screaming for some paint to fill it’s emptiness. We are taught that we were created in His image. Man and woman in His image. He is the master creator. So, it stands to reason that if we are in His image, when we create, anything, that we are at our finest. I sure feel like it brings out the best in me


Can it get any better than that? 

Yes, yes it can! I get the house straightened up, Mary Ann comes over to our place, helps me plant, we have a blast, my mom brings home armfuls of clothes for me and Sarah-bear’s grow-up box from garage sale hunting and a gorgeous new rug for our living room! To top it off MM helped me get some sentimental plants of mine out of the full sun. They just aren’t ready for it yet and if anything happened to them it would make me cry. Yes siree, today was a perfect day

A good friend of mine said, "In order to write you have to sit down and do it.",

and all I can think is "ouch".  They are true words indeed.  So this is me, sitting down and writing.  I have thought about writing for the last month.  Things have been very hectic around here.  I've always had a good excuse not to write, after all, I am a very busy woman!  However, enough is enough, so here goes.  
     Many things have been done around here since I last posted.  The two additional raised beds have been built in our garden.  One of them has even been filled.  It was a huge job that the whole family helped with.  That always makes it better.  In spite of the occasional whining the day was fun.  I've had to change the plans a couple of times, but I'm flexible.  The seedlings have been transplanted, except for the tomatoes that will go in the last bed.  

That makes a grand total of seven beds in the winter garden.  I call it that because it is the garden we use year-round.  We also got the composter put together and in use.  I love being married to a man who can do anything!  It is a wonderful device, however, the fourteen day compost is only achieved when you shred all your materials and add it all at once.  That's okay though.  I'll get there eventually.  

                                

 The flag-pole garden has been dug out, lined and refilled with better soil and less rocks.  It has also been planted with carrots, radishes, beets and carrots and onions.  

We also got the vertical beds put in two of the winter garden beds.  I am very excited about the extra space we will have to grow things.  It has effectively doubled the growing space for the beds!

On a different note, some of you might remember me mentioning that the farmers I buy my milk from, Rex and Marie, have a community garden that they host all year, every year.  For either $50.00 or seven hours of weeding members can buy their veggies at wholesale costs.  We have decided to become members of that garden.  It has been so wonderful eating the seasonal crops that they are turning out.  I throughly enjoy every minute that I spend with them.  They are wonderful people who enjoy what they do.  They are a real inspiration to me.  I took some pics of their hoop house.  We bought some kale, collards, and swiss chard and had the most wonderful salads for the next week. If any of my locals would like the info on the community garden,please, feel free to contact me.

I have learned that foods eaten, when in season and local,are more nutritious simply because they are fresher.  

What's in season now?

Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 9:02 AM

  |  posted by Monica Reinagel, MS, LD/N

Eating with the seasons is a great way to maximize nutrition and minimize the environmental costs of our foods.  Foods that are fresh (i.e., in season) and locally-grown are going to be more nutritious because nutrients degrade during shipping and storage. It's also better for the environment (and the economy) because the alternative (shipping foods long distances) uses so much energy.  

Makes total sense eh?  I'm looking forward to the fresh fruits and veggies coming up in our garden!  I am including a list of the plants we have planted currently and some that will be added soon.  Also, some pics of my garden plans.

Okay, so the list is too long for me to do today.  Sorry about that but the day is ticking away and there is still laundry to do and dishes to put away. Hope this finds everyone enjoying spring time as much as we are!

God Bless our blooms!