Tending to the garden

We all know gardening is both a joy and hard work. One thing that I have struggled with lately is getting my garden watered properly while I have been sick with a cold.
My husband will help me water it from time to time, but not always.

Since the hose burst, it has to be done by hand, which means many trips to the spigot. It is a bit harder on my body while I am not feeling well than using a hose would be. Being so close to the end of the season, I had decided not to buy a new hose until next year.

I am still watering my garden, just not as often as I would like. I had hoped the rainy days would continue but of course during this time the temperature decided to heat back up again.

I would have put wine bottles into the ground but the water would have dried up within a day I am sure, and I would not have been able to refill them so easily without the bottom being cut off. Usually it is a battle of spraying the dirt out of the neck before refilling. Seems like more of a hassle to refill bottles that are not cut, than watering the garden by hand.

Sadly I do not have a self watering system in place for my current garden, but I do hope to implement one next year if possible. Doing so with a larger garden would make things a lot easier. Even if only part of it  is self watering through watering wells, pots, etc, it would help take off the load.

I have a sprinkler system in my back yard, though it does not reach the slope. I do not see a drip system being possible for next years plans so I am coming up with other ideas like wicking beds and such.

Some of the tomato plants look a little wilted but are otherwise fine. I see a little acorn squash growing, though no others for pumpkin or butternut yet. The zucchinis are doing great. Most of the beets are growing wonderfully. Peas/beans are flowering.
All in all my garden is doing just fine despite lack of the proper watering.

I have still been able to water my indoor plants. My ginger is really taking off. Lettuce seems a bit hard to grow indoors. I wonder if the temperatures fluctuate too much for the little lettuce heads. Either the heads die off or start to bolt. I think it just gets too warm and our AC unit has problems keeping the place cool even with the fans going.

Watercress has died off but I do believe I was able to get a few seeds that will hopefully germinate later.

I started a mushroom growing experiment. I took the stems of two types of mushrooms, button and the brown topped ones I can never remember the names of, and put them in some moist soil. I have them in my crafting room on the windowsill in 2 liter plastic bottles with a big hole in them.

They appear to be decomposing, which I am not sure if that is part of the re-growing process or if this is a failed experiment. I read somewhere that you could grow them that way but I am not so sure as of yet.
I wanted to try growing shiitake mushrooms but those are hard wood mushrooms I believe, which means they grow on decomposing logs, not in soil.

In any rate if it does not work I will most likely get a mushroom growing kit in the future.

As for the outdoor garden area, I will give it lots of love via coffee, tea, and other yummy things as a thanks for their patience with me while I am ill. I have already put a little coffee out there for the squash.

Whenever I make coffee I make just a little extra that goes into a cup that I put into my garden later. I also save the grounds as well as you already know.

Thankfully even with as bad as I have felt with this cold, I can tell it will not last as long as others have. A testament to what good herbal remedies can do for ones body.

Gardening and baby humming birds

This is what I have in my kitchen near my espresso machine. I have an open container to store coffee grounds in as I use them, and a old ziplock lunchbag that I put dried used tea leaves in. It is not a lot right now, but over time it will be very useful.



I have also started saving eggshells again that I will later grind up.


My little kitchen garden is doing fantastic. Avocado tree, ginger, bok choy, watercress, onion, and romaine. All but the watercress were propagated from fruit stand or grocery store scraps.


This yellow crookneck is getting so big! Now everything I read says to harvest when the skin is still soft… But mine has never really been soft, so to be honest I am not sure when it needs to be harvested. I will most likely be picking it tomorrow after getting some feedback.


The beginnings of my compost pile! The boys mowed the grass and piled it up for me on top of a box that is laid flat. It towers closer to 4 ft tall… I will most likely be scattering it a bit more as I add more things to the pike so the pile is not too high.


Look at these two incredibly cute baby hummingbirds! They are quite the delight to have on the little urban homestead.

Look at those beans grow! I love vined plants. Now if only the bugs would stop chewing on the leaves I would be happy.
Beets are all sprouting up as well though it is too bright to get a photo of that until they are larger.
Carrots are not looking promising. I think the bugs may have gotten to the seeds. We shall see.

Being that I am pagan I wanted to go into a little more depth as to why I have been posting about fertilizer so much. For me, it is respectful to give offerings to the Gods, and the spirits of the land. In my past garden this was usually done by putting out seed for the wild animals to eat. I do not want the seed I have to sprout here as I did in the last house, so I have not put seed out until I can get the non-sprouting kind.
My bird can be a semi picky eater and I would put out what was not eaten. Waste not basically.

To me fertilizing and nourishing the plants is also an offering. A  show that I am here to care for the plants, for the land, and to be a steward. I am giving back to the earth and helping it grow healthy just as it helps me.

Now while I do give offerings other than this, I do feel that the act of taking care of your garden, the act of making your own fertilizer, and showing dedication to your plants is something that speaks volumes to the genius loci. The spirits of the land.
I help them and they help me. It is a working relationship. As I get to know my new land better, they will get to know me and may even teach me a thing or two about the secrets of the land.

I work with them rather than against them. I very much enjoy getting to know the plant spirits, animal spirits, and in general the local spirits as I enter a new territory. There is so much one can learn if only they are willing to listen and be patient.

The grand old silver maple in my yard has to have the most personality of all my trees. I picture her as a happy old woman, who much likes to tickle my cheeks with her leaves and give me encouraging pats on the head as I water the garden. She seems quite delighted with me. While it may seem strange to notice the personality of a tree, I assure you it is actually quite a normal practice for myself and many others.
It has already been proven that plants do in fact speak with each other. Just because we do not always regularly speak with them, does not mean they do not talk in their own way, and are not listening.

It has also been proven that talking to your plants does in fact help them grow. I know this to be true personally myself. Music is another thing that helps plants grow.

The biggest thing with communication would be patience and the knowledge that communication will not happen as I am talking to you now. It will happen in other ways. An impression, a dream, a sway in the breeze. If you are keen at picking up these signs you will know what they mean.

I had two deaf friends growing up. I did not speak sign language myself but I still understood what they were saying. I eventually learned some signs and we could communicate a little better through their teaching me. I think this is no different than that. You are learning the communication style of something that does not speak like you, but that does not mean you cannot communicate with it. I would not change some of the wonderful experiences and conversations I have had with some of the plants I have grown for anything.

I feel very blessed to have my new plants so happy to have me living here. I feel very welcomed in my new home. Some may take a little more time to warm up to me, but the welcome I have had is already quite heartwarming.

Fertilizing and growing the natural way

This is my first year at my urban homestead. With Autumn on it’s way I am prepping my land for next years gardening adventures. I have been thinking a lot about what goes into good garden soil.
I like making my own natural fertilizers and I am still experimenting with different blends.

Right now what I have to work with is a bit of old coffee grinds, egg shells, used and dried tea leaves (leave it in the bag or on a plate if loose leaf, and let it sit until it dries. It can then be dumped into a storage container) As well as veggie water/broth from blanching veggies.

I hope to this year start my compost pile, though that will not be ready for planting come Spring I do not think with how long it takes to transform into something usable. Still, it will be great to have in the coming seasons.
I will be piling up the grass clippings for the start of my compost pile.

If had a larger garden this year, and could have bartered my fresh herbs and veggies, for some aged chicken, rabbit, cow, etc manure to add to the compost pile, I would have. That is something I may look into once my garden produces a little more than my current small garden does.

I would also love to use things like seaweed and kelp in my yard but would rather wild harvest if I could. I will most likely see if I can find someone in the PNW coast that would be willing to dry some out and send it to me for my garden. I’d prefer to know where it came from rather than not.

I also would like to gather some willow leaves and stems to make a “tea” for my garden. That will most likely be on my wildcrafting to do list in Spring as I do not think I know anyone who has a willow tree growing in their yard.

Another thing I need to look into for Spring is picking up some rooting liquid (as my attempts at using honey have been a fail for that) and the other things you need to root cuttings. I find plants I wish I could take home with me all the time. I think I need to get into the art of rooting. It seems simple enough but I have not had success with anything from cuttings so far. I also have not tried it the proper way yet either. I am always looking for an alternative way to do something.

Pest control is another issue I need to tackle next year. I have a big problem with earwigs, ants, pill bugs, elder box bugs *which are a hybrid bug*, stink bugs, and I believe that is it for the ones I have a big problem with here. A friend of mine makes his own natural, plant safe, earth friendly, bug spray that I think I might have to give a try. He says it will work on the box elder bugs. Considering they are really going after my big silver maple, I have to get rid of them. I won’t use commercial pesticides, though they would not work on the box elder bugs anyways.

Morning routine

I enjoy my morning routine. I actually look forward to waking up and starting it all over again.

For me right now my routine is to get up, drink a protein shake.
I shake up any extracts I have brewing. Currently the only one I have going is ginkgo biloba.
Go out and water my garden. I water twice a day usually but I do not water deeply, so this is fine.
I get ready for work.
I harvest a handful of strawberries if there are any that are ripe and ready to be picked.
Today I also harvested a handful of mallow flowers and a bit of spruce resin for later use in my herbal preparations.
I then make some coffee and read some blogs, newsletters, do research, work on my garden gate book, read, do art, etc… Whatever I feel like doing. Sometimes it is sitting and watching a tv show but lately my tv has been mostly during the hotter part of the day or late at night on my days off.
I make my lunch, eat a little more of a breakfast at this point.
I throw any dishes into the dishwasher if needed, and get ready to leave for work usually after that.
What I get done depends on how long I have.

Basically my routine allows me to do some of what I love every day. It is sort of my meditation. While at some point I would love my garden to have a system set up where I will not need to water it by hand, I enjoy doing it with the size of garden I have right now.
It also forces me to keep an eye on progress and head off anything harmful sooner rather than later.

Of course all of this will change as often as my projects do, when the season does, or as my muse pleases. I like working on many things at once.

Grocery store gardening experiments

So I like to grow things from fruit stands, and grocery stores in addition to harvesting wild seed, transplanting, and buying seed from nurseries.

One thing I have not gotten around to trying is growing plants from the bulk foods section. From what I read it is sort of a hit or miss thing. I was reading about different beans, since now is a good time to plant them where I am at, when I thought about the fact that I have a bag of 13 bean soup from the bulk foods section of Winco.

I found another blog post from someone who had decent success in growing from these beans. Some of them were a little slow to germinate, but otherwise they seemed to do fine. I had not really thought about growing dry beans until today. I am all about green beans, peas, and sugar snap peas (My favorite) but I do love to cook with beans when I can.

I thought this might be a good way to get some more experiments in this year. I just repurposed a to go container into my new germination station. I think this one is going to work better than the tupperwear one I had, but I will have to see if the little round vents cause it to dry out too quickly or not.

I put two of each bean type in the germination station with the peas having a few more since they are in halves. The peas only have a 50% germination rate from what it would have been due to them being split. I figured it could not hurt to have a few in there rather than just two halves.

Now is a good time to be direct sowing the seeds,  but I would rather them germinate here and I transplant them later, than put them out in the garden, and keep watering a spot that does not grow anything.

My husband of course makes the comment “So do you need salt water to grow Navy beans?” Lol

In addition to my bean experiments, I also packaged up 90% of the seeds I had dried. The packets are really small but perfect since I don’t always get a ton of seeds for one plant. I printed out 4 of them on one sheet of paper.

I consider these seeds to be “experiments” also as I have not tested them out yet.

I picked some mallow cheeses “Seeds” which I almost feel is pointless as they grow all over, but figured it couldn’t hurt to have them anyways.

Mallow is related to the Okra plant and has a similar mucilage to okra when chewed or cooked. The green cheeses (which I did not harvest as of yet, I only harvested the dried brown ones) taste more like mini okras, while the leaves have the mucilage when chewed, it does not have that fleshy texture of okra.

Mallow has a lot of health benefits and I harvested some of the young leaves to dry out for teas later. I have not had them in a tea before and hope that drying them will not make my tea all slimy later haha. Mallow is used to thicken soups if that helps give you any idea on things.

Given the stress all my poor tomato plants went through, I only harvested one speckled roma tomato. It is the first time we have had one of those. I think I like it better than the normal roma tomatoes, either that or I just like the taste of it coming fresh off the vine.

I did save the seeds from that and they will be ready for drying tomorrow. I just scoop the seeds into a container and swirl them once a day. They have to ferment so the “anti sprouting” coating that is naturally on the seed will come off.  I then fill the container with water. The seeds that float are bad and will not sprout. Those I let run off. The ones that sink are good seeds and I keep those for planting later.

I have more tomatoes that I can save seeds from that are ripe and ready to be picked as soon as I get to drying the speckled roma tomorrow.
Next year I am sure they will be much stronger than the ones I moved into the garden.

Gardening really is all about trial and error. I actually enjoy it when I am not freaking out over my plants. Thankfully my tomato plants actually strengthened up without anything but water really. I did add some water to them that I had used to blanch some bok choy, and lambs quarters for freezing.

I like to make my own fertilizers. Basically I use coffee grounds, left over dried tea leaves (which my garden seems to always favor when I had used them in my container garden), left over veggie water, left over water from boiling eggs, egg shells, and things along those lines.

I will eventually start composting once I look into getting some smaller bins for it. That will be a new fun thing to learn. I like knowing exactly what is going into my garden and will not use harsh chemicals in it.

Speaking of the water I used from the bok choy… I forgot to mention that I only used the outer leaves and left a few inner leaves of the two heads I got, so I can regrow it. I also got these from the store.
They are already growing back. One is in only water, the other is in soil. The one pictured below in the water also has some watercress growing next to it that I had separated from the original mother plant I got back in June. They taste like radish greens.

Birthday Adventures

Today has been awesome. I did not have any special plans for today really. With all that has been going on, I did not want to make plans then have to break them if something went wrong at the house.

Woke up to tickets to How to Train Your Dragon 2, a pearl bracelet, and a pretty glass hummingbird feeder. My hubby knows I get upset I kept missing out on seeing the hummingbirds, so he decided this might be perfect to help with that.

We went out to eat with friends and family at Steve’s Café. Great food and awesome company. Many wonderful conversations to be had. Not to mention very thoughtful gifts that I adore.

After breakfast we drove around a bit. Went to an antique store and a garden nursery. At the nursery he bought me 5 squash plants, some onion bulbs, and a packet of sweet corn seeds.  We got a good deal on the squash/pumpkin plants. They were .99 and buy 3 get one free.. so we got the plants for $4 total, then about .50 for the onions, and a 2.50 for the corn. Not bad really when I was seeing the same squash plants at the big box nursery's for like $15 a pot.. We went to the Fivemile Farms Nursery in Meridian Idaho.
Being that it is late in the season they are getting rid of the last of their plants, so that means good deals on plant starts.

I know it is hard work, but I actually enjoy working in my garden, so we got some Hawaiian BBQ, stopped at Vapoligy, and headed to the new house to get to digging. The condition was that I leave the work inside the house alone for my birthday he said.

He worked on some electrical sockets in the house while I tilled up some spots in the yard.

I plants 15 yellow onions and 7 white onions in between my wilting tomato plants. I am not sure if the tomatoes will make it but at least now I have a good spot for them. I planted the onions up to the sticks I put in the middle of the tomatoes.
 

You can see how my tomatoes are doing in this photo

Here is where I planted my squash plants. The space was already mostly cleared out.
The one in the back right of the photo is small sugar pumpkin, then to the left is acorn squash, and the right is butternut squash.

I also got zucchini and crookneck yellow squash that I put in large pots.

The area that previously had tomatoes in it before moving them is where I planted three rows of sweet (gold and yellow mix) corn. I got about 45 kernels planted in the three rows. They needed full sun and I thought they might do better in that site than the tomatoes did given that they are usually a bit more hardy.

Once shoots start popping up I will probably dig little trenches on either sides of the rows for watering. Where the big-ish rocks are is where the row starts. Thankfully I should have them started in time to get a good harvest. Any later and it would have been too late to start them. Since my garden is small this year, I could pretty much put them wherever I wanted to.

I can’t wait to start getting a harvest and get into canning. I will probably have more than enough corn to freeze if not can some. This kind of corn is the only corn I like so much I will eat it raw even.

Corn, squash/pumpkin, and tomato/onion. Slowly cultivating the land. Eventually I will get to the grass, which will be much harder to tear out I am sure :/

The hilariousness of the adventure was not having planned to garden today. This meant I was in wedges while tilling and digging in the garden. I need some proper gardening shoes soon haha. Though being that I am someones hobbit friend, one might say I don’t need shoes to garden lol. Though really I do… Especially with ants, box elder bugs, and earwigs I really need to get under control. Thinking of trying out this all natural bug spray my friend makes soon. Maybe that will do the trick.

It is only the end of Spring and I am already excited for seed starting come this Winter. I plan to actually write out my plan for each plant needed, measure out each section, so I know exactly how much I will need to start. I will then probably start a bit over that depending on the plants. That way if some die, I have backups, and also possibly extras for whatever.
This means I will actually need to set up a grow kit of sorts. I will need the lighting, shelving, etc, for optimal seed starting conditions. I thankfully have space for it now too.

I am overwhelmed with the joy of not only having some really amazing friends to share my dreams with, but actually being able to act on one of the bigger dreams I have. Seeing a dream become a reality takes a while for it to set it. It is very surreal. While I am sure there will be some trial and error in learning the land (i.e tomatoes) I am sure it will be a wonderful journey.

Part of the journey is coming up with a name for my homestead. I have yet to name it and as of late I feel as if the name is on the tip of my tongue, but not quite there yet. I am excited for when that name finally comes to me in a big realization. The name is a big deal to me so I can be patient until the right one comes to me.

The only thing I need to get a jump on as soon as we are moved and unpacked is my garden journal. I sadly packed that, so I am just kind of keeping notes on my garden plants in my tablet, and on my computer for now. My garden journal is going to be filled with garden art. Sort of a garden planner, calendar, and art journal all in one.

Yes I have a lot of plans. Yes I will be making them all happen in due time. I will reach for the stars in my steampunk flying airship, and my journey will be never ending. I encourage everyone to reach farther than they think possible, and see the amazing things you can accomplish if you only try, and not give up.

Now I think it is time for some coffee, good conversation, and possibly some blogtalk radio time.