This morning (4/14/16) I scooped some out and filtered in through an old piece of window screen.
I then used it to lightly water all of our seedlings that were more than just a few days old. I also put some on my fig tree cuttings. I will talk more about them in another post.
It was a bit incongruous since it snowed all weekend: April 9, 2016.
We also bought yet another shop light for a fourth row of sprouts!
We noticed that our spinach has started to go to seed. We think its because they are under the lights 24/7. It is Tyee spinach, a hybrid that is supposedly slow to bolt. Sending up a flower after the second leaves is ridiculous but is no big deal. We will pinch off the flower and maybe they will continue to grow. If not, we will plant more. The recommendation is to plant spinach seeds every 2 weeks for a continuous harvest. We usually do a buzz cut at the soil line and they will grow more leaves.
We also planted some new seeds- Roma VF and San Marzano. Both are Italian style plum tomatoes for making sauce.
Maybe today we will make some compost tea to fertilize our little plants. Stay tuned….
Tonight we transplanted a bunch of plants that we want to get in the ground early to try to cheat the season. Broccoli, Romain, and Spinach mostly. All cold weather early crops. We split them out from their small initial planters and gave them medium sized individual pots, and now we have about a dozen of each! In addition, we tripled the size of our nursery shelves and lighting. We stole the additional shelves from the tractor shed and lights from the garage.
Here are the plants before splitting them out. Most were started March 8 and we are transplanting to larger pots on April 3.
Carolyn was pretty good at spitting out the young plants using an old knitting needle.
Each individual seedling got its very own new and larger pot.
Then we assembled a couple shelves and lights that we scavenged from the tractor shed and garage. Its only a couple of weeks until we can put them back—we can can put up with a bit less lighting and less shelving until the seedlings are done.
Next week the plan is to make some compost “tea” from our enormous compost pile and fertilize these plants, after they recover from the shock of transplant.
The best way to start seedlings is in mini clay pots. Tonight’s transplanting frees up about 2 dozen mini pots for the next plants to grow.
Also forgot to mention last post that we dug up 15-20lbs of carrots before we tilled last week. Carrots keep well over the winter in the ground. You can harvest them as needed all winter long, as long as the ground isn’t too frozen! You just need to dig them up in the spring before they turn to mush.
We have also been kicking around the idea of expanding in the way of animals. We talked about pigs, but may be too late for the season already. However, it seems we will be getting more chickens and of different varieties. Considering Barred Rock and Black Orpington. Need to build another coop first….
Also started some seeds indoors: Giant Roma, two types of onion, lettuce, spinach & broccoli.
Bought a fluorescent fixture from Home Depot and hung it between two mic stands 🙂 Easy to adjust the height!
The chickens have fared well over the winter too. Happy cluckers gives us about an egg a day.
As always, click the photos for FULL SIZE!
A big part of our move was preparing the old Cleveland house for sale. We spent countless hours washing walls, fixing holes, painting, repairing etc, etc. After several weeks of work, we had the Cleveland house in beautiful shape! We hired a real estate agent and he came and took pictures and listed the house. To help skew things in our favor, we also enlisted in the help of St. Joseph, burying him in our front garden per our pastor’s instructions.
A couple weeks past. I visited the house several times a week just to keep an eye on things, take out the trash, mow the lawn. Then, one day I parked in the driveway and noticed something funny. “What the heck is that?” I thought, noticing the siding on the house. I thought our bad neighbors sprayed something on the house.
I though little more of it other than how I would need to clean it off and went inside…
Our carefully cleaned house for sale was ruined! It was raining in the kitchen. I allowed myself just enough time to expel some expletives then ran upstairs. The tub supply had sprung a leak. I shut it off and ran to the basement to shut it off there too, just in case. It was raining in the basement, too
This was not good.
Cell phone. “Hello, Carol? Call the insurance company. We can’t fix this one ourselves.”
I immediately set about trying to save what I could. It was a fools errand, but I had to try.
The entire kitchen ceiling eventually wound up on the floor. The floor itself, buckled pretty badly, 1/2″ plus. The counter top swelled and warped. The window wouldn’t open. The cabinets were popping apart before my eyes. The electrical circuit breakers popped. The dishwasher was filled with sludge. Tiles and paint were popping off the walls. There was a water fall down the basement stairs. The rooms in the basement were an inch deep in water. The upstairs bathroom floor was buckled as well. This was not a good day.
The next day it looked like this…
It was shocking to see how it was all just gone.
Everything was removed.
We hired a general contractor to manage all the destruction and construction crews. We had to pick out new cabinets, counter, lighting, tile, paint, carpet…everything. Lots of decisions.
Eventually it all came together.
We finally moved to the country. We now live in the little town of Nova Ohio with a population of about 500. There were more people living on our STREET in Cleveland. The house is a 125 year old farmhouse on just about an acre of land. Plenty of room to grow our own food! Check out the pictures and the captions to get the full story.
Here’s the back-story: We always wanted to live in the country. We did the best we could in the city; our entire back yard was dedicated to our vegetable gardens, but it still wasn’t enough. Add to that all the noise and crime and… daydreaming became talking out loud which in turn became a search.
The hunt officially started on the way back from Carol’s mom’s house in Cincinnati for Thanksgiving 2013. I found a house on an acre in Mt. Sterling Ohio, south of Columbus. We loved it immediately, but thought, “we can’t take the first place we look at!” Turns out, there would be another 75 to see before we found “home.” Nothing was off the table; we looked at trailers in Darke county and shacks in Ashtabula, houses along the Ohio river in Brown county and just empty land in any other county in-between. We thought about trailers and manufactured homes and even converting a shipping container. We searched the entire winter, with a goal of moving by the spring. As our neighborhood in Cleveland continued to erode, our search became ever more desperate. We put over eight thousand miles on our car, searching, searching, searching…
