The Many Sides of Calendula

You can now find this article on The Free Range Life. You can find it here: The Many Sides of Calendula. If you are interested in my article on how Calendula can be used for your health you can find it here: The Healing Properties of Calendula

Bit by Bit

We've got a long list of things to accomplish before moving. Things like knocking down a barn and building a barn. And fencing. A lot of fencing. Today we started on a small yard for the goats and chickens. The barn and chicken coop will be in this yard. It's where we will keep kids when they are very young. Eventually they will have about an acre to forage on, but for now we are starting small.

So today was fence posts. Measuring distance and driving them in. And pruning brush out of the way.


Rylan and Cale helped. Rylan has been a huge help lately. Helping to tape walls, pack boxes, prune weeds and hauling other things around. He was doing pretty good with the t-post driver too.

We've also got a new addition to our homestead.

Meet Thor.

He's an Oberhasli buck. With one broken horn and one curled horn. He's calm around the dogs. A little scared of us. He's got sad eyes and he stinks. But hopefully he will do his job and come late March we will have babies

He's only been here a few days now but seems like a very even tempered non-aggressive boy. Which is the type I wanted.

Zucchini

Zucchini 1:


Made into Zucchini Garlic Herb Bread, one of my very favorite zucchini recipes


Zucchini 2:


Sauteed with garlic and onions and wrapped in homemade tortillas for lunch

The Replacements

This year we let each of the boys choose special chicks. Cale has been begging for a crested chicken for the longest time, so he chose a polish. We got 2- a buff and a white polish. One for Rylan and one for Cale. They are both yellow as chicks so we don't know who's who yet.

Bu they are pretty cute with the big pompadours on their heads. And names? So far I think they are named Fluffington Hat and Pearl.

We got a couple black Australorp chicks. One is named Shadow....after Shadow...


We are trying new types in general this time- Speckled Sussex, Brahmas with feathered feet, Partridge Rocks, Columbian Wyandottes, Delawares....


Lakin and Cohen chose top hat chicks too. Lakin's is a Mottled Houdan

It doesn't have quite as much fluff on it's head....but it does have this:

An extra toe! Her name is Black Hat.

And this...

Is Cohen's Crevecoeur- Francine.

Growing Green

The garden is starting to pick up, with warm days and lots of rain this spring, the peas and strawberries are growing strong.

Our strawberry bed is in a slow year, the heat (and the weeds) last year made them a little weaker. Last Mother's Day I picked nearly 3 basket-fulls...this year I got about half a basket:

Tomatoes are starting to take off....this is my main tomato bed. About 20 plants. Over behind the slide you can see in the background of this picture I have about 20 more.


Peas are growing tall. 5ft in some spots. The I have 2 8ft rows and at some points the boys have to crawl through the jungle of vines to get to the pods they want.


So far none have made it into the house...not many strawberries have either. We all like to snack when we are in the back yard.


Even the littlest gets in on the pea-stealing

The No-Work Garden

This was one of my sweet potato plants- back in June when they were first planted. I planted about 18 plants I think. They are back in the fenced yard with the dogs and chickens so I put up a little fence made of wood posts and netting to keep them out until they were big enough to fend for themselves. Then I sort of forgot about them.

This is my sweet potato garden today:

nice, huh?

If you look really closely you can see the plants....but mostly it's weeds. The fence fell long ago. The dogs and chickens have rolled and dug and played in it. The plants really didn't get very big. But we left them, hoping that more was going on under the soil. Yesterday, in a break in the 2 day rain we've had, Cale was poking around and saw a "huge" one poking out of the ground and he began to work on getting it out.

That one turned into about 6 pretty good sized ones. The 'huge' one he saw was actually really big. Bigger than any we've gotten at the store at least.

We had sweet potato biscuits for dinner, which we all love and hadn't had in a really long time.

Animals #39 and 40

Just in case I didn't have enough to take care of around here...


These 2 arrived here at their new home yesterday evening. They are Saanen goats, both females, and are a few months old. They haven't been around people too much so they are a bit skiddish, but we spent a good amount of time with them this afternoon and they are coming around.

I've wanted goats for a couple years now. I wanted ones to milk but wasn't sure when the best time to take on that responsibility would be. But over the past couple years my flower garden, as well as a spot in the front yard, has been taken over. With poison ivy.

All summer Paul wanted to spray it but I wouldn't let him go near it with chemicals. It was too close to my vegetable garden...and well, I just don't like chemicals. He did try a vinegar and salt mixture which did kill back some of it, but wasn't terribly effective. Paul can't go near poison ivy without breaking out terribly. I've pulled it bare handed before, but I assume one of these days I will get it....

My suggestion to cure the poison ivy problem? Goats.


So meet Bertie....

She's the more shy around people of the 2. Loves to eat. Seems to be the protector by the way she stomps and lowers her horns at the dogs when they get too close to the fence.

And Bella

She seems to be warming up a little quicker than Bertie. She'll come up and sniff, and occasionally let you pet her nose, when you stretch your hand out to her. She even started to cry and call when we went to leave the yard.

According to the farmer they both come from good milk lines, so maybe in a year or 2, we might attempt to breed them and use them for milk as well as weed eaters.

Garden2010

The growing season is here, the garden is mostly planted. We've planted a few new things this year- garlic, kohlrabi, odd melon and cucumber varieties. And some that are tried and true.


For the first time since we began growing them we are having trouble with the peas. They went in about a month late due to too much rain and really cold temps making the ground unworkable. Then it got really hot for a little while....peas don't like 80+ temps. But the few that did germinate seem to be doing okay now.


Our strawberries are coming in good....this is the first producing year for this bed and it looks to be a good one.

We got the first one yesterday and 2 more today...

But most are small and green still

I've upped my tomatoes again this year since my 25 plants from last year provided us with sauce through December and ketchup through February. I planted 42 plants this year.


One of our blueberry bushes.

And our little Meyer Lemon Tree. It'll move inside in the winter and should produce within a year.

We've also got cucumbers, carrots, radishes, spinach, broccoli, cabbage, corn, okra, red and hot peppers....and more to come as the weather gets warmer.

And the bird's nest in the bucket in the shed....this year I discovered it early and the mom is still in place. So there should be no tragedy this year.

Growing Season 2009-Wrap up

Last night we had the first frost. This afternoon the boys and I spent the afternoon pulling wilted plants and weeds out of the garden. I added up our final totals for the season

2009 total:


* 584.09 lbs *


That includes....
231.85 lbs of tomatoes
78.0 lbs of sweet potatoes
57.77 lbs or 101 cucumbers

30.99 lbs or 148 green peppers
29.4 lbs or 35 ears of corn
21.7 or 12 butternut squashes
24.0 lbs of strawberries

43.85 lbs or 21 cantaloupes
27.4 lbs of peas
and more....


We canned tomatoes,ketchup, salsa, jellies and pickles. I have a freezer full of tomato sauce, green beans, and green peppers. You would think my pantry/freezer is full, but it isn't really. We ate a lot as we got it and we have eaten some since we put it away. I can already see where we will have to increase if I want to store enough to actually make it to or near the following season.

Seed Tape

This morning I made seed tape for the carrot and onion seeds. I've never made them before but always look at them in the seed catalogs and think that it might make planting the smaller seeds a little easier, with less thinning later.

I used a 'recipe' from an older gardening book. Basically you dissolve 1 T of cornstarch in 1 cup cold water and stir and cook over medium heat until it boils and turns translucent and gel-like. Let the mixture cool to room temperature.

While it's cooling, take a length of paper towels....4-5 still connected and cut into 1 in strips. When the gel is cool place it into a plastic bag and do one of 2 things:

1. If the seeds are bigger, cut a tip of the bag and place dots along the towels at the desired spacing. Place one seed per dot and let dry.

2. If they are small seed, place about 1/4 tsp of seeds per 1 tsp of gel into the bag and mix. Squeeze out one seed at at time at the desired spacing.

I tried mixing with the first batch of carrot seeds and it was hard to get just one out, so I tried the dots with the onions and remaing carrots and found it much easier. The book said one they were dry you could roll them up and save them until you are ready to use them, but we used our today.

The peas are in. The carrots are in. The onion (seeds) are in. The lettuce is in. And a few radishes too. Now it can rain again.