(blogger is still not dating my posts right: today is june 26, 2007)
i've decided i will be lazy in this post and not capitalize. the garden is growing, but pretty slowly. The pole beans have just started to climb and the roma tomato bush is loaded. i get about a handful of strawberries every few days, but i'm sharing them with something who lives near my garden... haven't figured out just who that might be yet, though. i've started cutting greenery growing in the vicinity to mulch my ground with, but it's going to take me a little while to get all of it covered heavy enough to discourage the grasses and weeds from growing. i don't know the name of the weed i'm cutting, but it has a strong green smell, has no flowers and doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that will cause a problem by rooting wherever i lay it. right now my sweet potatoe row is covered with it, and it seems to be a good camoflouage because the first few that i didn't cover got eaten and the rest that were covered were left undisturbed. i've been using my little hand sickle to cut the weeds and i love that tool! i grab a handful and cut it off at the ground. works great.



i guess i'll show a picture of me. this might be the only time you'll get to see a picture of me, as i don't take them that often and do not feel very photogenic, lol.

Look what I found in my garden Sunday! I've been searching since we moved here and had all but given up on the notion of finding arrowheads on our place, and then this one popped up while putting in some okra transplants.

Last week's market was not as lucrative as the first one, but I did get to talk to some of the old-timers who know a lot about ginseng. Hopefully this weekend will be a good one for sales.

Today is 6-9-07 (in case Blogger is still not dating my posts right). It was a great first Kingston Farmer's Market today! We had 4 vendors, plus Wendy at the market info table and we all sold most of what we brought. I sold out in 2 hours of my ginseng seedlings, so i think i have hit on a good market item for now. We'll see what happens over the average. None of us but Charlie had produce, as our gardens are still trying to get going. The late freeze in April hurt most of us in that way. But still, for a town population of 400 or so, we did real good for our first market :)

My booth was shameful with last minute thrown together signage, but by next weekend i hope to have some decent signs and information to give out with the plants.

At my "real" job, my new instrument is kicking butt! I cannot use the data from it yet because i'm not qualified by the state of Arkansas on it yet, but I ran all the work that would normally take me a week with my furnace- in ONE HOUR. That just blows my mind, lol.

6-4-07

whoo-hooo! i found my packets of prescott fond blanc AND the french charentais melon seeds! i'm not sure what the difference between these two are, as i was under the impression that the prescott was a charentais melon, but i've started seeds of both and hopefully i will get to find the answer to that question sometime late this summer :)

over the weekend i did get a lot done. saturday morning was spent at the doctor's office waiting room, waiting to get my son worked in for a poison ivy shot. poor thing had a severe case of poison ivy rash and it was getting worse not better and by saturday morning he was ready for a shot. that's when you know a kid has reached his tolerance of misery - when a shot is considered a GOOD thing, lol. he has learned how to work the tiller and last weekend he tilled a few rows up to plant his corn and beans. lots of roots kept getting stuck in the tines and he kept pulling them out. apparently, the roots were poison ivy :( but he got a good garden in before the rash set in, and he thinks it was worth it. he is 10 years old and the doctor was pleased to hear about his interest in gardening. my oldest son likes to garden, too, but he only plants for the deer these days. i hope one day he'll get back to growing food for people.

so i didn't get much garden work done on saturday. on sunday morning as soon as i got out of bed and had coffee, i went up the mountain to look for some goldenseal roots for a friend. now, this is not the right time of year for harvesting roots, but if a person needs a certain herb for a certain need and you have to have it then, then any time of year will do. sometimes it's better than not getting it at all. it's a really hard hike to the goldenseal, about 300' straight up behind the house, and then it's all level to the west side using the logging road. once i make it to the water tank, it's real nice up there, but i sure wish i could hike it without getting winded and sore. i guess i need to do it more often, don't I? it was cool and breezy, and i always love being up there. i did get full of ticks, though.

after the hike i came back down and got to work on my garden. lots of seeds to start (yeah! melons!) and another trellis to make. this time i recruited my oldest son to cut the saplings for me, so building this trellis went a lot quicker than the bean trellis. my daughter doesn't like to hang out in the garden much, but she does like to ride her horse. i might have to put those two to work in the garden...she can get her horse to run errands or something - i'm always having to send one of the kids to the house for water or a hat.

it's really May 29, 2007 - blogger is STILL not dating right! This is looking west over the garden by the house. Eventually I want to have the whole hillside there terraced. It's pretty rough right now, but I can see there's promise of a beautiful "ozark tuscany", lol. You can't see the plants in the picture good, but there's tomatoes on the top row, and bell peppers, and on the second row is more peppers and some squash, and my favorite is the Prescott Fond Blanc melon. I had a whole pack of pretty old seeds and only managed to get one to sprout - so hopefully I can save some seeds from this melon and have some more next year. I hope it lives up to its reputation of being so fragrant and sweet that it stops motorists in france who smell it in the fields as they pass on the highway!

Here's our upper garden. The picture makes the trellis look much smaller than it really is, but it's high enough that i can walk under. Obviously, I didn't get my fence made, or even started, but I DID get the bean trellis done! there are strawberries in the foreground and yellow onions in the two rows before the beans. the beans are there, you just can't see them, lol. they're barely breaking out of the ground right now. in the foreground that you can't see is another row with a paste tomatoe, yellow squash, and more strawberries.

Today I found two overgrown Cherokee Purple tomato plants at the nursery near where I work and got them for half price. One even has tomatoes on it already.

5-23-07 (blogger still not dating right)
This weekend I am going to try and begin a fence around my front garden plot. Lets' hope this project turns out better than previous fencing projects! I'm off work Monday, so maybe I'll have a little time to actually get it started. The idea is to make a rustic stick fence. NOT rustic like my other one, which actually elicits laughter from some folks, but rustic in an attractive sense. We'll see. I fought the other one trying to make it look like my imagination wanted it to look, but it just wouldn't work. I have a new idea to try this time.

5-22-07 (Blogger isn't updating the dates properly)

Last weekend was very good gardening weather. I have almost everything planted that I had started, except for a few things i started as seeds over the weekend. It's really almost too late to start seeds, but I figured I'd try anyway. If they don't produce in time, well too bad. But if they do, then so much the better! Here's what all I have in the garden this year:

Tomatoes (beefstake, mortgage lifter, roma, mr. stripey, cherry, and some unknown variety of seeds that i had saved from last year)
Celery (leaf and stalk types)
Bell Peppers (yellow, red, orange, purple and green)
yellow squash
zucchini
snap beans (bush and pole)
sunflowers
okra (texas longhorn)
melons (one lonely little prescott fond blanc seedling, and seeds started for iroquois cantelope)
strawberries (everbearing, kent, and sparkle varieties)
yellow onions
asparagus (first year, no harvest)
sweet basil

If most of these do well, I should have lots of fresh food to eat and sell this year at market.

ha, well, i've almost let another 1/2 month go by without a post. but i just don't have a whole lot to talk about these days i guess!

Oh my goodness, how could a whole month have passed without even one entry?!! Well, I've been busy. My garden is finally growing and my little horse is growing, too. Here's a picture from the weekend from my son, Zack's, game camera. This was one of 3 bears caught on camera this weekend, raiding his deer corn feeder. I hope they stay up there on the mountain and don't start coming down to the house!

I've put our household on a budge - every dollar has a budget department. So, I took the kids grocery shopping with me the other day. I told them about the budget and informed them that we only had $100 to spend for a week's supply of groceries. They were also told that we were not going to buy anything processed or prepared, all of it had to be ingredients for meals. My optimism at the success of this experiment was low, I am sad to say. We are accustomed to eating lots of frozen or boxed foods - but that is changing. I am so proud to admit that the kids did great - the ticket came in at $66 and we've enjoyed a delicious home-cooked meal each evening so far this week!! The first night was roast pork and Tuesday night Gabrielle cooked garlic chicken and tortalini (that doesn't looked spelled right, i know). Not sure what we're having tonight though, might be just egg sandwiches if i get home too late from work. When the garden starts producing, we'll have even more good food for the table.

it was 30*F again this morning here. i'm starting all of my seeds over again. the peaches and pears won't make this year i'm sure and the tomatoes i had set out are mush. it's going to be a late garden, that's for sure. oh, and the strawberries probably won't make either- frost got the flowers last week and again this morning :(

i went to get my little horse to bring him home yesterday. comanche is the shyest horse in the bunch. almost took a rodeo to catch him yesterday, had to make gary and kids all leave because they were making matters worse and it was making me irritated, too. after they left i got the halter on him halfway, but it was enough to catch him. it was hard because the other two fillies and the pregnant mare wouldn't leave us alone and i couldn't get him separated. once caught he was VERY well behaved, leads wonderfully. had to slow him down a few times because i like him to walk either right beside or right behind but not in front. i can't wait to work more with him, he learns quickly and without much effort :) i was really impressed with how trusting he is, like how he went through the water and past the big scarey things, even though he was afraid, he did it for me without a lot of prompting. gosh, i love that horse already. but he looks TERRIBLE - very wooly and skinny. lots of work to do there ;)

we put the biddies outside last night for the first time. it was a little chilly, but they were in a doghouse stuffed with hay inside the root cellar with the other chickens. for now, our chickens are roosting in the old root cellar. haha, one day i will put a new roof on it (right now there is only a few sheets of tin to keep the rain off the roosting chickens) and install a real gravel floor and ferrocement roof with air drainage. then i will use it like a root cellar is SUPPOSED to be used, to store fruit and veggies from the garden - NOT as a chicken house!

I wonder when Spring will return? Or will we just go straight into summer when all this nasty cold weather is done? My tomatoes and bell peppers are going to be soooo late this year. The only thing doing well in my garden are the new strawberries I put in last month and the turnips, lettuce, radishes, and spinach. The arugula seems to be doing okay, too. It was sleeting this afternoon, though, so no telling how it will all look in the morning!

I need to put my biddies outside, they're getting too big for their box and think they need to roost on the edge of it now, like big grownup chickens. The problem is, they put the tail end out over the outside of the box!

The first time I tried to Publish that last post, it didn't - but the error message was different, so I tried again and voila'! It worked! It's been so frustrating to type in a nice long post and then not be able to publish it, so I'd lost some of the enthusiasm. I'll try to be better at it now :)

The weather has really set back my garden. Saturday night it was 17 when I checked at one point. I think the strawberries are okay, but I'm not sure yet about the peaches. It will take a few days of normal temps to see what's what.

I haven't posted much here lately because every time I try, something is wrong with blogger and it won't let me. It just got to be too frustrating. I hope this time it goes smoothly, since I cleared all my records before beginning. We'll see. If it works, I'll try to post more regularly in the future.

This morning I heard the sure sound of spring: whipoorwill calls! When we first moved here I hated those birds because they would keep me up all night long with that incessant noise they make. But after the absence of their calls for the past several months, I find that I am happy to hear them return. I'm not sure if they actually went anywhere, but they quit making noise for a while at least.

We're running a little slow right now at work (which is unusual) so I am taking the opportunity to work on some personal projects. My co-worker and I have brought in our garden soil and our drinking water. I have two springs that we use for our water source, so I brought in samples of both of those. It's interesting to see the results from our own soils and waters, after analyzing so many other people and business's samples. It's something we like to do at least once a year. This year, both my water and my soil are looking better.

The cabinet maker is here installing formica right now for my new ICP room, and the fumes are about to render me senseless - I don't know how the guy can stay in that room with the door closed! If the fumes are so strong out here, imagine how strong they must be in that small 500 sq.ft. room!

I've been trying to post and keep trying, but I kept getting an error and my post wouldn't get posted! Finally today I found out why - you have to clear your computer's cache and cookies every so often. That did the trick apparently and now I'm back to being able to post.

Spring is really in full swing here now. The redbuds are open, the forsythia is still strong, and the dogwoods are just beginning to unfurl their flowers. I planted out some strawberries over the weekend and I am so looking forward to tasting some of the goodness from that garden this year. I should get some black raspberries and hopefully my peaches and pears will also make fruit this year. Tomatoes and bell peppers are a staple in my garden, but it's a little early yet for that. I have started seeds anyway, though, and put out two tomatoe plants that I got from Wal-Mart the other day. I would have bought the plants from our local nursery, Richlands, but she didn't have any. So from her I bought cauliflower and broccoli, lettuce and spinach, and a few herbs. Oh, and I started some melon seeds: Prescott Fond Blanc and Charentais - both new varieties to my garden and I can't wait to taste them! As you can tell, I really love fruit. But I also love things like glazed turnips and white gravy with biscuits with eggs, so I'm also pulling for the turnips to make good :)

Comanche is losing his winter fur and now his black is really looking nice. I hate it when they have the old winter hair and black isn't really black anymore, but a copper-black. He was gelded last weekend, so I'm keeping him at Frank's corral down at the mule farm until he's healed enough to bring home. I hope he and snippy become good buddies and that neither one tries to hurt the other. I think snippy might be getting lonely enough to be grateful for a buddy now. Since Spanky first died, he hasn't acted too lonely. I have been surprised.

whew! i've been sick lately with whatever it was that the kids both caught a couple weeks ago. it's a pretty bad upper respiratory/sinus infection sort of thing. i've been taking a fresh goldenseal tincture and that seems to be doing a good job on it, though. the kids both have been taking antibiotics, but by the time i could actually get in to SEE a doctor, i was feeling much better already. so i'm glad i didn't waste my time or my money.

it is really looking like springtime around here now. the forsythia is in full bloom everywhere (everywhere but my house, since i don't have any). the redbuds are just beginning to bud out, the spicebush is blooming, the hyacinths are blooming - don't know when they started, i just noticed them today, but they look like they've been in for at least a few days now. the tulips are not blooming yet, but they're growing.

something spooked snippy bad today. he came running at full gallop to the house from across the creek and kept on running all the way down to the gate, which is close to 1/2 mile from where he started, ran through the gate (which was open because we had just come through and i was getting ready to go back down to visit with comanche) and kept running til he got to the Felkin's creek bridge. he stopped there because all the mares in the pasture came running toward him to see what the heck was going on. i have never seen a horse spooked that bad, so i am thinking that maybe the mountain lion or a bear came out of the woods over there by where he was grazing, intending to see about digging on spanky's grave maybe. something keeps trying to dig him up and gary keeps having to go cover him up more every day. why we didn't think of it earlier, i don't know, but zack thought of it today - he put the game camera over there tonight so we can see what is trying to dig him up. i hope it's not my own dogs :(

Today I rode Snippy! I haven't saddled up a horse and ridden in a long time, even though we've been having horses for years now. All of my life I wanted a horse and while I was a kid, my parents would never get one. When my own daughter started wanting one, I decided to get one, but by that time I was so busy with work that I never had time to ride. I still love horses though, and decided I would start riding again now, especially since I'm getting a new yearling next week. Snippy needs a companion since we lost Spanky. He's very lonely and it is not good to try and keep only one horse. Comanche is a black and white paint, half Missouri Foxtrotter and half Spotted Saddle Horse. I've known him since he was born and hoped he could be mine. I enjoyed riding so much today. It makes me sad that I'm so much older now and not nearly as fit as I used to be, but maybe if I ride a little each day or a little at least each week, soon I will be in shape enough to ride better and longer. I'm posting a picture of Comanche so you can see the new baby.

For some reason, blogger is filing this post out of order. It should be listed AFTER the post about Comanche, which is above this one in my browswer.

I got a lot of gardening done over the weekend. Planted peas, carrots, mustard greens, turnips and radishes. In the cold frame I started tomatoes, bell peppers, echinacea, and some other things, but I forgot what all. Monday, the kids were both sick so I kept them out of school and brought them to the doctor, but before that we worked in the garden some more. Gabrielle transplanted 3 raspberry canes that had rooted, over to the trellis I had waiting on them. I love it when the kids help me in the garden, it makes me feel like everything will always be alright. It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't know what I mean, so if you've experienced this feeling and have a better explanation for it, let me know, haha.