One week after St. Paddy's Day

I can't believe it's been a week since last post already. Spring is still in the air here it's just been cooler and the rain has finally quit after two days. But enough of this New York weather, you're probably wanting to know about the pictures.

The picture with the two plants is the salad blend mix. Can you guess which one I put in the mini green house I made last week? Yes the mini green house plants grew taller and faster than the one out of the green house. I had sprouts on the green house one a day before the other.

The other plant shown is the Cherry Tomatoes also started in the mini green house. Wifey was so impressed with the mini green house she put saran wrap on her plants. I guess she thought of a quicker and easier way to create a mini green house!

Three days ago we finally uncovered the strawberry plants. Looks like the moles got into a few of them but the rest seem good and have begun rejuvenating.

Over the weekend we started shoveling dirt. We have large piles of dirt to fill in the lower landscape where we want to put our garden. Our garden will not be the conventional kind. The garbage that was left in the regular dirt of our lawn is a good deterrent. We are still pulling up insulation and buckets and who knows what else. I've included pictures of the area we are filling in. Not sure if you can really tell how much we've done through the picture. Anyway keep posted because we've got a lot more to do over the next several months. Somehow we're going to use the stumps and pushed over tree and branches in this garden. If we can bury it with dirt that is good but some will have to be used for decoration (maybe plant in the stumps).

Our garden plans: Have you ever heard of the Square Foot Garden? We have a book out of the library right now on how to do this. We plan on using cement blocks about 8 inches tall to make a raised Square Foot Garden. We'll have pictures every step of the way and explain our process too. We're kind of excited to give this a try. But before we can do that we must keep shoveling dirt and raising the land. So I'm going to get back out doors while the sun is out and get this done. Until next time...

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I love the color green. Today the sun is shinning, it's over 60 degrees outside and the snow is almost gone. It's hard to believe this is the snow belt of central NY. I hope the weather stays this way but I am leery as it doesn't seem right that it isn't snowing in March.

Anyway, back to green. On Sunday (3 days ago) wifey planted some herbs and I set them out in this beautiful weather today. Once outside I decided I should start some plants as well and opened up cherry tomatoes, beef steak tomatoes and a salad mix blend.

I even made a crazy little green house out of some boards and a plastic garbage bag. It's my little experiment with a greenhouse. I nailed 3 boards together and left the ends open. I placed 3 planters inside with the garbage bag covering it. The open end of the plastic I folded underneath the planter so I can pull the planters out to water them. I'll keep you informed along the way as to whether they grow better or not.

Ah the smell of green is in the air. First thing this morning I won 20 swagbucks for a search. Also the amazon cards were given out today on swagbucks and I got another $25 worth of gift cards. If you're not a member, join for free by clicking here and start earning your rewards today.

And one more bit of green. The grass is beginning to become green and we had our first deer in the yard eating as much of it as she could! The cat and I watched it munching down some lunch about 3pm while other deer wandered just inside the woods. This is the first deer in the yard since we moved in about 7 months ago. So far we've had a fox, moles, deer and birds including turkeys! Oh and add to that a neighbors cat that comes over on the deck and watches our cat through the sliding glass doors. What an interesting mixture of wildlife.

Today I put a honey bee outside, released a fly from inside the screen door and searched the swampy wetlands beside the house looking for the frogs that will soon over run the yard. No croakers yet but they may be waiting for the mosquitoes that will soon be out. I also noticed that our strawberries plants are starting to push through the layer of leaves we had covering them for the winter.

That's a wrap for today. I hope everyone had a beautiful green day.

Spring is on the way!

This is the wifey. It's sunny outside and the ice is melting. Fifty degrees in March is a heat wave in our part of the country! It will be our first spring at the new house and we are really excited about having a garden. We bought a lot of our seeds already and are trying to figure out just how we will lay it out. We plan to make a raised bed garden because the soil in our area is not the best. Last year our son planted strawberry plants and I am eager to see if they come back this summer. I believe fruit trees are also in our future.

Gardening is a great way to stretch your food budget and free up more money to buy starch and protein items. Also with all the pesticides and waxes that get put on our produce, it is nice to eat something that you know isn't filled with chemicals. Even if you live in a little apartment or trailer park where you can't dig up the yard, container gardening can give you a surprising amount of food for very little money and can be kept on your patio or by a sunny window.

We will be using some of our free pickle buckets for container friendly plants like tomatoes, radishes and lettuce/greens. I also got sunflowers because I love the seeds and they are so pretty. I can't wait to eat produce that I grow myself and am excited about how much money we will save on produce. We plan to can and freeze some of what we don't eat for storage. I also plan to make weekly donations to our local food pantry to share the wealth. Below are some articles I found on About.com for building raised beds and container gardening; hope they inspire you to get your hands dirty!

http://organicgardening.about.com/od/startinganorganicgarden/a/raisedbed.htm

http://gardening.about.com/od/vegetablepatch/a/ContainerVeggie.htm

Tsunami Warnings & Spam

Today there were tsunami warnings for Honolulu after the 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile. Luckily nothing happened. At least no tsunami hit.

But something did happen. Chaos, panic, the mad rush to leave or to stock up on supplies. I read an article today from yahoo about Scientist defending themselves for making the tsunami predictions and I agree they did the correct thing in letting people know a tsunami may hit. It is better to be prepared than have it hit you square in the face when your not expecting it.

The thing about the article that got me was people going to the store and grabbing food and water. The store had to put a limit on the number of cans of Spam that were allowed to be bought by each customer because of the "panic buying".

Maybe I should reconsider adding Spam to my food storage. It could be a real barter item if the grid goes down for any amount of time. Do you really think people like this stuff or were these people just grabbing at any canned meat they could get their hands on?

If these people had been prepared (even mentally) they could have grabbed canned beef stew, ham, tuna, potted meat, chicken and many other varieties of meat in a can. I'm probably just reading too much into this. They were probably buying all the kinds of meat available. Heck, probably anything in a can.

I just can't help but think if I lived by the Ocean or on an Island I think I would stock up on food and water and probably a life raft and life preservers. It's situations like this that have to make a person stop and think: How will I survive if? What would I do if?

I can not emphasis enough how important it is to think ahead in case something might happen. Especially if you have children. It is up to you to take care of them. We can't plan for everything but having food and water may help ease the situation.

If you're interested, read the article here.

Then go get your cans of spam before the stores put a limit on the amount of cans you can buy.