Melons and cordials

I know… way to many posts today… I’m just trying to get caught up!

I planted 37 melon plants yesterday while the moon was in Leo… there was only room for 18 in the bed I’d made and I didn’t want to throw away the other seedlings, so I planted them in a big hill of dirt we have in the back yard.  We should be flush in cantaloupe, watermelon and muskmelon come late summer!!

Oh, and right now we are overflowing in strawberries, roses, and lemon balm.  No use in letting all this yummy goodness go to waste!  So, I decided to make cordials out of all of them!  I followed Kathie’s recipe and made a quart of each.  Tomorrow I will strain them and add the sugar!  Mmmm mmmmmm!

cordials

Mother!!

We’ve been making kombucha in a continuous brewing system for a while now, but it’s in a ceramic pot, so you can’t see it unless you look in the top.  Lately, it seems like I will add some fresh tea to the batch and it will be too strong to drink within days.  It’s fermenting way too fast.  So, I finally took the scoby out to see what was going on and this is what I found:

scoby

That is the biggest, thickest hunk of scoby I’ve ever seen!!  I tried to separate a slice of it to put it back in the tea, but I couldn’t.  It had grown into one huge mass.  So, I took off a small chunk, put it back in the tea, and I’m going to put the rest in the blender and use it on the garden in my compost tea (I hope that doesn’t ruin my garden 🙂

Meet the new addition

Well folks, we finally did it!

We’d been talking about getting a new car for years, we just couldn’t find what we wanted.  There are no environmentally friendly family cars.  To have room you have to get a mini van which get horrible gas milage (compared to our 45 mpg Jetta), and to get good mileage you have to get a small car.  Plus, we did have a vegetable oil kit in our jetta so that we could run our car off of straight vege oil, which was free from the right sources.  (But, we’d taken that kit out a while ago and now just run it on biodiesel.)  So, it was hard to think about going back to gas.  But, after much looking around and realizing that the jetta was just tooooo small and costing us toooo much in repairs, we decided on a Toyota Prius.  It is roomier than the Jetta, gets great gas mileage, cost less to repair, and seems like the best option out there for us right now.  So, meet the new car!  a 2010 Toyota Prius… arrived on the lot yesterday morning and we drove home in the afternoon.  Isn’t she a beauty!!  I’m going to have to get use to the fact that it is very, very quiet when it is running, especially compared to a diesel engine.  But, really, you can’t hear it at all.  It’s really nice, but you have to be extra careful when you are in parking lots, ’cause pedestrians might not hear you coming!

prius

Harvest Totals

Last month I decided to start writing down all the food we harvested from our land.  In April, I only kept track of eggs, but this month I tried to remember to measure everytime we brought something in the house.  I keep a little scale on the kitchen counter for just this.

April Harvest

  • 146 eggs

May Harvest-

  • 110 eggs (we were down because 3 of our hens were broody and not laying)
  • 5 pounds 4 ounces strawberries
  • 2 pounds shiitake mushrooms
  • 4 ounce rose petals
  • ~2 pounds of greens (this included chickweed, kale, lettuce, pea shoots, and spinach.  I’ll try to be better about separating then next month.  Sometimes we would go grab some greens for a sandwich and forget to measure.

In May, we also had 11 inches of rain!!

Feeding the garden

Quick question…

How often do you fertilize or feed your vegetables? I’ve not done anything since they’ve been planted, and everything looks great, but I imagine they would like a little food boost every now and then.  I checked on my comfrey compost tea, but it’s not ready yet…

Monster Pudding

I’ve been experimenting today… thought you’d like the recipe.  It’s really good!  It even gets ‘Kaia’s Gold Star of Approval!” (I got the original recipe from Darcey)

Monster Pudding:
4 small avocados
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/4 cup coconut oil
1 Tbsp. Cardamom powder
1/3 cup (or less) honey or other sweetener

Put all in a blender and mix up.
You can eat it like this, or if you can’t stand looking at green pudding and would like a little ‘dirt pudding‘ instead, add 1/3 cup carob or cocoa powder…
If you want to get even more creative you can also 2 drops of orange or mint essential oil.

Mmmmmmm……!!!

It’s dairy free and full of lots of good fats and oils!  And it’s really tasty!!

Yummy giggles!

Leif found his giggle tonight!!  It had us all laughing up a storm!  I’ll see if I can upload the video for you!

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I also finally finished his kimono for next winter.  It’s a pretty easy pattern, I just haven’t had a whole lot of hands free time.  I’m going to knit some pants to go with it.

leifkimono2

leifskimono

(Sorry for the horrid color, the lighting sucked!)

Oh, and the strawberries are coming in!  YAY!

strawberryharvest

Gardens a growin’!

Kaia’s flower garden:
kaiasgarden2009

Looks like we will have a nice strawberry harvest this year:
strawberries

Onions are doing well!
onions

Potatoes are up and growing strong:
potatoes

Lettuce and other greens are overwhelming us!
lettuce

Here’s a view of the front gardens from the roof
gardens2009

The plants on the roof are doing well… well, the ones that survived. Almost all of the delospermas (ice plants) didn’t survive the winter. We have large dead spots on the roof. We’ll see how things grow over the summer. Hopefully the plants that are living will fill in the gaps.
roof2009
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Kaia and I planted 45 Gladiola bulbs this spring, and Heidi created a little heart garden around them for us!
heartgarden

Chicky baby

Snowflake ended up hatching a total of 4 chicks (out of 8 original… but one was squashed, one was dropped, and two didn’t fully develop). Poor Sparkle didn’t hatch any. I waited until day 23 before I took her off the nest. I cracked open all the eggs and only one had a chick and it looked like it was only 18 or 19 days developed. I think she just didn’t keep them under her enough and they got cold. I’ve put her back in the coop but she still won’t stop sitting on anything she can. I’m not sure how to break her from being broody. I don’t want to put her back on more eggs. I think another 21 days of sitting would be too much for her. She needs a break.

Now, my Buff Orpington is sitting on 12 eggs. She went broody a week ago and I decided to put her in the other side of the broody coop once Sparkle was out. We’ll see how she does.

Here’s a pic of the 4th chick that hatched. Dad is an Ameraucana and mom is a Welsummer;
chicks6

With 3 of his ladies sitting on eggs, Fezzik the big rooster is getting a little antsy and has started picking on Poodle Noodle, our silkie rooster. He drew a little blood on his left ‘ear’. I put some blue lotion spray on it so the other chickens won’t be attracted to pecking at the red blood. It seems to have worked, but the ear may be infected. It’s puffy. I’ve put a salve on it… we’ll see how he does.

Still waiting…

The chicks are very late in hatching… normally, a chicken has a 21 day gestation. Our first chick hatched at 22 days, three more hatched at 24 days! I don’t hear any peeps coming from the other two, but they had moving chicks in them last week. Our other broody mama is due on Friday… her batch didn’t look as good. One, maybe two moving chicks out of 6 when we candled them last. (Oh, and another one of our chickens has gone broody, but we don’t have any room for her to sit. So, I’ll try to discourage her 🙂 )

The arrows are pointing to the crack in the shell where the 4th chick is starting to hatch.
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chicks4

Can’t shake the grin

I can’t wipe the smile off of my face from watching Kaia at her first lesson today. She was SOOO FLIPPIN’ CUTE!!!
here’s her high block…
tkd5
We both started classes this week! It feels good to be back in it, but class kicked my butt!!

In the garden

Things are really looking nice in the garden! The greens are growing strong, my cucumbers and summer squashes are peaking their heads up, the potatoes are up, and the new asparagus has just broke ground. Yesterday, in Virgo (a fruit sign), I planted a hops vine, put in 22 tomatoes seedlings, seeded 3 types of winter squash, 2 types of pole beans, and seeded 3 types of melons into soil blocks. With almost everything in the garden, I realized that I have nothing to feed the plants with. I can’t use anything fishy or seaweedy, ’cause Suki will dig to china trying to find the source of the smell. So, I’m going to try an herbal fertilizer. I filled a 3 gallon bucket half way with comfrey and yarrow leaves (they were slightly wet from the rain). Then I put a large rock on top of them to weigh them down, and covered the bucket. I’ll let it sit like this for 3-6 weeks. I should end up with a concentrated fluid vegetable food. I’ll water it down with 10 parts water to one part concentrate and then spray the veggies. I’ll let you know how it works. What do you use?

The only pests I’ve noticed so far are flea beetles and white flies. I’ve sprayed a little neem oil to see if that will do the trick. May have to get some diotomacious earth for the beetles. What are your preferred methods of pest control?

this is a bloom from the “pavement rose” (a rugosa type) that I picked up at the herb festival this past weekend. Isn’t she lovely? The fragrance fills the garden!!
rugosarose

Birdies at the feeder! There is one I’ve seen lately that is an iridescent midnight blue! I don’t know what it is, but it’s beautiful!
birdfeeder

We have babies!

Well, at least one that I know of. The chicks were due yesterday, but snowflake never hopped off of her nest, so I couldn’t tell if they’d hatched yet. But, just a few minutes ago, I went outside and heard some peeping. One little chick had just hatched (I believe this one is an Ameraucana and Black Australorps mix)! YAY!!! Babies!
You can see her peaking her black head out from under moms wing.
chicks1

In celebration of the upcoming hatching, Kaia and painted the broody house and the feeder. I really like the color they add to the yard!
chickenfeeder
feeder