I’m working on posting more frequently and in some sort of scheduled fashion. I’m also considering offering items for sale.

I have of course been told by countless people that I can’t do that! You have to sell on Amazon or Ebay I am told, I think most people who can not figure out how to do something on thier own often discourage others from trying.

Perhaps they think they are trying to be helpful or maybe they are jealous that someone else would dare try what they themselves will or perhaps can not. I’m not sure.

That being said, I was working on what I felt was a great blog post, I had worked on it for the better part of a week, editing, adding to and spell checking. I however wanted to add one more thing and somehow the entire post was lost, it wasn’t saved like I had thought and of course there was no back up!

Such is life and I learned a lesson I should have already known. Striving for perfection is all good and well but sometimes getting something done can be more important. I’m sure my grammatical prowess would drive an English teacher to drink but I am working on it and hope my followers, both current and future will bear with me as I take this venture more seriously and learn as I go.

I thank you for taking the time to read my blog and hope you find success and happiness in all your ventures!

Many will say saving seeds isn’t a great idea or that whatever you’re saving seeds from has to be over ripe or dried out.

I haven’t found either of these statements to be true, I’ll go on record and say I’m not an expert though! I once, just for grins and giggles took a couple of seeds from a sweet pepper I was cutting up for the youngest and stuck them in with a house plant.

I was surprised they all germinated. Even better still they went on to produce fruit that tasted exactly like the store bought peppers did. I’ve been saving seeds off and on for most of my life, I’ve had many successes and probably nearly as many failures.

I’m stepping up my game this year though. While these are not my first seed packets, I think I made one last year, these are the start of a far more serious collection to come.

From seeds I saved for this year I have a decent cantaloupe patch growing and a good sized garlic patch from store bought bulbs as well. The garlic needs dug up and stored so I can seperate and replant this fall.

These are all small things but they are leading into more sustainability for us, less food we will need to buy, more money freed up to invest into more sustainability and food security for our family.

My artwork and seed packet design could use improving but they will do for now and since I’m not trying to sell them I think they are ok.

I will however have my plant dealers license for next year and a mess of plants for sale. That was my goal for this year but mice got into my seedlings and had quite the feast at my expense.

I am also trying to start some fruit trees from seed, I have read it is a waste of time and shouldn’t be bothered with but I have also read where people were quite happy with fruits from their efforts at seed starting

I figure worst case scenario is I’ll have root stock to graft onto. Assuming I can get them to live.

Best of luck and happy growing!

  Seems a daunting task at best and one I find I desperately need to figure out and soon. Like many others I now find myself living from paycheck to paycheck. It’s frustrating at best!

  I had planned on selling starter plants for gardeners this Spring but that fell through when mice found my trays of seedlings and proceeded to have a feast. Everything was doing so well too. I figured I’d add around 2K to my income before that happened.

  I was able to salvage some tomato plants and the peppers are still trying to recuperate. Many didn’t make it. I traded six of the tomato plants and a Redbud sapling for other plants and felt like I got a good deal, so long as the blackberry plant survives into next Spring I’ll be ecstatic!

  That’s possible future nutrition but not income, at least not until it grows to the point I can sell berries or starts from it. While producing as much of your own food as is possible is a great idea, I feel it’s important to boost income as well.

  Unless your completely off grid you’ll need income and even off grid you need some unless your lucky enough to not have to pay property taxes.

  I was doing some crypto mining for awhile but with the rising cost of electricity and the excess heat it just got to the point it no longer makes sense from a financial standpoint. If I wasn’t raising kids I might see it differently.  I do plan on firing the mines back up full time when Winter hits, my heater kicked on all of three times. So it offset my gas use nearly 100%.

    I’m currently working on figuring out things to make and sell. I have some paper plant starter pots made from waste paper and trying to figure out coasters as well but have a ways to go before I’ll offer any for sale. Sadly shipping is so high it will likely make it impractical to sell the starter pots online.

  I 3D printed to mold, it’s a scaled down version of one I found on Thingiverse and I’ll give the original maker credit when I find it again.

  I’m also starting to make jerky again though I’ll need a better prep area before I start offering it for sale. There’s nothing wrong with where or how I’m doing it but if I remember correctly you need a dedicated area for prep that can pass state inspection. As it is now, space is extremely limited and so my prep area is also used for many other things.

Best of luck to you in your self sufficient ventures!

  Got a small strawberry patch put it, planted 100 onion sets. Moved some garlic that wasn’t doing so well where I’d planted it. Also started another batch of cucumbers fermenting and started my first batch of jalapenos.

  Went and picked up my antique wheel hoe, to be honest I hadn’t touched it in quite some time but I find my rows look a bit neater when I do. Most of my planting is a bit haphazard.  I know what I’m doing I just don’t get overly carried away with presentation and sometimes do things that would infuriate a purest.

  If I start a market garden that may need to change but for now it works for me and that’s good enough.

  I put down a fairly thick piece of cardboard  and planted the strawberries in holes I’d cut and covered the bed up with rose stems that were ran through a chipper. I covered the garlic with the same material and they are growing very well. Hoping this helps with berry production as well.

  I’m happy to say the roses are making a fantastic recover, I hated to mow them down like I did but they were broken down in a major blizzard and were not recovering very well after two years or longer.

  There has been a lot going on here, I just haven’t been documenting on here very well. I’ve gotten into making our own flour and will start planting wheat this Fall and have started experimenting with bean flours etc. I imagine I will push the limits on what flour can be made of. I’ve started zucchini for that very reason. The fermentation is going well so far and the pickles are a huge hit with the youngest and I like them as well.

  I ordered a crinkle cut knife for cutting the carrots I plan on fermentating and will likely use it for waffle fries as well as other things.

I hope your all doing well and striving towards your homestead goals!

As fate would have it wood handles on yard/garden tools can degrade fairly quickly if left out or not properly maintained.

I kind of hate to admit it but this is the handle on one of my shovels. This week I’m reworking all my wooden handles getting them ready for the upcoming gardening season.

Handle on flat shovel, or square whichever you prefer to call it. It’s been a good shovel and I feel bad that I didn’t catch it before it got this bad, however I will stop it from getting worse.

First I’ll fill all the cracks in with a high strength wood filler, sand down and give it several coats of boild lindseed oil.

Step one is done see picture below. I ended up just rubbing it in to the cracks with my index finger. You could use a flexable putty knife if you want but the putty washes right off your hand, though you risk getting a splinter so choose wisely. The boys cat photo bombed the shovel.

After it dries for a day I’ll start sanding it down, I don’t want to get too carried away as I’m just looking to smooth it out, not remove much if any wood.

Decided to sand just enough to make the wood smooth and knock the grey off.

Now to seal with boiled lindseed oil. It took more time and work than I thought it would but I put the putty on thicker than I thought. Looking back a putty kniffe would have been the better way to go. Live and learn.

The blade need a little tlc as well, the edge is pretty beat up. I’ll wire brush the rust off, straight up the edge and sharpen and it should be good to gp for another 20 years or so.

I’ll post a picture sometime after it’s all cleaned up. I hope this helps someone.

Been awhile since the last post, life’s been a little hectic to say the least. Seems no matter how well I plan there’s always some reason why I can’t get something done as quickly or in the fashion I intended.

With three littles underfoot time is hardly easy to come by it seems but I/we press on. I had intended to start a lot of plants to sale for extra money, however mice got into my seedlings and decimated half of my plants.

That being said I have probably started more than I need and still have a great number of seeds left to plant. I’ve decided every season to try at least three different new varieties and or types of plants to see what works best and what we like eating or can sell.

The boys love mac and cheese and ate a lot of the individule servings this winter, I kept the empty containers thinking they might come in handy for growing plants.

My plan was to make soil blocks but for reasons I haven’t figured out just yet my soil isn’t holding together like it should but that’s a subject for another post.

Here are the cantaloupe seedlings I have in some mac and cheese cups now, so far so good.

For drainage I put a hole on the side instead of the bottoms, my thinking is that some water will be retained in the soil without drowning plants. It’s an experiment for me so we will see how it goes. This particular cup is from potatos but the concept is the same.

Not sure if any of my  posts helps anyone else or not but but if they do please feel free to like, share and comment.

  I recently decided to buy a small, fairly inexpensive green house. It’s 12’X6.6’X6.6. I believe this will be good enough for a start and not a major investment in something that will be left behind in the event I find a larger property. Need to finish putting it together. The picture is what it should look like when finished.

I figure this will help with ever soaring food costs, I also plan on trying to grow plants to sell. I planted 84 gogi berry seeds, around 100 or so wild strawberry seed and a small mixed herb seed planter.

I set up a small indoor seed starting station as well, it will hold 576 seedlings and will be filled in within the next week or two. I need to get one more of the starter cells to finish filling the shelves.

I’m also making soil blocks for planting in. I’ve found the soil blockers I’m interested in are fairly expensive if your not making money from them. My solution was to 3D print some. If my sales go as hoped I’ll buy some commercially made soil blockers and expand the green house a bit. I like the bigger size, still working out the best soil mixture.

Happy gardening!

  I’ve recently started working on growing sprouts and found I’m also interested in micro greens as well.

  I’m always looking for new things to eat and ways to grow them. Growing sprouts to add into salads seems like a great idea to me and if I chose I can pluck a few sprouts out to to put into small pots to be put into the garden later on.

The above set up is just a clam shell type plastic container that had cupcakes in it. I started soaking my lentals in it today. I have close to ten lbs of lentals so figured I’d start with them and move onto other things as I go if I like this and have decent results. This sits on top of my dehydrator for now.

Here is a fairly quick video showing how to sprout lentals. In case anyone is wondering about how to go about it. I’m still not really making my own videos but am getting set up to do so.

https://youtu.be/Ng7m9mFxzrs

As I watched the next video I realized how easy it is to go from sprouts to micro greens. This guy gives a pretty good break down of how he grows his and gives names of places to source bulk seed from. You could also put your sprouts in a try and cover with a little soil and have micro greens from the sprouts.

https://youtu.be/dtvuMNVLISo

Both of these ideas could help make sure you have enough interesting food to help out if your food budget is a little tight or just keep your salads interesting.

May your gardening efforts bring you good health and happiness.

N/A

  I’ve always hated thinning out plants in the garden. I always wondered if I’m plucking out the right seedling or if it could have ended up being the better plant.

  My solution, seed tapes. I looked into buying some once and found I didn’t really like the price so much. It was some time back and I remember it being quite a bit more expensive and had fewer seeds.

  So I decided to make my own, thinking most paper is biodegradable I went a different route than they took in the videos I’ve watched, and as is ture with most everything. There are as many ways of doing a thing there are people doing it.

  This is 1/4″ wide strips that come out of my paper shredder. My plan is glue how ever many strips together to get to the desired length. I will then glue my seeds onto the strip and after it dries out I will roll them up. Sadly the youngest was having some fun and ran some plastic items through it. After I’m done whatever good paper that is left over will go into the compost.

  I will of course write on the back side what seed I’ve used so as to avoid any confusion later on. I honestly do not see any reason why this will not work. My first go around was a diaster. We were in a drought and grasshoppers over ran everything that year, it was so dry they were eating the bark off of younger trees.

  I have no affiliation with the video below but thought I would share one in case anyone wanted a visual aid and or hear someone explain the process. For what it’s worth I’m using white Elmers school glue.

https://youtu.be/BPSbTV0BTbs

Happy gardening!  😀

I may be starting a little early but when it’s time to plant the garden I want to have decent sized plants to put out. And I have lots of new plants to try this year.

Along with a regular garden I am working on building up a food forest, which is taking me longer than expected. In part because I’m still learning and gathering information and partly because of drought and insects.

I’ve done a lot of work to lessen the issue with insects and have plans to lessen the affects of being in a semi desert location.

For years I’ve used several methods of seed sprouting my seeds. The one I’ve just replaced with another that I think will be better was to place a damp paper towel in a zip lock bag.

Now I’m using a Rubbermaid container. I placed my paper towels on the lid and then placed the clear bottom over the top. I think this will be better in the long run.

I probably have a few too many seeds seeing as how I don’t know if these were from a hybrid pepper or not. I would like to sale plants but think with these I’ll settle for trying to sale the peppers themselves, assuming I get good peppers.

The last store bought peppers I started seeds from were true to the pepper they came from, I’m hoping these will be as well.

Where seed planting is concerned I have some ideas on that as well and will share that in another post as I get things set up and ready to go.

If you have any thoughts or ideas on planting or starting seeds. Things that work well for you, please feel free to comment. I’m all about sharing thoughts, knowledge and ideas. Hope you have a great week!