2020

Planting the Garden – Coronavirus Day 42

This weather has been nuts. I swear, it goes along with this year. This year has been nuts. Wow! So weird, in fact I put my sweatshirt on backward this morning. Oy! But, it’s the perfect time to plant a garden since we’re all sitting at home with nothing to do. And that’s just what I did yesterday. I started the garden, planted it once, that didn’t work, so I’ve proceeded to grow seeds in the greenhouse. Update on that to come shortly. But, when the first set of seeds didn’t work, I added more soil, tilled it up a couple of times… AND… now we’re ready! Ready to plant. Except the weather isn’t cooperating.

It has rained at some point every day this week. Yesterday morning included. BUT then…

So first off…

My friend Janet talked about planting corn on her Instagram stories the other day. She mentioned an Earthway Precision Garden Seeder. I went on the hunt to do a little research and kind of fell in love. I was trying to find one locally so that I could get my corn planted… I might be itching to get my corn planted. (more…)

Homeschooling 101: Planting Seeds… Coronavirus Day 38

Once upon a time, we were in a science class in grade school. We planted beans and corn from seed and watch the germination process. Jump forward 20+ some odd years (I don’t know how many) and I decided to do that with the little. It was a time of the Coronavirus Pandemic when schools were closed for the rest of the year and we had to homeschool. And when I say homeschool, our school district wasn’t prepared for that. Eventually, they sent out daily work, that wouldn’t harm the kiddos grade, but would help it should they do it. But after we did that work, we did our own education as well. This time… science.

Since this spring we got into gardening, why not do the germinating thing, right? I had seeds waiting to be planted in the ground. Mainly corn and green beans as I attempted to start other plants in the greenhouse.

Corn prefers to be started directly in the ground. Beans on the other hand don’t mind being started indoors, but in my luck, they still do better directly in the ground. (more…)

Adding Soil/Fertilizer… Coronavirus Day 36

I gave up on the seeds in the ground. Grandma swears I should give it a little more time. And truthfully my dad always says I’m a little impatient… but they’ve been planted since March 30 and here we are April 18th (that was Saturday this all went down) and no signs of anything. The seedlings I planted were for cooler weather. Not cold… there’s a difference. But they prefer the cooler weather of April, May, and possibly June versus the summer heat of July and August.

3 weeks and nothing. So I pulled the tiller out and said screw it. Hubby started “feeling sorry” for me because I really wanted more soil from our manure pile, but we don’t have a front end loader. I wasn’t in the mood to try and bucket it as we did back in March. And truthfully he’d been wanting to rent this machine because it comes with multiple attachments including one to work on the brush in timber. (more…)

My New Greenhouse… Coronavirus Day 36

Some days I have great ideas… and other days I have ideas that make you scratch your head wondering where on earth I came up with this. Today’s project might be one of those… WHAT?!?! moments. So between the gardening and landscaping this year… I’ve really gotten into plants. I bought a lot of the flowers that I’ve used for landscaping, but the vegetables for the garden are a different story. I really wanted to grow my own plants. After garden planting #1 went awry, I decided to try the little miniature greenhouses. You know the little starter kits you buy at Home Depot (<– I used that one… not an affiliate link, just a link to what I used) or Lowes and I even found them at Dollar General.

Those starter kits are addicting. So I accidentally took over my kitchen table. Whoops. That was when I went on the hunt to see how much it would cost to make a greenhouse. There are kits you can buy but this was a DIY Greenhouse that we decided upon. This round anyway :).

My New Greenhouse

First things first… you need to decide how big it is going to be. Where you are going to put it. And buy the materials. Since I already had the trailer on from taking scrap to the scrapyard, it was the perfect time to get the materials. We decided on a 12×16. So here’s the material list: (more…)

Starting Vegetables from Seed… Coronavirus Day 35

I got a little excited back at the end of March trying to get plants in the ground. In case you wondered… none of them germinated. None of them came up. I decided to give up… although Grandma told me to give it just a little more time. But I don’t have high hopes. So I decided to go the route of starting them indoors and then transplanting them. What do I have to lose at this point? I still have time to try this method and if it doesn’t work, try planting directly in the garden again. I guess that’s one good thing about starting early.

I still haven’t given up hope on finding potato starts, but I’m not finding them either. Fingers crossed I find some… but…

Back to the day at hand…

Starting Vegetables from Seed.

  • You’ll need a good potting mix. Typically I try to use from our soil pile, but I actually bought seed starting potting mix. 
  • Seed trays that include an outer tray, inner tray, and the clear plastic dome.
  • Seeds (of course)
  • Water.
  • Optional: Seedling markers.
  • Optional: Seed Dibber or pencil. Helps measure how deep to plant the seeds.

First things first, you’ll want to put the soil into the individual trays. (more…)

The Day I Drove My Husband Nuts… Coronavirus Day 34

Honestly, why am I recording all of this? Because someday I’m going to look back and see this and remember. Truthfully, maybe I don’t want to remember some of this. This Pandemic is nuts. It sucks too. But I’m trying to make the most of it. Plus, I can’t seem to sit still. It’s not like I went a lot of places before all of this, but the thought that I can’t has me stir crazy. Stir crazy enough to go all over our place looking for scrap to haul off. Not because I want the money, but because I want the crap gone.

Once I was done with our house, I went off to my parents. In fact, the more I think about it, I might be driving my dad nuts too. (more…)

The Coronavirus Easter… Day 30

I’m pretty sure most people would agree this wasn’t the Easter we planned on for 2020. Everyone talked about the Roaring ’20s but I seriously doubt this Coronavirus is what they had in mind. Honestly, truth be told, this is probably the Easter I don’t care to remember. Not because I want to forget the true reason for this season. In fact, Jesus is what is getting us through this. Him and God. Otherwise, this would suck a lot more than it does. I love that a lot of churches were broadcasting Easter Church services online because we’re not allowed to congregate at Church right now.

But Easter with my family this year could have gone better. I seriously think I’ll just leave it at that. 

At least the Easter Bunny was able to make it through to our house. Whew!!

What made it “perfect” was the fact that the little said that she loved this day and couldn’t wait until next Easter. That right there and Jesus are the true reason for this! (more…)

The Coronavirus Haircut… Coronavirus Day 30

We’re in unchartered territory here. Heard that a lot lately? The other day I watched a video of a girl who was crying her eyes out because she couldn’t get her hair done or her nails done and she said, “This is the year of the farm wife.” I kid you not. So supposedly farmer’s wives, daughters, female farmers are ugly and don’t care about their looks. That’s what I gather from that.

When I was growing up, my mom had a job outside the farm (so did my dad… the used that to pay for the farm)… But my mom had her nails done every what is it 3-4 weeks. Whatever the time frame is. I’m not into long nails. They drive me nuts. I tried them for a while. I’m good without them. 

Anyway… my mom wore gloves on her hands when she was doing anything around the farm from working horses to driving a tractor to bucking square bales onto the trailer. So when she went to work, people figured she was a “city girl.” Nails were her thing. Nice hands were too I guess. I was a little kid, I dunno. But the point is… I’m pretty sure we all care about our looks to some extent. Whatever…

Now with this pandemic thing… (haha)… getting your hair done is kind of unheard of. I poke fun at my husband a lot. I’m mean like that. I tease him because he’s a little light in the hair on the top of his head. But by golly he can grow it everywhere else it seems. (more…)

Time to Burn it… Coronavirus Day 25

What to do when you’re “stuck inside?” Why not go out and burn leaves and sticks. Right? And only on one of the hottest days of the year so far. 87 degrees to be exact. And I started a fire. Why? Well… because I’ve been wanting this area cleaned up for over a year and no one else would do it.

I had to watch closely because just off to the right of our picture is a hay baler. I didn’t really want to catch that on fire. And you can see the rake. Didn’t want to catch that on fire either.  See, you have to be careful. If you could see me, I had a rake in one hand (or was it a shovel? I don’t really remember) and the water hose in the other. I was prepared.

Once I got all this burned, I went behind our garage and continued on. Then I started trying to scrape the leaves from around the garage. That was a little more difficult. I’ll have to keep working on that. (more…)

Time to Play on the Horse Walker (again)… Coronavirus Day 19

When I was a kid, my parents bought this horse walker. What is a horse walker? It is exactly what it says, a horse walker. There have been times we had horses get hurt and we had to slowly bring them back (think physical therapy for people, but for horses). You can put them on the walker and it helps build back muscles. Say you have multiple horses and you need to warm them up or cool them down, you place them on the walker. Say it is winter and you want them to get outside and stretch their legs, hello horse walker.

It’s a machine that helps the horse walk around in a controlled manner.

When I was a kid, one of the arms had a swing put on it for me to ride on. The horses learned how to stop the machine and as a kid, I loved to ride the thing… it was my job to keep the horses walking. (more…)