Chicken Tunnels

Time to start saving those 2liter bottles again

Check out this tutorial on how to make a greenhouse out of plastic 2liter soda bottles over at http://ana-white.com/2011/04/plastic-bottle-green-house-build-guide

~

Instructions on how to build a plastic bottle greenhouse using 2ltr plastic lemonade bottles. This was produced as part of the Greenspaces project with primary schools in Moray. http://www.reapscotland.org.uk/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=8

~

How I built my Greenhouse, or how to ignore instructions and get away with it! http://www.squidoo.com/plasticbottlegreenhouse

~

Plastic bottle greenhouse http://www.appropedia.org/Plastic_bottle_greenhouse

Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden

Last night I bought a new book on dehydrating. Drying With an Attitude By Mary T. Bell. At the start of this book she states "One of my mentors has been Buffalo Bird Woman."  She describes this book as "a rare and valuable window into the past by clearly documenting specific details of how Native Americans grew, harvested, dried, stored, and cooked their food." 

This reminded me that A while ago when I read The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe. Carol frequently referred to Buffalo Bird Woman’s garden.





Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa Indian born about 1839, was an expert gardener. Following centuries-old methods, she and the women of her family raised huge crops of corn, squash, beans, and sunflowers on the rich bottom lands of the Missouri River in what is now North Dakota. When she was young, her fields were near Like-a-Fishhook, the earth-lodge village that the Hidatsa shared with the Mandan and Arikara. When she grew older, the families of the three tribes moved to individual allotments on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.In Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden, first published in 1917, anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson transcribed the words of this remarkable woman, whose advice today's gardeners can still follow. She describes a year of activities, from preparing and planting the fields through cultivating, harvesting, and storing foods. She gives recipes for cooking typical Hidatsa dishes. And she tells of the stories, songs, and ceremonies that were essential to a bountiful harvest.A new introduction by anthropologist and ethnobotanist Jeffery R. Hanson describes the Hidatsa people's ecologically sound methods of gardening and Wilson's work with this traditional gardener.

After reading reviews of this book that glowingly state testimonials such as "As a messenger of the old ways, she detailed how to build drying platforms, the best days to dry corn, beans, squash, buffalo, serviceberries, prairie turnips, and more. She cached food for two years in case the next growing season was a failure."  I knew this is a must read for me.

Each of the pictures of the books in this post are links to amazon where you can purchase them. But if your cheap frugal like me, I wanted to share a link I found where you can download a copy of Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians for free from the 

Digital Library

 

  Click here to go to book http://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t0sq90970

New Seeds Ordered And Garden Plan Done

It's funny, for all the gardening I do, I don't really like to garden. I like the planning, and the seed saving, and love the picking, canning, dehydrating, freezing and of course the eating. I'm just not much for the in-between. But hey, dusting, floor washing and toilet cleaning are not my favorites either, but providing us with a clean, healthy and nourishing life makes it all worthwhile.

2012 Garden

Do you Re-grow your garbage?

We have been eating the same green onions I bought at the store all winter long. No I don't have a corning wear dish of mushy green onions sitting out at every dinner. But I do have a beautiful pot full of lush green onions growing on my windowsill. Here's a quick pin I found on pinterest to show you how to grow them. The only difference from how I grow them is after mine had a nice root system going I potted them.

Source: plumsintheicebox.typepad.com via Pacy on Pinterest

I had a bunch of celery that needed to be used up quickly before I was ready to cook with it, so I chopped it up leaving the bottom stub intact. Dehydrated the chopped up stuff for the spice rack and I am going to re-grow more celery from the bottom stub. Here's a great how to re-grow celery pin.

Source: chickensintheroad.com via Pacy on Pinterest

Next neat regrow pin I want to try is re-growing ginger from store bought ginger roots. Check this one out.

Source: tropicalpermaculture.com via Pacy on Pinterest

 

 

I did find this neat book with loads of plants you can re-grow from your kitchen garbage.

Setting Up a Worm Composting Bin

Growing Sweet Potatoes in a Bag

Available at this link

The 1st thing I'm trying from the Extension Center's class on Urban Farmsteading, is going to be growing sweet potatoes in a bag. With our iffy spring weather and the sweet potatoes long growing season, I'm hopeing I can just bring the bags into our warm house and plop them under grow lights if this fall turns cool to early.

Gayla Trail from yougrowgirl.com has a wonderful article on how to grow sweet potatoes in a bag over at The Globe and Mail click here to read . She explains how she re-purposes over-sized green shopping tote bags for her grow bags. This is just perfect for me. I have so many of those black reusable shopping bags that I have not been using since I replaced them with my home-sewed bags. If this works well I plan to try carrots in grow bags. We've never had much luck growing carrots in our clay soil.

Almost Garden Time

 Our weather is finely in the 50's this week. With the ice and snowing melting and the property a big mud bog it's really got me in garden mode. Time to start planning the garden and start the seeds ☺

Last year I started my seeds in 2 liter soda bottles, sorta like mini terrarium. But I found this technique very space consuming. I needed alot of lights for the amount of plants I started. And I found that my plants became very leggy because with the height of the bottles I could not lower the lights to the proper distance. This year my daughter is starting a large garden. And with my DGS's 2 year old "helping" fingers, she figures that it's a better idea to keep her seedlings at my house.  So now it's time to come up with a better way to start my seeds. I've always wanted the Paper Pot Maker, but no way will I spend $18.95 for it. After hunting around the Internet I found these 2 video's. I like this 1st video because it seems to make a stronger pot, more like the wooden pot maker. But the 2nd video is more simpler, and if you twist the cup in the last step it should tighten up the pot bottom just as good. I think will be using one of these 2 video's to start our veggies this year.

Garden's finely starting to grow up

Distractions

This is what happens when life distracts me;

Radishes the size of my fist ☻

Wedding Roses all crocheted and ARMY Afghan reposted on my website

Well with all this rain (24 days of rain out of the last 30) I haven't been able to get the garden finished planting yet, but I did get all those Damn Wedding Roses crocheted for my nephew's wedding. Which is this Saturday, but boy did I cut that one close, they went in the mail today. I don't know what I was thinking when I designed that pattern.
I did get My ARMY Afghan pattern re-posted to my website. It's kind of an abbreviated pattern, enough to crochet the afghan, but I still have to re-post a more detailed pattern this fall when I get more time. Right now, if this rain ever stops, I have to much to around here on the homestead and in the garden. Add all that with a sick grandchild, my Master Gardner class on Wednesday, my granddaughter graduating kindergarten on Thursday and a family reunion on Saturday and I think I have mush brain syndrome.

My Garden Bucket

My Dad has a Bucket Buddy. He uses it to carry all his tools around as he's working on a project. I wanted something like this for my gardening. First I found the Fiskars Garden Bucket Caddy I really like this but I wanted one that was well basically free, Hey I admit it I'm CHEAP.

                      

I found this Simplicity Pattern at a Thrift Shop and picked it up to buy it, figuring that I could adapt the pattern to a large bucket.

Then I walked past this  for 50 cents and knew I had my Garden Bucket.

The Garden Bucket is basically an Apron belted around the bucket. So I cut the pockets off the shoe organizer and sewed them onto an old canvas belt and cinched it around the bucket. I had enough pockets to make a second belt which I cinched around the lip of the bucket so those pockets hung inside the bucket. I love my garden bucket. It's not as tidy as the store bought bucket, or as pretty as the Simplicity Pattern, but the bucket was free (left over from a dry wall project), the belts were something I was going to donate, and you can't beat a 50 cent gardening project.

Pics from the Week

#### Happens

It's just us, these things usually happen, to us me. We had our 1st meal of the year with an item from the garden, asparagus. Only a few spears but enough for my hubby and me to have for dinner. Boy did they taste good to. Sure wet my appetite for eating every spear that comes from that little endangered spot in the garden. I didn't pick the area very well for the asparagus in the garden when I planted the bed last year. It was the bottom left hand corner of the garden last year, but this year with the garden size increased it is not closer to the middle. When DS disked the garden a few weeks ago, I had to practically stand in the middle of the asparagus bed so he didn't disk it to. He had a lot of mumbling and muttering at me as he maneuvered that big tractor and disk around me and the asparagus. I even remember apologizing to him for it's placement. He then replied "It's fine Mom, I can get around it, your just going to listen to a lot of complaining while I do it." Today before the birthday dinner he borrowed a tiller and tilled the garden. As I walked out to check on the progress I was just in time to stop his second pass with the tiller, Yep You Guessed It, thru the middle of my asparagus bed. And they tasted so good this year to :(