First seeds go in the ground!

On April 2, 2015 our first seeds got planted in the ground. It is an exciting day at our house. We planted green onion, leaf lettuce, and spinach. The green onion and spinach were planted using our "seed tape" we made a little while ago.

Brian is planting the green onion seed tape in this picture. You just bury it at the usual recommended depth for each plant. Can't wait to see if it will work!


 We also planted some of our regular onion bulbs on this day. We like to use a variety of onions so we planted some red, yellow, and white ones. We bought these onion sets at Home Depot. They come 100 to a box and we also bought some more at our local plant store, Anderson Seed & Garden. We are really hoping to be able to store many onions for use all winter. We will have to make sure we dry them out really good for storage.

Soil Testing

On March 20, 2015, we did some soil testing of our garden plots. We found that our upper garden (older one) was pretty healthy. It did need a little bit of nitrogen in some of the boxes because we hadn't really been rotating our crops like you are supposed to. However, the lower garden was very, very poor in nutrients and super high in pH (this combination will lead to no growth or very poor growth). So, with this in mind we have added the amendments to the soil and hope that it will be ready for this season of growth; if not it will be ready for next year. Remember, this year is a year of trial and error with our lower garden; anything that comes out of it is great!

Getting ready to test the soil from our garden.

Tomatoes and Peppers, OH MY!

On March 14, 2015 we planted a total of 50 pepper Plants! Holy Cow! We have jalapenos, carnival bell, long sweet, pepperoncini, Anaheim, and regular bell. There are a hot ones and mild ones. We love peppers at this house, especially in salsa and spaghetti sauce.

We also planted 48 tomato plants! We have Beefsteak and Super Sauce tomato varieties. The Super Sauce are Roma tomatoes that are supposed to grow up to 1-2 POUNDS a piece! We will have to wait and see about that.
The plants are taking over the house!

Picture of Baby Chickens

Ok, so that was totally dumb, that the picture wouldn't post with the previous post. Maybe this will give you a small idea of our small fluff balls.

Chicks

These are our new chicks.




We got them March 11, 2015. There were originally 4 Buff Orpingtons, 4 Red Rocks, and 4 Silver-Laced  Wyndottes. We had to replace a few from death and we finally decided on just having 11. Last year we culled our entire flock because they were old and were no longer laying eggs. They are obviously much larger now and we have moved them outside to the big coop. I have a corner of it fenced off for a couple more weeks and then they will have free run of the coop. Once it is warm, and they have all their feathers they will be able to go back and forth to the outside coop and run. That will be great!

We can't wait to have fresh eggs again in a couple more months. Yummy!!!