Let the good times roll!

The Half Acre Farm has really been going to town over the past week and a half! All seeds are in the garden, all tomato and pepper plants from the green house are healthy and could be planted in the garden any day, the blackberry raspberry and strawberry plants all look good, and the chickens are pretty much back on track of laying 1 egg per day! Life is good on the farm! Last Thursday (April 23rd) I planted all the seeds in the garden, I planted radish's, carrots, spinach, egg plant, and okra. Pretty much all of our peas have sprouted and look really good, we have a couple cucumbers that have sprouted, and our beans are starting to sprout as well. Also last Thursday (April 23rd) I put another row of 2x4's on my potato box and another layer of cotton bur.

The Planted Garden (Sorry it was almost dark)

Peas

 

Cucumbers

 

Potato box

The berry patch is coming right along as well. The blackberry and raspberry plants have a lot of leaves on them and even are starting to get a few buds on them too! The strawberries are starting to come up more and more it seems every day and we have our first straw berry bloom! The blueberries are doing good...well the one that has made it is doing good, we're still not sure what happened to the other blue berry plant. We walked out side one day and it was gone, there was no sign of anything digging it up or it a stump where it had broke. The funny thing is, the one that is alive and well, is the plant that Duke dug up! The not so funny thing we are having a hard time finding another blueberry plant like the one we planted.

Strawberry bud

 

The blueberry plant

 

The Green house plants are really doing well and we have started setting them outside for a couple hours per day to start hardening them up for the big transplant in the garden!

 



Gardening!

We have had an extremely busy week this week so I didn't get this posted until now. Nicolle and I have reached a new age in our lives.....we are officially Minivan old.....we have been busy all week minivan shopping and finally picked one out, and get to go pick it up tonight. So I apologize for the late post!

Last Saturday (April 11th) Isla and I decided that it was time to start pulling the straw off the strawberry patch! After doing so I think this will be the last time I use straw to cover my strawberries for the winter. Straw still has seeds, which have started to germinate in my strawberry patch. I hope that when I raked it all off that I have removed all the seeds that have germinated and that will be the end of it, but we will see.

 

When I pulled off the straw I couldn't believe how many strawberry plants were already coming up even with the straw on top!!!

 

 



Then after pulling the straw I decided that it was such a nice day that I might as well not stop there, so I measured off my garden rows, got the tiller out, turned some dirt and planted my green beans and peas that evening! (I used my handy dandy app also that I talked about in a previous post!)

 

I may have had a little helper with laying it all out!

 

On Sunday (April 12th) my Dad came down, and we went and bought a hog panel. I took the hog panel and staked one end down in the garden then staked the other end to the ground with the middle up off the ground like a dome. Then I planted cucumber seeds on each end of the hog panel. My hope is that the cucumber plants will vine up the hog panel and then I can walk under it to pick my cucumbers! Now time to wait and see how long it takes for these bad boys to germinate!



Potatoes, Onions, and a Green House

The weekend turned out to be more of a laid back lazy weekend with me cleaning out the garage and doing some odd and end things around the house. So not a lot happened around the farm this weekend. However, Monday night I started in making some changes! I have really been struggling with my green house keeping it at a steady temp, not drying out the soil, and keeping all the plants that have germinated alive while waiting for the other seeds to germinate. So Monday night I made the decision to pull all the plants out of the green house, by Monday I would say 85%-90% of the seeds had germinated by that time, and my tomato plants were starting to look a little droopy from being in the green house. I set up a table in the sun room, broke down the green house and use some of the pieces to run my lights and placed all the trays under them! So far it is really working out well. I only have 2 tomato, 1 green pepper, and 1 serrano pepper plants that have not germinated as of yet. So far I have had a really good germination rate. When my tomato plants were in the green house I had moved them to the second shelf to get them away from the heat, but it reduced the amount of light they received. When I pulled them out the leaves are a little yellow and a little droopy, at this point there could be 2 scenarios that could be happening 1. they weren't getting enough light on the second shelf, 2. I am over watering them. Given my history with plants I'm going to guess I am over watering them, so moving forward I am going to back off of the water a bit!

 

 

 

The flowers are not doing the best, the Bachelor Buttons are for some reason almost pulling themselves out of the soil. I'm not sure how to explain it, but that's the best way I can describe it. Isla's sweet peas, the moon flowers, and the impatiens are all doing fairly decent right now.

 

Out in the garden we had exciting news! we had our very first potato sprout!!! So mark it down it took exactly 21 days for a sprout to emerge. I'm going top let some more come up first before I put another layer of compost down and another 2x4 row. I went ahead and snapped a picture of the onions because I think they look really good and I wanted to share!

(Potato Sprout)

 



 

The First Flowers

We had our first flower seeds germinate last night, and they are the Bachelor Buttons that Aiden planted! Just about all of them came up yesterday which means if you ever plant bachelor buttons from seed you can pretty much guarantee 4 days until they germinate! Thats about the same amount of time it takes for tomato seeds to germinate as well. We had 2 tomato seeds germinate yesterday out of ten that we replanted as well.

Here are Aidens Bachelor Buttons, and I know its just a matter of time before I hear "When are my Sweet Pea's going to grow Dad?!?"

 

The Half Acre Farm has been pretty dull this week, not a lot going on. Its still a little too early to get seeds planted out in the garden. I am thinking I might plant my peas in the garden this weekend, but we'll see how the weather fairs. There are still no potato sprouts, but the onions seem to be doing really well so far. The sprouts are starting to get tall, and there seems to be more sprouts every day when I go check on them. I hope everyone enjoys their good Friday tomorrow, and if there is nothing new to report tomorrow I want to wish everyone a Happy Easter!

They Survived!

Last Night I was outside choring my chickens and doing my usual walk around the 1/2 acre farm, and I noticed that my blackberry and raspberry bushes had their first sign of green leaves! This is very exciting to me because I planted them last year and really put a lot of work and effort into nurturing these plants through the summer, and I was afraid that they may not survive the winter. However, apparently they did survive the winter, and we should have blackberries and raspberries this year!!!

Blackberries

 

Raspberries

(Sorry the picture quality is bad, the camera didn't want to focus on the green buds)

 

On a sad note though when I got home last night one of my healthy little tomato plants didn't make it through the day. I think I had left my grow lights on too long and it got too hot in my green house and killed it. Also a blueberry bush (not the one Duke dug up) seemed to have snapped in half as well. I'm not sure what to think about these blueberry bushes at this point, every time I think they seem to be looking better....they take a turn for the worse. I may be going to a nursery within the next month or so and buying two new bushes. 





Everything is turning GREEN!!!

For some reason this weekend as I sat at my kitchen table gazing outside at our beautiful country view I noticed that the grass is really starting to turn green! And that Duke, my yellow lab, really stands out a lot in the green background as he is doing his business in my front lawn right outside the windows.........I really wish he would find somewhere else to do that!

We had a really productive and exciting weekend on the 1/2 acre farm! Saturday (March 28th) the kids and I removed all the peat pots from the green house, and proceeded to replant everything that I had planted in the peat pots. Last week I ordered 60 4" diameter plastic pots and 24-6 cell trays off of amazon, the 4" diameter pots were $11/30 and the 6-cell trays were $7/24.

The 4" diameter pots seem to be really sturdy and I am hoping that i can reuse them year after year. The 6 cell trays is what the kids used to plant some of moms flower seeds for her! We planted Bachelor Buttons, Pansy's, Sweet Peas (Isla's favorite since that is what I call her), Moon Flowers, and Impatiens. Now I'm sure the kids will be impatiently waiting for the seeds to germinate! Later that evening I replanted tomato plants, and pepper plants, I planted 10 new tomato plants, 5 green pepper plants, 5 red pepper plants, 5 jalapeno plants, and 5 serrano pepper plants.

 

The tomato plants that were planted in plastic Containers look really good! My watering cycle currently is I spritz the seeds and plants once a day, and I water the plants from a watering can every other day! Also yesterday (Sunday March 29th) I went out to the garden and found that we have onion sprouts!!!!

Tomatoes

Onion Sprout



 

My Birthday was March 22nd and I wanted to share one thing that my Aunt Gina got me for my birthday that I thought were really neat. She bought me 2 garden journals! I don't know if I should take it as a sign that she doesn't like my blog, and that I need to keep my journals more private or not though! HAHA I'm kidding Gina! The green one is really neat, its a book for daily journal entries and will keep 5 years worth of entries! The black one is a record keeping book for plants, tools, and for all sorts of information for you to fill in to document what you did! Thank you Gina!



The Berry Update We've All Been Waiting For!!!!

I want to update on the blueberries that, if you recall, were plated on March 13th, looked pretty rough a couple days later, and that the dog dug one of them up. Well as of right now I'm really happy to report that I actually think they're going to make it! The plant that the dog dug up I placed back into the hole and put some more cotton burr around it. Yesterday I went outside to check on everything and wouldn't you know, the plant that the dog dug up is starting to get green leaves on it and seems to be doing just fine!!!! The other plant doesn't have any leaves showing up yet, but looks just as healthy as this one!

 

Because of the mulch its kind of hard to see the plant so I circled the plant in red, and circled the green leaves in blue! I really thought after the dog incident that these plants weren't going to make it, but right now I'm pretty hopeful!

 

Nicolle sent this picture to me today, apparently our strawberries have survived the winter!!!! I have not pulled the straw off of them yet, because I'm not convinced that the cold weather is 100% gone (especially since they are calling for a mixture of rain and snow tonight!). However, starting Sunday the forecast looks to be more in our favor, and I will more than likely be pulling the straw off the strawberries towards the middle of April, if not sooner!

 

 



WE'RE BACK!!

We have made it back from beautiful Colorado! Nicolle and I spent the past four days on a vacation to Colorado spending the first day in the car driving, the second day in Breckenridge, the third day in Vail and Silverthorne, and the last day driving home! We didn't do any skiing but did a lot of shopping, and spent a lot of quality time together!

Here we are in Breckenridge!

 

We made it home so late last night that I had to walk around the garden with a flashlight to see if we had any potato or onion sprouts.......and we had 0 sprouts, but I'm hopeful we will have something soon especially with this rain we just had.

 

While we were gone I was a little nervous about my tomato plants and pepper plants that we had in the green house. I left the grow light on them and we left with fingers crossed that they were going to be alright. As it turns out all the plants in plastic containers made it just fine and look really good! The plants in the peat pots......no so much. I'm going to be quite honest, I think I've decided that I'm not a big fan of these peat pots. Nicolle and I have tried to grow flowers from seeds in these pots and they germinate, get about an 1" tall, and then wilt over and die. I think that plastic containers retain the water so much better, where the peat pots pull the moisture from the soil and then the heat dries out the peat pots. I'm going to get some more plastic pots and start some new tomato plants in those, and since my pepper plants never germinated in the peat pots I will re-plant those in plastic containers as well. I am going to try one more time with peat pots though. I want to start some flower seeds in them, but this time I am going to pour about 1/4" of water in the tray that they sit in, to try and keep them moist by pulling water from the tray vs the soil. I'm not sure if it will work, but I figure it's worth a try!

The plants in the plastic containers look really good!

The ones in peat pots.....not so much!

 

 



Garden Planning with Companion Planting

The more I research about gardening, the more I'm finding out that I don't know a thing about gardening! As I researched when to plant potatoes, and onions, and tomatoes, etc.,  I learned that there is something called "Companion Planting". Growing up watching my grandparents garden I just always assumed you just planted your seeds, vegetables grew, you picked them, and then you ate them. Apparently there is way more to it than that. On the right under Good Reads you will see a new article about companion planting. This article goes over what plants are good to plant next to each other and what plants will compete with each other and shouldn't be planted together. So with this new knowledge about Companion Planting I found a handy dandy app on my iPhone called "Garden Minder" from Gardener's Supply Company. This app gives you a grid and helps you plan out how you are going to plant your garden! For instance here is my grid with my garden for this year:
 

 

And like so many infomercials will say "AND THAT'S NOT ALL!",  it helps with how deep to sow seeds, the spacing, when you can replant, days until you can harvest, and all sorts of interesting things about each plant! And probably the most exciting thing that this app has, at least to me anyway, you can make journal entries!!!!  Here is an example of what it talks about:

 



  Beans, bush

	Sow seeds 1" deep directly in garden after all danger of frost. Spacing: four plants per sq. ft. for bush beans, six to eight plants per sq. ft. for pole beans Plant second crop of bush beans (if needed) two weeks after first planting Days to harvest: 50-80 days from seed, depending on variety. Not frost-hardy. Hint: Add a legume inoculant when planting to increase vigor and yield.
Carrots, summer
	Sow seeds in garden 1/4" deep three weeks before last spring frost. Spacing: Plant 30 seeds per sq. ft.; thin to 16 plants per sq. ft. Replant six to eight weeks before fall frost for late crop. Days to harvest: 55 to 70 days from seed. Frost-hardy. Hint: Before planting, loosen soil to 12"; remove stones and add compost.

I know this is probably going to disappoint everyone, but Nicolle and I will be heading out tomorrow morning for a long weekend vacation to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado for my birthday (which is Sunday)! So this will be my last blog post until Tuesday of next week. Hopefully on Tuesday, I will be able to report about onion and potato plants sprouting!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Well I guess it would actually be a Happy belated St. Patrick's Day! The Half Acre Farm had a very busy St. Patrick's day, we planted our potatoes and our onions. I read many articles on when the best time to plant potatoes and just about every master gardener says 2 weeks before the last frost, and the same goes for onions. However, I have always heard to plant your potatoes on St. Patrick's day, and if you miss that day plant them on good Friday. I question if the theory to plant on St. Patrick's day is more of an approximation that it is two weeks before the last frost. Honestly, I decided to go with the old wives tale to see what happens, based on the fact that it has just been so nice outside lately I just couldn't help myself. I had to get something in the ground!

 

I planted 80 sets of yellow onions, Enought for 2 and a half rows of onions. I couldn't let any go to waste and i didn't want to start another row just to plant half, so I planted the half row alternated between the two rows. If that doesn't make sense think of the number 5 side on a dice. I may not have plated them far enough apart, but we'll see.

 

Here are my potatoes. I read an article that you can supposedly grow 100 lbs. of potatoes in a 4 sq. ft. box. I bought white seed potatoes, I used 2x2 posts for my verticals and 2x4's for my edging. How this is supposed to work is as my potatoes sprout above the ground I will add another row of 2x4's and fill that row with dirt. I will continue to do this row by row until the box is approximately 3'-4' tall. Then when it's time to harvest I willo remove the bottom board and harvest the potatoes from teh bottom up. It seemed to make sense to me, I'm really looking forward to this experiment to see how well it produces potatoes!

 

Now I would like to report that yesterday on March 17th we had our first tomatoe plant germinate! we have 4 or 5 sprouts that came up yesterday. We planted our seeds on Friday the 13th and had our first sprout on Tuesday the 17th, so 4 days to germinate!

 

 

Blueberry Bush Report!!!

I didn't take a picture because I was very angry and upset last night, so I will just report to everyone what happened. Duke (the 21 week labarador puppy) dug up one of the blueberry plants. If you recall from yesterdays posts they didnt' look very good to begin with, and now I'm not sure I can do anything for it. I did place it back in its hole and will continue to nurture it but I'm afraid it might be toast now.  



The Berry Patch Addition

I forgot to include in yesterday's post that I planted my blueberries also last Friday (March 13th), which expands the berry patch to 4 different kinds of berries! When I purchased my blackberry, strawberry, and raspberry plants last year I bought them from a local nursery, and they really did well. This year I thought I would try something new and I bought a couple blueberry plants from Orscheln's Farm and Home. The plants were reasonably smaller, but they had some good green buds starting on both plants I purchased, and they were only $5/plant. So I thought what the heck I'll give it a try. I dug my hole for my blueberries, but before I placed my blueberry plants in the hole I filled the hole with cotton burr. Blueberry plants like very rich acidic soil when planted and cotton burr, like I've said in my previous posts, is really good stuff! I filled the hole with cotton burr, transplanted my blueberry bush and covered it with cotton burr and mulch. I do apologize I meant to take a picture at the time of transplanting but I forgot. These pictures are from Sunday night when I returned home from the weekend.

 

As you can, barely, see the buds don't seem to be as green as they were when I planted them. I'm hopeful that they are just stunted due to the transplant, and that I can nurse them back to a healthy state. I will keep you all posted!

Finally Getting Started!!!

I hope everyone had a good weekend! Mine was good and fairly productive, especially since I wasn't home for the weekend. On Friday I started some of my seeds for my garden. I started my tomato, jalapeno, serrano pepper, green pepper, and red pepper plants in my little green house. I used some bigger recycled planters from some flowers we bought last year to start my tomatoes in, and then I used some peat pots to start my peppers in. The peat pots you can buy just about anywhere, and when you get ready to transplant your plants you just plant the whole pot and everything. We'll see how that goes!! I bought the 1.75"x2" peat pots that have 8 spots in each tray. I basically followed the article "Starting Seeds Indoors"  that you can find on the side of my blog under "Good Reads". I purchased Jiffy Organic Seed Starting mix as my soil for the containers. I'm not sure how much it really matters what brand it is, this was just what was available at the Orscheln's Farm and Home store when I bought my seeds, but I want to document what I used so we can see if this stuff works or not! I dumped my seed starting mix in a bucket and I wet it all down really good before I filled my pots. I didn't saturate the mix to where if you squeezed it a bunch of water came oozing out between your fingers, I just added enough water that it made the soil a little sticky. Also I spritzed all of my peat pods down with water from a squirt bottle before I filled them with soil as well. Then I filled all my pots with soil. After I filled them I placed 3 seeds in each pot (just to help the germination rate out of each pot), and then I covered them with dirt. I then gently pressed the dirt down in each pot to make sure I have maximized the dirt contact to the seed. Then I put them in my green house and spritzed them one more time for good measure and zipped them up!

I plan on spritzing the seeds every other day. Spritzing the seeds with a squirt bottle versus pouring water over them helps to make sure that the dirt stays in contact with the seed. Pouring water over the seeds can create a separation between the two and reducing the germination rate. We'll see if that holds true for me!

You will also see that I have a light in the corner of my green house. Home depot sells grow light bulbs that fit just perfect inside a heat lamp for only $7! This was exciting to me because to buy fluorescent grow light fixtures is quite expensive! Seedlings don't necessarily need the light until they germinate and become plants, but I'm using my grow light as a heater for my green house. It doesn't produce a lot of heat, but I am getting good condensation on the walls of my green house, which is a good thing, so it must be producing enough!

 

The last thing that I did over the weekend was I bought some good black composted horse manure from a lady down the street to spread on the garden! She had made a post on the local swap and shop selling horse manure for $5 a tractor bucket load! I couldn't pass this up so I hooked onto the trailer yesterday and went and bought 2 bucket loads. I spread it over the garden really good and then pulled out my little mantis tiller and mixed it all together. I would like to get a bigger tiller out and get everything turned over one good time before I plant, but the mantis tiller mixed it in good for now anyway!

 



(You can really see a difference with the manure!) 



Without getting a big tiller in it, I think it still looks pretty good!

When life gives you Mulberries.......make Mulberry jelly???

I travel a lot for work, and there is one specific state that I spend a lot of time in.....Nebraska. At this point in my life after 2 years of being a Bridge Inspector I'm pretty sure that I have been to every single county in the state of Nebraska, and I would venture to bet I have been to 75% of the towns in the state. If you haven't spent much time in Nebraska I apologize for ruining the surprise, but there is NOTHING very exciting about this state, unless you're a corn farmer or live out by Scotts Bluff. However, I found last June that there is 1 itsy bitsy super exciting thing in Nebraska that happens only in June. That is Mulberries, yes that's right mulberries, and I'm here to tell you they are EVERYWHERE in Nebraska. We spend a lot of our Nebraska time on gravel back country roads inspecting these little bridges to make sure they are safe for the farmers and their equipment, and these mulberry trees grow all over the sides of the roads we are on! SO....what do you do when you're sitting at a bridge getting ready to inspect it, and you look over and see a mulberry tree loaded with plump, juicy, sweet berries?

That's right!!! You take a 30 min. (maybe an hour) break and you climb the tree and start picking!!! I filled a gallon sack took it back to my hotel, washed them, and threw them in the refrigerator until I could get home to make delicious mulberry jelly! This was our first run at making any kind of jelly, and it turned out really good! Thanks for that jelly recipe Mom....oh and by the way I've lost it, so I'm gonna need another copy!!!

 

 

Now this will be the only time I say this....But I'm looking forward to June getting here so I can get back up to Nebraska and pick me some more mulberries!!!! I doubt Nicolle shares the same enthusiasm  though..........