Beauty Farming Life

Many of you will remember in May when I gave up the garden, temporarily . I stopped watering and just let it go while I focused on other things such as planning the drip irrigation system, deciding on the layout of future beds, and figuring out how to kill the grass inside the garden.  There has been no watering and we haven't had rain in almost three weeks. Well this weekend, I was checking things out and against all odds, two tomato plants are still alive, in fact they are growing and putting on blooms!  And in the herb bed, there are two basil plants that are also doing well. NATURE FINDS A WAY! This is a "Marglobe Tomato".  It's bright green, has blooms and has grown a foot or so, without watering and in the blazing heat.  It's an heirloom from 1917, and in my research I found out it is heat and drought tolerant.  I guess this proves that!  I watered it well and pulled its branches inside the   tomato cage. The other on...

Today's fruit bounty Today, I found some more trees for the farm.  In this picture is a Santa Rosa Plum tree, one of the best plums for our area, another of the Muscadine grape varieties that I wanted, already trained into a vineyard style trellis shape, and a bonus find, a Barbados Cherry tree/bush.  It's not a true cherry tree, they just call it that because the fruit looks like a cherry.  It's a tropical plant so it should do fine down here. Got all three of these for $14 at  Houston Garden Center .  I love a bargain! Looking forward to getting these in the ground at the farm later this Fall.

Tonight, if you are fortunate enough to have a clear sky, you'll see a Hunter's Moon. It's also known as a Blood Moon or a Sanguine Moon... Hunter's Moon Native Americans first used this name to describe it because they used the bright light of the full moon to hunt for food.  They did it during this month in order to stockpile supplies for the upcoming Winter. You can check the phases of the moon anytime by visiting the Farmer's Almanac and their  Moon Phase Calendar HERE . Enjoy your Hunter's Moon wherever you are!  

Yummy Fruits and Vegetables  One of our favorite DIY cleaning projects in the kitchen is a wash for the produce we buy.  You know, when it's homegrown, you have control over knowing what's on your own stuff, but when you buy from a store, you never know what was sprayed on it, how many people have handled it along the way, and so on.  It's better to be safe.  Most of the news stories you read about E. coli outbreaks come from contaminated produce. A simple washing will get rid of anything you might be worried about.  You can buy a product in the store that will do this, but it's very pricey and you don't exactly know what's in it.  So a few years ago, we found the following "recipe" online and now we always keep a bottle of this under the kitchen sink, ready for a moments notice. Instructions: 1 Cup water 3/4 Cup distilled white vinegar 1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice 1 Tbsp baking soda Get an inexpensive spray bottle, pour all ingredients ...

Water Trough Garden I stumbled across this today as I was surfing the 'net and I am intrigued .  We are going to have raised bed gardens and as I was going to do the research, I found this: Using galvanized metal troughs, with holes drilled for drainage of course, as the raised beds.  Anyone seen this before?  Thoughts?  It's interesting! UPDATE: I'm working on a blog article about this topic, coming soon!

 Water Troughs all in a row In a recent blog post, I mentioned stumbling across the idea of using galvanized water troughs as raised bed gardens and I was intrigued.  So I decided to do some research, and here's the info I found along with some pictures.  All photos were randomly sourced from the internet and are not mine.  If you know where credit belongs, please let me know and I'll gladly link to them. The general consensus is that it can be done, it's relatively easy and as compared to buying and sealing wood, can, at times, be comparable in price.  The only down side is that you are limited in the size you can have, whereas with wood, you can make any size or shape you wish.  Photo by Thomas J. Story, courtesy of  Sunset Magazine Article The main difference of course is that a lot  of holes need to be punched/drilled into the bottom, as drainage appears to be the biggest hurdle. Most people (Be...

The little tree is no more.  Ironically, I just had a post ready that I was going to make about this tree and how it had died in the drought we have been having. I was going to give it a second life in an outdoor art project. Alas, Mother Nature had other things in store and when I stopped at the farm the other night, this is what greeted me as I pulled up... The tree was not really big enough to cause damage (though I suppose it could have broken out a window) but it's still scary to see a tree fall so close to your house.  Thankfully, all the large trees around the house are healthy and in no danger but it's still kind of unnerving to see as you drive up... I'll replace the tree with another one elsewhere on the property.  We always try to replace any tree that has to be removed (either willing or unwilling, ha)  with a tree in another spot.  That way, it feels like we haven't lost anything. RIP little tree 200? - 2011

With Winter approaching (and already here with a blast for a lot of you!) our thoughts turn to keeping the green going.  One way to do that is to grow plants inside during those cold and dreary months.  One of the best places to do this is often a kitchen window, since it's usually over the sink.  That makes for ease of watering, sunlight for the plants, and gives you something nice to look at while standing there washing dishes. At our house in the city, we do have a kitchen window sink, but it's ledge is pretty much non existent.  Maybe an inch wide at the most.  At the farm however, we have a nice, deep ledge above the kitchen sink so lately, I've been looking for ideas on how to keep some green plants going inside. Here is some of what I found: Vintage Coffee Can Garden This is not in a windowsill but of course could be put in one very easily.  It's a collection of succulents growing in vintage coffee cans.  Very neat an...

I think this is such a cute idea, and we are totally going to use this at the farm.  There are a couple of trees on the property that have died in the drought this summer and I was going to have to cut them down at some point anyway.  It always makes me sad to lose a tree, but looking at this, I think it would be a PERFECT use for one of those trees. We think it would be neat to have one right off the front porch, near the PARTY TREE  so that it would be a great conversation piece when company comes over to visit. I love the flowers around this one and the brightly colored signs.  Not sure I'd do the birdhouse at the top, I might have a different idea for that. This could be a project I start on soon.  I can only hope it looks half as good as this one does.  Now I'll just need to figure out what cities/towns/countries to point to!  There is great potential for being goof...

Here we go with the planning! Part of our plan has always been to build raised beds and create a fairly substantial (for us anyway) garden area.  So this past weekend, when it wasn't raining, we spent time roaming around and we finally picked the spot: Future Site of Raised Bed Garden It is this one!  It's a flat area, with minimal trees/bushes.  It's near the house but still far enough away that it will be its own separate area, and it gets full sun almost all day long.  This photo was taken very late in the afternoon and there are some shadows because the Sun was rapidly setting.  There are definitely 6-8 hours of full sun which is, of course, the best choice for a well producing garden. OK, I'm not the best with using a photo editing program to draw on, but this is, roughly, our plan.  It's so  not to scale, my apologies, LOL.  We want to put in eight, 4' wide and 8' long raised beds....

So the other day, I blogged about how we had our first fairly hard freeze, which means the end of planting for this season and soon to be brown and lifeless for a few months.  It also means more time inside.  It can be rather depressing when all you want to do is go outside and plant. So fast forward to night and when I got home from work, there they were...shining like jewels in the mailbox...SEED CATALOGS!  GARDENING CATALOGS!  PLANT CATALOGS!  All of these came on the same day. Weird huh?  There are more coming, I think I usually end up with almost twenty that all come in within a week or two of each other.  It couldn't have been better timing to head off the Winter blahs. So I laid them all out, poured myself a nice glass of RED WINE (blogged about here) , and sat down on the comfy couch to enjoy a trip into the future...Spring of 2012. I can spend hours looking at gardening and seed catalogs...

Last spring, in the midst of my spring cleaning of the property at the farm (which has now turned all to weeds, but THAT'S another story), I found this vase/urn that "Ma" left behind when she moved.  It had a small tree in it that died in the previous Winter's freeze.  I was thinking of turning it into a fountain, which I blogged about  HERE .  Of course, that would have had to be later on so until then, we just put it on the porch and left it alone, sort of forgot about it during all the remodeling stuff. Flash forward to last week when I was out there waiting for the appliances, I decided that this corner of the porch, which is different now because of the new stairs, needed something.  The whole porch needs stuff of course, but I saw this sitting on the other end of the porch and moved it over there to just fill the space...and I think i like it there!  I could still make it a fountain, just run the cord u...

Now that the garden area is planned and clearing should begin soon, I need to move ahead with some other stuff for Spring plans.  With the new year here, and time for resolutions  goals, I'm going to make this one of the must do things on the list: Did you know that a 1000 square foot roof, with just 1/2 inch of rain, can provide you with 300 HUNDRED gallons of water?  With Houston's record breaking drought still ongoing, and worries it might persist into next year, we are strongly leaning toward getting a rain barrel, or perhaps even several.  As you can see in this photo, this is the back corner (one of them anyway) of our house and we think it's the perfect spot to collect all the "free water" that falls from the sky. Rain Barrel location? The first thing we need to do is have gutters put on the house.  It's never had them.  Setting aside the water conservation advantages, since we just had the foundation repaired earlier this s...

       For all of my gardening friends out there, the USDA has released a new, updated "zone map". CLICK HERE TO VIEW IT For the first time ever, it is now available as an interactive map, you can zoom to county level, or simply plug in your zip code and find your zone. Why is this important?  They have not updated the map since 1990!  This new map is based on twenty years of new weather data from over eight thousand weather stations across the country.  It shows a trend of warmer temps which means a slightly longer growing season for most.  Zones have shifted slightly Northward and they have even added two new zones. I know ours has actually changed slightly.  We are now a 9a.  Good that it's slightly warmer for our gardening plans, not good this Summer when I'd rather it be slightly cooler instead, ha. So click on the link above and check our your zone!

HERE . We have kept them in the city until the time is right to plant them out at the farm.  Today when I left for work, I looked and to my surprise, the pear tree has already started budding out and putting on flowers...s o much for that groundhog! Of course, none of the trees  are in the ground yet, and we're only in early February.  A freeze is definitely still possible.  Somewhere deep down in its genetic makeup, this tree thinks it is time to bud out.  I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do at this point?  If we do get a freeze, should I cover it and protect this new growth?  Not worry about it?  Any suggestions?

  OMG, I can't describe how hot it is outside today.  Sigh.  But I did get a bit of stuff done and wanted to share some pictures of how things are growing so far.  Muscadine Grape Above is the "Muscadine" grapevine I got last year.  It's not in the ground yet, I've got it in a large pot so I can take care of it until it's in the ground.  On my short list of projects is a grape trellis.  This will be the star plant.  I have two of them, but this one is doing the best (two different varieties) and here is one of several actual grapes on it.  It's funny, in my head, I was picturing clusters, like you might see on other grapevines.  So I did some checking and these grapes just produce fruits all over.  They grow close to each other and sort of look like a grape cluster, but they are individual fruits.  Looking forward to tasting it when it's ripe.  Next season will be focused on fruit production.  Still, it's fun to s...

Well, yesterday I came home and was going through the mail...junk mail, junk mail, bill, catalogs, magazine renewal, and, wait!  What's this ??  MY SEEDS!!  These are the seeds of the month that I got in a contest that was sponsored by the always awesome Prairie Cat over at her wonderful blog,  Back to Basics . But I won, by way of Granny, also known to everyone as Annie's Granny, from her amazing gardening blog,  Annie's Kitchen Garden .  She gave instructions that if she won, she wanted me to have the seeds.  She won, and so I won.  But it wasn't just her generosity, it was also 3rd Shift Man/Cloud from his blog The Stay at Home Gardener , and Jenny from her blog  Simple Garden Made Easy .  They both also said that they wanted me to have it if they won. The world of blogging is so cool. So, every single month, for the next year, I will get a shipment of seeds from Mike the Gardener and the  Seeds of the Month Club .  It's...

One of the things we need, especially since the grass is just now recovering from last Summer's epic drought, is a sprinkler (or two or three).  This weekend, I did some watering but it was a tedious process.  I need something better.  So I started looking and I guess I didn't realize there are so many options.  We can't have an in ground system, not this year anyway, but I'd still like to keep the yards around the house green for this season. SO, I need to see what people use, what they like, what doesn't work, etc. I have narrowed it down to the three main types: Oscillating Sprinkler   This is the one I call the "old school" kind, the oscillating sprinkler.  You just put it where you want it in the yard and it arches back and forth to water a specific swath of the yard. Tripod or stand sprinkler This kind probably has the furthest reach, at least I assume, since the sprinkler head is attached at the top of the stand and then shoots water outwa...

Recently, I received a gift of seeds.  In preparation for our garden, I need to store them for the time being (as I'll be getting more each month). With the help of your comments and some online research, I found that the 3 most important things are dry, cool, and dark.  I was roaming around in the store the other day and came up with this idea. A one gallon paint bucket (inexpensive at any hardware store), a bag of "Silica Gel" (already had that) and a small flow thru bag of some kind. Pour some of the silica gel (they are granules) into a bag of some sort.  You could use an old sock, pantyhose, mesh, whatever will hold it in but still allow air to flow through it so that it will do its "moisture absorbing magic".  I used a small muslin bag leftover from a craft project and just tied the bag at the top with some string. Drop the silica gel filled bag inside the can and that's it. Believe it or not, you are done with...