Construction Begins!

The wood is here now it is time to build!  Bryan got to dust off all of his toys that have been sitting in the garage.   You know what?  They still work!  We had to cut the  8 foot boards onto 4 footers for the ends of our boxes. 

The kids got to help too!  Brendan loved using the drill to screw the boards together.  He is such a boy!  Gotta love those power tools!   

Samantha gave it a go as well, but wasn't as excited about it. 

I had fun watching Bryan work up a sweat while I took pictures.  This really was more of a one person job, but we all chipped in and helped.  At the end of the day, we had some really big planter boxes all ready to be filled and Bryan had some serious bragging rights!  Am I the most blessed girl ever or what?!  



My New Favorite Place!

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to my new favorite home improvement store!  This place is amazing!  Here is how it works: When someone wants to remodel their house and it needs to be gutted, they can call a contractor who will come in, break up the cabinets, floors, roof, fence, etc and then haul the pieces to the dump.  OR, they can call Whole House Building Supply!  This little company will come in and take out all of the materials carefully and then sell them.  If, as a buyer, you are really lucky, you might see something that you are looking for come up on a demo day!  Then you can be the one to go in and carefully remove it from someone else's house and buy it for pennies on the dollar.  It is pretty awesome!  

On this shopping day, we headed straight to the warehouse.  As you can see from the picture, they had tons of wood!  We got 2x10 pieces for $0.75 a foot and 4x4 posts for $1.00 a foot!  What amazing prices!  They have tons of other stuff too.  It was fun to poke around at all of the vantage doors and hardware.  There are new things too, like a jacuzzi tub that was never installed and is now being sold as used.  Oh, I wish I had a place for THAT!  

 

Bryan and Aaron worked hard hauling down the perfect pieces of wood.  Aaron cut them all into 8 foot lengths so that they would fit in the back of the van.  He was a perfectionist, so it took longer.  We were so thankful though because the boards are all just right.  Assembly will be much easier!

Here it is, all laid out the way we want it.  I was thinking that I had room for two 20 foot beds, but I must have measured wrong.  We are getting two 16 foot beds instead!  All of our lumber is cut into 8 foot sections, so this should be easy.  The extra lumber will be used for the chicken coop.  YAY!   I'm getting excited!!!

Grapefruit and Oranges - OH MY!

Boy do we have an abundance!  These trees were here in our yard when we moved in.  The grapefruit goes crazy every year!  Unfortunately, no one in our family likes them.  I usually have a couple of friends who come over and pick a few, but really, how many grapefruit does a person really need?  Each year we watch the fruit fall and splatter on the patio, making a big mess. 


This year is going to be different!  We have decided to donate the fruit to the food bank.  YAY!  I am excited to get picking and see how many pounds we end up with!  I have given notice to my friends that they have one week.  That means that after next weekend, there will be no more mess.  WHOOT!

Now for the oranges.  These, we LOVE!  But what to do with them?  I have heard of pickling them in salt to use in cooking.  hmm...not sure I would use them.  The juice doesn't really freeze well.  I might try again, but it tends to separate and not come back together well.  I can't find much on preserving them other than canning in heavy syrup - blah.  I guess, we will just start eating oranges morning, noon and night.  Manna from heaven! :)  If anyone has any great preserving ideas, I am open.  Please share!

Blessings and Garlic

Things have been busy here.  Due to the crazy schedule of the kids and me homsechooling them, not much has happened around here to move the garden along.  I wonder sometimes, what I am thinking, putting in this garden!  What I want and reality are colliding, more than I would like.  However, I am tough and don't give up easily.  Time is like everything else, you make due with what you've got.

On that note, I wanted to plant some garlic.  Back in late December / early January, I researched it online and found that it is really quite simple.  My garden hasn't been put in yet, but I have some room in my flower bed in the back, in between plants that are already established.  One afternoon, I grabbed my son and a couple of heads of garlic from my kitchen and headed out back.  Why not?  Let's see what happens.  We used a ruler to measure out a grid.  We pulled our heads of garlic apart and planted the cloves 4" apart, just under the surface.  We watered occasionally and pretty much left it alone.  I went out the other day and low and behold - GREEN!  We have garlic growing!  I am so excited!  I only planted what I had a little space for and only what I had in my kitchen, so it isn't a lot.  It is a good start though!  SO easy!  We also planted some carrot seeds, but those haven't done anything.  I don't know if the birds got them, or if there hasn't been enough water....who knows.  I will try again later when my beds are in.

Another blessing has happened!  A few weeks ago, my son and I decided to go for a bike ride.  We were riding through our neighborhood when we saw a man out front who looked like he was taking down his picket fence.  I slammed on my breaks and struck up a conversation with him.  It turns out, he gets tons of this fencing for free!  He has enough fencing to wrap around my new garden.  He wanted to get rid of it and would be more than happy to give it to me for free!  God is good!  I got his contact info, and just today went over and picked up the fencing.  It is a bit weathered.  Some pieces may have to be replaced, but over all it is perfect! It matches up nicely to what we have in place already.  Oh, did I mention?  It even came with a gate!  I am so excited!  The dogs, of course, had to check this new stuff out.  Little do they know it is the beginning of the end to their reign in the back yard.

Bodi, the wanna-be sheep herding farm dog

This afternoon, Bryan and I are going to head up to the salvage yard to see if they have lumber that we can use for the planter boxes.  Hopefully they will be built this weekend.  Next weekend, my wonderful nephews will be coming down to haul compost for us! 

I thank God daily for his provision.  The fencing could have been a huge expense.  The garlic is growing beautifully with out the purchase of special seeds.  Things are moving all in His perfect time.  We are blessed.

Canning Day!!! Spicy Chili Beans

 

      After several days of wanting to can, only to realize that I was missing one thing or another, it finally happened!  I spent yesterday canning.  I got my pinto beans soaking overnight and into the next morning.  Then I drug out my wonderful, amazing, incredible camping stove.  (I really love this stove, can you tell?).  I got it all set up and ready to go.  My new pressure canner fits wonderfully on there too! 

All I had were small jam jars, but that’s ok.  This little farm experiment is all about using what you have and not crying over what you don't.  I put my beans in, spices on top of that, water on top of that and a lid!  I then shook them, to get the spices mixed in.  Only problem is that now my lids and the rims of the jars were dirty! <sigh>  I had take all of the lids off and wipe them clean then put them all back on.  There is a bit of a learning curve here though.  I have never used the pressure canner and assumed that you needed to cover the jars.  I don’t know why I thought this, since you don’t do this in a pressure cooker…but I did.  I got the whole thing loaded, then double checked my instruction manual.  OOPS!  Everybody out of the bath!  The water was hot, so this was tedious work with the little jar lifter thing I have.  It took a while to set the whole thing up again with only 3 inches of water (before the jars are put in). 

 By the time it was all loaded up again, the bottom layer of jars were submerged!  It worked though.  I turned on the gas and watched the pressure gauge go!  10lbs of pressure and 240 degrees for 75 minutes.  I didn’t realize it when I started, but we were actually low on propane.  The stove went out a couple of times, so I had to keep an eye on it.  With the flame turned down and a little prayer, we made it the full 75 min.  Everything came out great!  Bryan had to help get the lid off of the cooker.  Apparently, you have to use Vaseline to lube the seals so you can open it.  OOPS!  Now we know.  More learning.

                For dinner we had a wonderful taco salad with hamburger cooked in spicy chili beans. Mmmm….Samantha (my super bean lover) was in awe over the beans.  She kept on saying how amazing they were!  Everyone loved them, except Brendan who is very anti-bean. Lol  

                All in all, my fist canning experience with my new canner was a success!  I can’t wait to do more!

Spicy Chili Bean Canning Recipe:  (8oz jars)

½ c pinto beans – washed and soaked overnight

1 Tsp Cumin

1 Tsp Chili Powder

½ Tsp Salt

½ Tsp Garlic Powder

½ Tsp Onion Powder

Birthday Fun!



Not my actual cake (I didn't have one)
I found this online and thought that it
was cute!



Yesterday was my birthday.  I am blessed by the grace of God, to have had another year on this Third Rock.  When I turned 36, I decided that I would just go backwards to 34.  Yesterday I turned 30 again!  Now if I could just get my body to realize that it is 30, I would be set!



Our local feed store - Right in Down Town San Jose!



In celebration of my birthday, I dragged the kids to the feed store in town.  We talked to the man there about chickens and he gave me the names of some good local breeders.  He said that I should be able to get a juvenile (Pullet I think it is called?) hen for just $15!  All of the ones that I saw online were about $35.  This is good news since everyone that I talk to tells me how stinky the chicks are.  I would also be worried about them becoming dog treats!  This way, I get a hen that is getting ready to start laying and not have to worry about keeping them alive in the house.  WHOOT!



Did I mention that it was big?  It's big.



Last night, Bryan and the kids gave me gifts.  Bryan gave the the biggest, baddest canner to beat all canners.  I love the fact that it is called the "All American" company.  The entire thing is made in the good ol' USA!  The kids each gave me canning books, so I am ready to go!  I went out today and got some beans to get started with.  I also picked up the ingredients for soup.  I am going to try to get both of those canned this weekend.  We will see how it goes. :)  Oh, did I mention that this sucker is big?  Take a look at this pic.  It doesn't even fit on my stove with out touching the Micro hood!  I guess my super camp stove is going to come out of storage and I will be canning outside!  On the upside, it will keep the heat out of the kitchen this summer.  With our winter being so dry too, it looks like it shouldn't be a problem for me to can now too.  I just hope we get some good rain in a few weeks!  This is our rainy season and there isn't a cloud in sight! 



My sad dog bathroom. 
I can almost envision my tomato
 plants now.



More good news:  I talked to my awesome, wonderful, amazing nephews and they agreed to come down and take out my lawn.  They will use a sod cutter to take out the Bermuda grass and then haul in compost to put on top!  We can't rototill because of the sprinkler lines.  This should work though!  I love it when things come together.  God is so good and provides exactly what we need - including a wonderful family. We are blessed.

Day 4 – New Year’s Eve!

Today is the last day of the year.  2011 has actually been an ok year!  It started off rough with one of my best friends being in a near fatal car accident.  Today she is back to work and looking good!  PTL!  My other BFF finished up Chemo at the end of last year and this year she has stayed healthy and is going back to her pre-cancer awesomeness!  All in all, it has been good.  Not to mention, I get to start my garden today!!!

Composting and planting!  You know how I feel about composting, but this wasn’t too bad!  I had about 4 days of kitchen scraps to put in. YAY!  I also got to use last year’s compost pile for my new plants today!  Gotta love payback.  It is like harvesting, only dirt and worms.  YAY WORMS!

All those veggies I bought yesterday went into the ground today.  Most in the front yard since my back yard is still the doggie bathroom.  Lettuce, onions & herbs all look good enough for the front flowerbeds.  I actually had enough lettuce plants that I took a couple over to the new neighbors for their yard.  They were excited!   I told them about our back yard plans and they can’t wait to see it.  You know what?  Me either! J  Baby steps…