Medicinal Plants

I've always been a big fan of learning how to do things from scratch, so the idea of using herbs to treat common illnesses has always had appeal for me. However, I've never liked the idea of taking someone's anecdotal evidence that something will cure such and such a disease. The other day however I stumbled across this site:
http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-supplements/default.aspx
You can search for a plant, take rhubarb for example, and it will tell you what studies have been done on it's effectiveness against certain problems. Turns out rhubarb root is good for cold sores. It even has the dosing to use:

For treatment of cold sores: a cream containing 23 mg/gram each of rhubarb extract and sage extract applied every 2 to 4 hours while awake, with treatment starting within one day of symptom appearance and continuing for 10 to 14 days.

The site will also list off all the things rhubarb is supposed to be good for and let you know if studies have been done backing up that information or not. I love studies. Needless to say, I'm impressed. And it turns out that a lot of the things that have proven to be helpful are things I am already growing. I have garlic, lavender, rhubarb, willow, and thyme in my yard right now and these have all been proven to be helpful for various things. I'm going to have to do some more reading, but I think it would be neat to have all the plants I would need to treat common illness around just in case the zombie apocalypse becomes a thing, or if I have a cough and want to have some thyme tea.

Stevia

I'm going to try growing Stevia this year. I'm been doing the keto diet (low carb) and so I've used the stevia you can buy at the store, but I had never considered growing it. Then one of my coworkers mentioned making mojitos with stevia and mint leaves muddled at the bottom. Yum! I didn't think mojitos were going to be on my menu of drinks this year, but now I've got my stevia plants and I'll put mint in the ground and I'm looking forward to mojitos this summer.

Strawberries and Mulch

I planted strawberries for the first time last year, and nurtured them all year. I picked off flowers and runners and all the things you are supposed to do the first year for strawberries. Except mulch them. I was very pregnant by the time mulching season came around and then I had a newborn, and I didn't have any straw or pine needles readily available. Which led to most of my strawberry plants looking like the picture below instead of the picture above.

The strawberries are in the same garden bed as my garlic, which I've also forgotten to mulch before, but the garlic always came up in the spring. So did all my other plants which they say you are supposed to mulch and I never did. Turns out I don't get a pass on mulching, and now I'm regretting not taking the time to get some straw and throw it down last year. Oh well, I've got four strawberry plants still alive, and at the rate they were throwing out runners last year I should be able to get my strawberry bed back up to operating capacity this year or next.

Asparagus!

The first asparagus spear of the year has appeared and I'm so ready for asparagus. My husband has been asking me every day for the last week if we have asparagus yet. It will start off slow, I have a couple plants that send up a shoot before the rest, so I won't have enough for dinner for about another week. I'm even more excited this year because last year I took the time and plants another twenty asparagus plants. It will take a couple years but I will have double my current asparagus when they all get mature.

Digging out the front flower bed

I had an extra holiday I could use at work and so spent the day today working in my yard free of distractions from husband or baby. The flower bed I'm working on has needed some attention since we moved into our house. The original owners had put down black fabric and then wood chip mulch which is a terrible idea. The wood chips decomposed and created dirt and the weeds used the black fabrics to anchor themselves.

You can see how when I pulled up some of the black fabric the plants stay attached. They are actually really hard to pull out even when the only thing they are rooted to is the fabric.
I put the extra dirt up in the second terrace of my garden, which has needed some good black dirt as I don't think it was originally used as garden and so is composed of primarily clay soil.

After four hours, this is as far as I got. I forget how much work moving that much dirt can be. I was hoping the have the whole bed dug down to the stone wall level today. Oh well, we'll have to finish it up another weekend.

Busy Weekend

What a busy weekend! It was actually nice to go to work today and sit at my nice comfy desk. The gravel for our driveway arrived early Saturday morning so my husband spent his morning spreading it out with the tractor grater blade. The garden got tilled right on schedule, and then my father and I got to planting. Some before and after photos:

Then on Sunday I transplanted the peppers into larger pots. That takes a lot longer then I remember it doing. I think next year I'll cheat with the peppers and just seed them into the larger pots to start with.

Spring Planting Time!

We are planting the spring garden tomorrow and I'm so excited. The plants you see above are the ones that are going in the ground. Everything has just come together really well for this Saturday:

• It rained all week but it's sunny today and tomorrow so the ground should be dry enough to till.
• The person we have till can be there first thing in the morning.
• It's supposed to rain on Sunday so I don't have to water.
• The seedlings are hardened off and looking great.
• It's supposed to be highs of 60 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny - perfect gardening weather.
• My mother is coming up so someone can keep an eye on the baby (she doesn't garden).

It's my dad and I who plant the garden, neither my husband or my mother enjoy growing the food - they just help eat it. You might be wondering why I have someone come and till my garden. I do own a small tiller, but with a garden my size it is completely worth it to me to pay someone to till the larger part. We have the same guy come every year. He has a tractor with a tiller attached and can do an excellent job is a tenth of the time it would take us with the little tiller. I use the little tiller for the terraces and other places where the tractor couldn't reach.

Spring Blooms

We got a good rain over the last couple of days, and so everything is growing in full force. My grass has gone from brown to green, the trees all have blooms, and the weeds have started to sprout.

The next wave of bulbs is blooming, the ones that bloom after the snow drops but before the daffodils. It must be slightly cooler at my house because I see daffodil flowers in the yards on my drive to work but mine are still coming up from the dirt.

Cutting Down Trees

We have decided that we need to cut down some more of the trees on the timber line because they are leaning at the house and the trees on that hillside like to fall over randomly. We already had one tree come down and nick the corner of our roof a couple of years ago. So I have to say goodbye to two hickories, a walnut, two pines, and two cherry trees. As much as this saddens me it will be nice to not have to worry the next time a wind storm comes through. One of the cherry trees has actually fallen over already, but got caught in the canopy of a slightly bigger tree before it could hit the house. This is what prompted my husband to start calling tree cutting services. I have no problem cutting down trees ourselves anywhere else on our property, but I would rather have professionals do it when it comes to trees that are already looking like they would like to have a go with my roof.

Cleaning Up the Yard

My husband and I worked in the yard this last Saturday cleaning up the flower beds around the house and cutting down the little scrap trees that grow up next to the timber. We even cleaned the house. It was a very productive day. See the before and after photos:



I meant to do a

Pepper Seedlings

Peppers! My pepper seedlings are growing well, I was just thinning them  out when I decided I needed a photo. I leave two seedlings per cell because I like to have extra in case we have an "I forgot to water them for four days" incident and only some of the cells survive. I know, it isn't that hard to water plants but I'm notoriously bad until I can get them into the dirt outside where Mother Nature takes care of the essentials. These are the varieties I'm growing this year:

Spicy Peppers (Mostly for canning salsa):
Habanero
White Bullet
Pequin
Manzano Yellow
Naga Viper
Wimpy (Some type of cherry pepper I got from a coworker)

Spicy Peppers for Drying:
Puya
Chi Chien

More Mild Peppers (Salsa and eating):
Jalapeno Big  Guy
Jalapeno Born to be Mild
Trinidad Perfume Pepper
Anaheim
Ancho Gigantea

No Heat:
King of the North

A lot of the spicier ones I'm only planting one or two plants, but the King of the North bell peppers and jalapenos I grow a lot more.

Seed Starting Setup

This is my setup for growing plants from seed. I just keep it in the storage room so it is out of the way and the plants didn't get a significant amount of light from the window I used to put it in front of anyways. I have heat mats under each tray with a temperature controller to keep the soil at an optimum germination temperature. My lights are on a timer so they come on for about 16 hours every day. 

Right now the peppers and tomatoes are the only things in here, because soon I will be transplanting them to larger pots and I'll need all four shelves for everything to fit. Then I split up the lights so there is only one per shelf, although in the future I want to buy more lights so I have six all together.

Spring Vegetable Seedlings

My spring vegetable seedlings are all doing nicely. Now that the low temperatures are above freezing I can leave my them outside so the peppers and tomatoes have more light. (I need another set of grow lights).
My setup has four shelves and I have four lights, but I realized last year that the seedlings grew much better with two lights hung side by side above them rather than just one.
Besides having the extra space inside, the main reason these are on the deck is to harden them off. It is important to acclimate seedlings to being outside before you go to plant them. For the first day, I set them out in the shade on a warm afternoon. Then the next day I left them out from the morning to the night. After that I let them have more sun, and now they are outside all the time as long as temperatures are above 34 degrees. (Note that that low temperature depends on the plants, these are all cold hardy and would probably be fine even if it frosted).

Weekend Yard Maintenance

It is cold again, and the excitement I was feeling for spring has dwindled as I haven't had time to work the entire work week. However, now that it is Friday I'm getting my plans in place for the weekend. It is supposed to rain on Sunday, so I will play on putting down some Preen Vegetable Garden Weed Preventer around my vegetables and some Preen Garden Weed Preventer around my flowers. I realized this last week the the two different containers in my shed were actually two different products. I'm sure I knew this when I purchased them and just forgot since last summer. It turns out the Preen Vegetable Garden Weed Preventer can be used around edibles, but the Preen Garden Weed Preventer can not. I am just lucky that when I put the Preen around my asparagus I was using the vegetable variety.

I also need to cut down the ornamental grass. I haven't figured out the best way to do this yet, I just use a hand saw, which I'm sure can not be the best tool for the job. If anyone has a really good method of doing this please let me know.

Happy weekend and and happy yard work!

Watering Seedlings

I'm finally over the cold I've been fighting the last couple of days, and didn't kill my seedlings when I forgot to water them for two and half days. In fact, they seem to have thrived with my neglect, as my plants always seem to do. This is actually something I can't stress enough, you have to deprive your seedlings of water occasionally once they start growing. If you keep watering them every day and keep the soil moist constantly, not only will you grow nice green stuff on top of your soil, but you will have plants with little tiny root systems that will try and die on you the moment you plant them in the garden. Once my plants have their true leaves, I water them less and less frequently, letting the soil dry out before watering. This prompts the plants to expand their root systems in search of water. I also water them from the bottom by pouring water into the tray beneath the seedlings so the roots go down further instead of hanging out at the top of the soil.
Don't forget to pay attention to what the seedlings are telling you though, if they get droopy and the soil is drying out, then water them. It's more important to listen to the signals the plants send you than to follow a set schedule.

Working In The Yard With The Baby

I wanted to share my solution for the baby in the garden. I originally thought about wearing him while I was working, but with moving brush and tearing out weeds I tend to get myself covered in dust and fragments and that didn't seem like a good idea. So I found this thing online, and I love it. It's the Summer Infant Pop 'n Play Portable Playard. The neat thing is that the bottom is like a tarp, so the wet ground can't soak through, and it folds up into about the size of a camping chair. My son just played nicely by himself for an hour while I did some yard cleanup on Saturday.

Starting Tomatoes Inside

This morning I started my tomato seeds inside. I'm growing 5 varieties this year: Federle , Big Mama, Italian Heirloom, German Pink, and Stupice. I'm also planting the eggplant Rosa Bianca seeds in the tomato tray.
I get kind of busy in the spring, so I'm cheating this year and sowing my seeds directly into 2 inch pots. I'll still have to transplant them into larger pots but since I always plant extra I'll only have to transplant about half of these. The rest will remain on backup until I know the garden plants will survive.

Front Flower Bed Project

This is my first project for the new year. This "flower bed" has been a mass of weeds ever since we moved into this house, and I've only ever had time to knock the weeds down. Finally this last fall the plum tree that was in the bed died and split in half, so I've decided that the whole bed needs to be redone from the dirt up.
First of all, I need to remove the tree and a bunch of the soil that has accumulated on top the black fabric that must have been laid down as a weed preventer. Now it just serves as something for the weed roots to dig into so you can't tear them out.

Then I need to fix the retaining wall. These blocks are VERY heavy, so I think I'll have to get out my husband's engine hoist to get them back into place. I'll also have to move the bottom stones and reset them. The whole wall is so unstable.

Once these chores are done, I'll be able to plant something. Yeah! 

Vegetable Garden Plan for 2015

My garden plan is finally set in stone. I got some interesting pepper seeds from a co-worker that I wanted to incorporate and ended up having some extra room when I realized I was out of Bulgarian Carrot pepper seeds, but that is the final change I am making. (I say this every year and it's never true.)

The software I used to make this is the Garden Planner from growveg.com. I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to laying out my garden and planning everything ahead of time, and I've found this is the best tool for it. You can see the garden details and plant list here.

Starting a Blog for the New Year

While most people may think that the new year starts in January, it always feels to me like the new year doesn't begin until the first Snow Drops bloom. Happy New Year! It is finally spring and I can put on my boots and start working in the yard. Granted, it's a muddy mess, so I can't start digging up the flower bed I want to redo, but I can make sure all the debris is cleaned up and put some Preen down on the established beds.  I'm trying to get a head start on the weeds which are already starting to grow with the unseasonably warm weather we had last week.
This year is going to be different than years past - I'm trying to figure out the best way to juggle a six month old baby and a garden. I put him out next to the garden on some blankets the other day, but the ground was so water-logged when I knelt down next to him the moisture seeped all the way through three blankets and my overalls. We went back inside.
It's also the time to start seeds. My spring vegetables have already grown their first true leaves, and my pepper plants should be germinating soon. Next comes the tomatoes this weekend.
I love spring.