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Bells of the North Homestead

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Showing posts from July, 2014

A week after compost tea application

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Compost tea application & Status of the Garden

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Tamara

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Useful Links

City Farmer
EarthEasy.com
FilareeFarm.com
Findacomposter.com
FungiMag.com
Gardeners Supply
GardenWeb.com
GrowOrganic.com
HarvestEating.com
Rare Seeds
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WoodPrairie.com

Blogs I'm Following

Avant Garden Decor
Common Sense Homesteading
Daphnes Dandelions
Fresh Eggs Daily
Frugal Canning
Frugally Sustainable
Ghost Town Farm
Green Idea Reviews
Home Ready Home
Life on the Balcony
New Life on a Homestead
Patriot Rising
Restless Hands with Many Plans
Ruths Garden
Science Based Art
SNRA Science & News
The Manic Gardener
The Survival Mom
TheHippestHousewife
Tigress in a Pickle
VeggieGardenBlog

Popular Posts

My Top Five tips for lowering an Electric Bill

I write this now, coming from about 4 months, give or take, experience now at reducing our electricity bill each month. Energy here in Fairbanks, Alaska is expensive. In fact per the US Energy Information Administration only a few other states are higher. In case you're curious, Hawaii is the most expensive with New York and Connecticut following. We're number four on this list. Unfortunately for us here in the Golden Heart City though, we have a nasty little surcharge added onto our bill due to a legal issue that our Electricity company had some time ago, so it pushes that cost per kWh up around an extra .9 cents. That doesn't seem like a lot but when you multiply that times 400, 500 or 800 kWh. It adds up. The most important thing one has to keep in mind when trying to lower an electric bill is, while keeping an eye on your cost per month, you really want to look at your total kWh usage per month. If you do this you will be able to dissect the appliances and elec

An argument for soil testing

August 12, 2016

I've been a gardener since in my early twenties. Yes, I was a novice but we have to start somewhere right? I started by killing mint and basil. I did try to grow them, but they constantly died. A couple of years later, I figured out what I was doing wrong, what the heck was the small spidery pest that was attacking (and killing) my bonsai, why was my mint taking over the yard, what were the green small bugs eating my cilantro, and WHY was my cilantro always developing seeds so fast? I got a bit better at planting herbs in the tiny spaces I had in all the houses we occupied, and upgraded to vegetables and even cherry trees (that the moose thoroughly enjoyed even though I did not). When we moved to Maryland all that experience was kicked into high gear as my family got hit by many unfortunate personal economic events. When you only suddenly have money for your house, your car, the repairs for the car and some of your bills and desperation hits in, well then you'll do anyt

Compost Tea = MASSIVE GROWTH

I've been looking at photos from the past few weeks, especially since I found some recently on my Facebook page from last year at almost exactly this time, and well....I really have to pat my husband and I on the back. This is what really made the impact. The left side was from last year. No compost, no raised beds, No compost tea, no extra soil. Nothing. This year we've added raised beds, extra soil, extra compost, compost tea, vermicompost and bonemeal along with loads and loads of backbreaking work. So I guess I cannot attribute all of our success to the compost tea. However, the tomato plants in our planters are doing awesome ! We have diligently been following a schedule of compost tea one week, miracle grow fertilizer the next. The end result? Can you believe this!? What amazing growth! Next is our tomato and eggplant/pepper beds. Again just really awesome growth here. We've been out here almost nightly now so it's easy to miss how the plan

Foraging from nature; Bunchberries

Cornus canadensis. Cornus canadensis is a slow-growing herbaceous sub shrub growing 10–20 cm tall, generally forming a carpet-like mat. The above-ground shoots rise from slender creeping rhizomes that are placed 2.5–7.5 cm deep in the soil, and form clonal colonies under trees. The vertically produced above-ground stems are slender and unbranched. The leaves are oppositely arranged on the stem, but are clustered with six leaves that often seem to be in a whorl because the internodes are compressed. The leafy green leaves are produced near the terminal node and consist of two types: 2 larger and 4 smaller leaves. The smaller leaves develop from the axillary buds of the larger leaves. The shiny dark green leaves have 2 to 3 mm long petioles and leaf blades that are obovate. The blades have entire margins and are 3.5 to 4.8 cm long and 1.5 to 2.5 cm wide, with 2 or 3 veins and cuneate shaped bases and abruptly acuminate apexes. In the fall, the leaves have red tinted veins and turn

Cutting Our Electricity Bill

Fairbanks, Alaska, dubbed the Golden Heart City has a lot of positives to it. The people here are welcoming and friendly. The town is a great place to raise kids; it has a small town feel to it; there is very little traffic except for the two usual times of day and even that, after driving in I95 traffic on the East Coast is nothing. All in all, after all the places I have seen in the US, it’s the type of town that I feel I can really settle down and put down some roots. However, a big negative here are the energy costs. Unfortunately, gas for cars and generators, fuel for heating and fuel for electricity runs high here so this makes the cost of living much higher here than it is in many places in the lower 48. When moving here, we moved from a townhouse in the military community where we did not pay for our electricity, back to our house where now we do. When I first saw our very first electricity bill I was shocked. $299 for one month, our usage was 1427 kWh. At first

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