Bells of the North Homestead

Its officially week three into our safe planting time and we’re now harvesting baby kale greens, rapini (or also called Broccoli Rabe which is pronounced raab),  some lettuce, arugula, micro greens and oddly enough, mustard greens which were from last year.  They obviously reseeded themselves.   As of today I harvested our first two radishes, and wow, surprise, no sign of root maggots! Little victories! Our tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers and watermelon are looking better than they ever did last year which gives me some hope that we’ll actually harvest something more than greens and potatoes this year.  As of today we have about five unripe tomatoes on the plants, most of which are all on the tomatoes in our greenhouse.  We have harvested our first bell pepper recently which came from one of the few plants we purchased from one of the many greenhouses here. I purchased two weekends ago  two white eggplants which I’m seriously hoping we see something out of.  My husband p

So now here we are, in the middle of our second spring back in Fairbanks, Alaska after a reasonably mild winter.  In late March we started our seeds, mostly tomatoes, a mixture of beans and a few herbs.  This, I knew going into it, would be challenging since we would be going on a weeklong vacation in May.  Trying to keep little seedlings going for a week without any attention what so ever would be tough.  Lo and behold our own dumb mistake took care of that worry. One mid April night when my husband and I were both exhausted from work we forgot the seedlings over night in our new light weight greenhouse.  The next morning we peeked in and every single one was dead, the mid 20’s temperatures killed them all.  Our greenhouse now in early June.  A lot of tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, hot peppers and believe it or not, ORANGE & LEMON TREES! The weekend of the 25 th of April we did manage to directly sow a lot of seeds.  All kale, lettuce, radishes, turnips, broccoli ra

I was pleasantly surprised to receive an Oregon Scientific Weather collection model number BAR218HG to provide a review about and just try out for myself.  While I don’t consider myself too much of a techno geek I do find new electronic toys rather cool to play with!  What arrived in our box was: •One indoor temperature/humidity/barometric pressure set display unit •One outdoor temperature/humidity sensor — the system allows for up to five outdoor sensors •Quick Start Guide •Full User Manual •Warranty information Upon opening the box and adding the batteries I got busy with The Quick Start Guide.  Most of the setup went pretty smoothly, setting the date and time, pairing the base to the remote sensor, setting the altitude, sea level pressure and what not.  However, I did have a minor hiccup when attempting to pair it to my cell phone and that I believe was mostly user error. Not any flaw in the thermometer.  Since we already had something like this thermomet