Bells of the North Homestead

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

We've had a pretty earth shattering winter.  The past two years, since moving back here to Fairbanks, Alaska our goal has been to expand our garden.  To finally have some land to do with what we would like. Two years ago we looked at a fixer upper, but alas, it was not meant to be.  After much struggling to make it work, to purchase that house, it fell through.  We went into the winter of 2014 dejected and sad.  We knew we had to change some things about our life financially so we buckled down and put quite a bit to the side, paid off some bills so that hopefully, next time we fell in love with a house we could actually buy SAID house. In January of 2016 we knew we had made some pretty good progress on our financial goals, we knew we had made some progress cleaning up some of the damages from our previous renters on our current home in Fairbanks, so we decided, tentatively, to take a look at a couple of houses during the weekend of the Martin Luther King holiday. Our goal was to