Bells of the North Homestead

This weekend I decided to bite the bullet and tear out our lovely, beautiful lone tomatillo plant.  If you remember right I posted earlier that I made the rookie mistake of only planting one tomatillo plant.  You know, the old saying, it takes two to tango? Well that applies here. Tomatillo plants are self infertile which means they need two plants to produce fruit.  Since I only planted one plant the tomatillo was going to do nothing else in my garden but draw bees (good thing), take up room (bad thing) and bring shade to my pepper plants (also bad thing).  So, it's gone.  In it's place I planted some Cumin seeds that I hope will come up soon.  Edward and I love cooking with Cumin so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  This will be a new spice for me to grow. I also have one other spice that I will be trying soon but a blog will be following shortly on that to cover that one. So onto the state of the garden.  First we had a...

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 ...

This past winter we discovered compost tea.  I have to admit, when I first heard of it my very first thought was "OOOHH GROSS!"  After a bit of research though and hearing lots of good things about it, I decided to give it a try.  So I went to Youtube like I almost always do to scout out people who are familiar with it.  I was lucky enough to almost immediately find this video from Ray at Youtube. So starting February we purchased a bucket from Lowes and kept any vegetable or fruit scraps and threw it in there.  We actually kept it inside for a bit but it started to stink come March so we brought it outside.  It takes a bit longer for the compost to actually breakdown in the cooler temperatures but we figured that would just be the price we would have to pay for an UNstinky house!  Little did I know at the time that the extreme smell was due in part to too much nitrogen remains and not enough carbon. Here is a list of high carbon items that can be com...