Bells of the North Homestead

Well we finally did it.  We opened the potato bin so see if we had anything there.   And this was the result. What an utter disappointment. No blues, no reds, no any special potatoes. Hardly anything at all.  Depressing.   Still though, I told Edward that "hey this was our second time growing potatoes, our first time growing them THIS way so we should be happy with WHATEVER we get!   I still can't help but be depressed by this photo.  By God I WILL get better at growing potatoes! It looks like these possibly grew from either some baking potatoes that we haphazardly threw in there or some fingerling potatoes.  Not sure which.   Now while the potato harvest was meager this was the other stuff we collected tonight. Kohlrabi, Eggplant(black beauty), 1 brandy wine tomato, several Amish paste, several black cherry tomatoes, 3 lemon cucumbers, several okra and that's all folks.  Not bad at all.  And that all being said, I'm going to b...

Today we planned to run to the gym since we haven't been there in decades however after breakfast we began talking about all that needed to be done with the yard, then we got caught up planting, cleaning up, etc so we never actually made it to the gym. Good news is that we got loads done!!!  Early this morning we took some advice from Ray at Youtube. Well that then led to our desire to work a bit outdoors to clean up after the lovely storm we had yesterday.  Let me just say, I never, ever want to work out there again in flip flops in the cold, wet mud.  My feet were FROZEN! After an hours worth of work we decided to head on out to Walmart in search of chicken wire for our potatoes(see further down for instructions on that!  A new modified way to grow potatoes, much like a potato condo!) Walmart didn't exactly have everything we needed however my husband treated me to a brand new set of rubber galoshes!  Let me just say working out there in the mud does NOT f...

A while ago I posted a blog on Seed Saving where I shared my own idea of storing seeds.  Well imagine how surprised I was when I found that Walmart sells the exact type of container that I wanted to use. So, since they were so cheap(aka affordable) I picked up two of them up. I labeled each container by number so that I can always switch things around later when I run out of one type of seed and replace it with another.  Next I just made up a list or legend that tells me what number container has what type of seed.  Too easy! I did find that the bigger seeds don't fit into the larger containers (the larger ones have small screw top lids that fit about 5 of the larger type of seed.  No good) so I found a type of container that has larger storage areas.  Then I just numbered that and again, made up a legend.  Done! Takes up so much less room than before.  I've also swiped some of those little moisture control packets that you often find in shoe pac...