Being careful not to bite off more than I could chew I focused on four flower varieties last spring to grow, but in order to do that I had to start in late summer. I’m starting this cycle again and thought I’d share with you what I did last year, so if you wanted to follow along with me this year, you can. I can also tell you what I did that was a complete failure, so you can know ahead of time what not to do.
(Botanical Interests Snapdragon Tall Maximum Blend)
Please note that I am in zone 9 (you can find your zone here), so our winters don’t get too cold and these flowers can easily overwinter and survive the frosts and very occasional freezes we do get, as long as I keep them covered.

(Botanical Interests Lauren’s Grape)
I started my seedlings off in mid September. So right about now. Last year for ease I picked up Renee’s Garden & Botanical Interests seeds at the local hardware store. This year I decided that since I proved my worth last year, I would splurge on specialized seeds from Swallowtail Garden Seeds.

(Botanical Interests Hungarian Blue poppy – the most beautiful flower I’ve grown!)
Last year in Mid-September I planted:

• Botanical Interests Snapdragon Tall Maximum Blend
• Botanical Interests Echinacea
• Botanical Interests Lauren’s Grape
• Botanical Interests Hungarian Blue poppy

This year I’ve planted seeds all from Swallowtail Garden Seeds:

• Madame Butterfly Snapdragon
• Twinny Appleblossom Snapdragon
• Mother of Pearl Shirley Poppy
• Meadow Pastels Iceland Poppy
• Danish Flag Breadseed Poppy
• left over Botanical Interests snapdragon seeds from last year

I plant my seeds in all sorts of left over 6-packs we save along with big plastic clam shell produce containers from Costco. I haven’t spent any money on fancy seedling trays, although I probably should at some point. If we happen to have seed starting soil mix, I’ll use that. Otherwise I just use potting soil. Whatever we have on hand. After I seed them, I label them. That’s a very important little step that I have often forgotten in the past, thinking I’ll certainly remember what I planted. I never do.

(Botanical Interests Lauren’s Grape)
Then I take our kitchen trays and cookie sheets and cover them in aluminum foil to protect them and place all the seedling containers on these. I put all of these on our washer and dryer which get great southern light and is close to a water source for easy washing. I also happen to walk past this spot multiple times a day so I can keep a steady eye on how things are looking. Now friends, learn from me and if you choose to place your seeds on your washer and dryer, please, please level your machines first. Two years ago I had an entire cookie sheets worth of sweet pea seeds vibrate themselves off the washer and all over the floor. A lot of bad words came out of my mouth that day and I don’t want that to have to happen to you too.

By early November all my seedlings had come up and I planted them out into raised beds. That’s about six weeks of growing inside in trays before I planted them out. Then I covered them all in agribond floating row cover. That, I believe, was a key step in seedling success. The agribond keeps pesky bugs and birds from eating the seedlings and keeps them a little bit warmer during the winter. Rain water permeates through the agribond. I kept the agribond on over the flower starts all winter. If there is one thing you are going to invest in, other than seeds, it’s that agribond.

By March I was snipping my first snapdragons to bring inside and by April 9th my first Hungarian Blue Poppy bloomed, which was so gorgeous!

If I did this, you can too. Go out to the hardware store or nursery and buy a few seed packets and get planting this weekend! I’ll keep checking in with you over the winter about our fledgling flowers. And in November we can discuss sweet peas. If you’d like a good list of zone 9 seeds you can start now, check out Floret’s article for more ideas.

p.s. Thank you for your patience while I was selling the Ultimate Healthy Bundles package the last few weeks. I don’t normally ‘sell’ things on this blog and it felt like a bit of a stretch for me. I’m not a natural sales person. But I really believed in the package and was so excited that my book was part of it. Thank you to those who did invest in it!

Now that I’ve used it for a full year and can honestly recommend that you give this a try. My skin feels so soft after I wash it and not dry like when I use soap. You know that tight, dry feeling that you get after you wash your face with soap? I don’t get that after using this recipe. Even though I don’t use soap, my face is clean after I use this scrub.

Normally I don’t wear too much make up, usually just a bit of mascara and a touch of eyeliner. However on days when I do wear more makeup, I do add a tiny bit of liquid soap to this mix.

Here’s the formula for making Cleansing Grains:

1 c. oatmeal
small handful of each:
dried lavender
dried rose petals
dried calendula
dried mint

Blend well in blender. Store in an airtight jar.

To Use:
Splash warm water onto face. Pour 1 Tablespoon of Cleansing Grains into hand and rub grains between both hands. Apply to wet face in gentle circular motions for about 15 seconds. Rinse off and enjoy your clean soft skin!

Other uses:

• Add a handful to bath water for a soothing, skin healing bath. Perfect for eczema and dry skin.
• Add 1 TB honey to 1 TB Cleansing Grains and use as a face mask

Enjoy!

Our ladies are on the move! Scott and I have been wanting to build a chicken tractor for a couple of years now and we finally did it.

I got the desire to move our chickens to a mobile tractor when I read Joel Salatin’s Pastured Poultry for Profit. Now we don’t really aim to make a profit with our poultry, but he gives great advice even for a backyard operation like ours. The idea behind a mobile chicken coop, or chicken tractor is that every day you move it one space ahead onto new pasture. This allows the birds to eat fresh grass and bugs and allows that space of land to receive a proper amount of fertilization from the chicken poop. If you leave chickens in one spot too long, not only will they eat everything that grows until it dies, but also the nitrogen from their manure will completely deaden the soil. By having both their food and their manure on the move, you are making both the chickens and the land healthier.

And in addition, because these are laying birds, having them eat fresh greens and bugs makes their eggs more nutritious, which of course makes better food for us.

You see, it’s better for everyone.

You also eliminate that pesky chore of coop cleaning if you can keep them mobile. Having chickens live in a dirty, dusty coop raises their chances for catching disease. And let’s be honest, it’s one of our least favorite jobs to tackle on the weekends.

I researched a lot of chicken tractor plans and wasn’t happy with anything I saw. I wanted to build this myself and I’m pretty new to construction so many plans were either intimidatingly difficult, or they were too simple and not easily moved. Then there were some that were frugally made, but just plain ugly. Then I found this YouTube video and knew it was the perfect plan for us. A few days later and we started building. I did have Scott help me build this in the end. He’s a great building partner because he doesn’t like unfinished projects laying about, so he’s a good motivator to get out everyday and work some more on it. In all it took us one full weekend day and a few evenings to build it. We followed the directions of the video pretty exactly.

We ended up using mainly wood we already had on hand. We did have to buy hardware cloth, fence boards, and two eight foot boards along with the wheels and a whole bucket of nuts, bolts and washers. Our grand total for what we need to buy for this was just under $200. It’s not a cheap project. To lighten the load the video suggests ripping 2×6 and 2x4s in half lengthwise to 2x3s and 2x2s. This helped a lot. And while it’s still heavy, it rolls so well on it’s wheels, that I can easily move it around. Can you see how the wheels work on those levers. You can position them to raise the coop and move it or by swinging that 2×4 over they lay down flat. It’s a pretty cool design.

The only thing we haven’t figured out fully yet is the watering and food situation. The video suggest putting in a 5 gallon square bucket next to the laying boxes and hooking up a PVC extenstion with chicken watering nipples. That all sounds well and good, but how we can refill that bucket is a mystery to us. That is our puzzle to solve. In the meantime we just put their water container in with them along with their grain container and that works for the meantime.

Now our field is as dead and dry as it gets, so we ran them along our septic leach lines for a week to eat down the dock that grows like crazy there. They’ve eaten it all down and for now, we’ve placed them back in the main coop. Because of the timing of the season we have giant bowls full of produce and kitchen scraps for them to enjoy. As soon as we (ever!) get some rain and once the vegetable garden is finished, we will move them back into the mobile coop to enjoy their salad bar. Hopefully this next spring we’ll be all ready to keep them in there moving along. If luck plays a part and we get decent rainfall, we can keep them moving all over the backyard, helping Scott to mow the field.

And the empty chicken coop left standing? Well, it is big enough to fit a few sheep I suggested to Scott…..

I’m reading An Everlasting Meal, which I’m really enjoying. It’s a book about cooking. Not really a cook book, but something you can read front from cover and talks about all the things you can make from simple everyday things, from say, an egg or beans. It’s like reading a long letter written by your poetic friend who really loves to cook and is hoping to give you inspiration in the kitchen. It’s made me want to cook more, and too cook more creatively and as the tagline says, ‘with economy’. I wish this book would just play in the background of my head every time I entered the kitchen. Don’t you just wish that was how it was with some books? That it could continuously play softly and subtly in the background of your thinking at appropriate times? Yes, I wish this one would turn on every time I entered the kitchen. So often I get caught up in dinner being an elaborate affair using many store bought ingredients and Tamar’s writing just calms me down and encourages me to look at what I already have on hand. I really like this book. I could use more of this cooking mentorship in my life.

Thank you to all who commented on my new ‘Makers Marketplace’ shopping center suggestion. Wouldn’t that be so fun to actually put together and have as a resource? I don’t know if I can go from introverted stay-at-home-mom/self employeed graphic designer to dynamic, extroverted, wheelin’ & dealin’ shopping mall developer anytime soon. However, if that switch happens, you’ll all be invited to cut the ribbon with me on opening day. In the meantime, we can dream.

Oh and the Ultimate Living Healthy Bundle that my ebook is a part of is on sale starting today. It’s for a limited time so don’t miss it! Buy today

Sometimes I wish I had giant gobs of money. On a normal day I don’t spend much, if any time, dreaming about having large amounts of money, but every once in a while, the desire comes up. For instance a month ago we had to pick up a quick birthday present for a soon to be eight year old girl. We were in the next town over and stopped at a new shopping center to see what they had. After parking and looking all around I decided that Target was our best option. Actually I knew it wasn’t a good option at all, but it was our only option that afternoon. I wanted to get this little girl something crafty and something she could make. Choosing Target to find that object was going to be tough. In fact as we walked closer to the front entrance I realized that I felt a little repulsed by the entire shopping center full of cheaply made goods. This center is filled with cheap (made overseas) home goods stores and fast (environmentally unfriendly) fashion. Things you’ll buy today and grow tired of in a year, if not sooner. Things that ultimately will end up in a landfill. Satisfying our immediate urge to buy, yet ending up cluttering up our homes and making us feel even more empty inside. Its a dismal feeling to look around and see that all of this land was covered by concrete and asphalt, with millions of dollars of resources only to fulfill our consumerist desire to get the buzz of instant gratification shopping.

I’m not against shopping. In the right setting I enjoy it actually. But I don’t enjoy big box shopping at all.

Right then the thought came to me of an entirely new sort of shopping center. And that’s where the need for giant gobs of money came in. I want to build a Maker’s Marketplace. Imagine a shopping center full of stores where you can buy quality ‘ingredients’ to turn into your own creations. I suppose back before industrialization all shopping hubs would look similar to what I’m about to describe. A place where you could buy simple, useful items with the intent to transform them into things you need. They already have these stores scattered around your towns, but I want to bring them all together into one shopping center.

What if we combined a quality fabric store and placed that next to a craft store. Put a fully stocked hobby store next to that. Of course a yarn store. Probably in the middle of the center I’d put a good natural grocery store. On the other side of that a kitchen & cooking supply store. On the far side I’d invite a hardware store to move in with a large lumber yard. I might even make room for an auto parts store. And of course a gardening shop with a plant nursery that extended out far and wide. Across the parking lot I’d have a materials yard were you could pick up a load of gravel, flagstone, compost or whatever you needed that day.

In between these larger stores I’d imagine smaller, independently owned shops such as an herb/apothecary store. A coffee shop or two. A few small quick and healthy restaurants. Even a few boutiques where people have handmade items to sell. Of course a stop off for an ice cream cone. A music store with instruments and lessons. What about a shop selling fermentation items for making wine and beer? An amazingly stocked seed store. A shop that carried high quality gardening tools. A few places for local clothing designers to sell their creations. I wouldn’t be against a quality shoe store, should the right vendor come along.

Scattered amongst all of this would be spaces for classes and workshops. I would encourage each store to host weekly or monthly classes on how to make things. We could host Maker’s Birthday Parties for adults and children. There could be farmers markets hosted in the parking lot once or twice a week. Maybe on Friday evenings we could host all the food trucks in the area with musicians playing for all.

What do you think? What else do we need in our shopping center? Do you like the idea? This, at least, is the type of shopping center I’d love to go spend time and money at. A place where you feel good leaving your money. A shopping experience that would fill us up and get our hands and minds busy creating something new. What if the end result of our shopping trip left us more satisfied and proud of ourselves for taking on a new skill. Wouldn’t it be a good day if we left that shopping center, not only with the happy buzz of a new purchase but that we could come home and satisfy our minds and hands with our innate desire to create something new? We are hard wired to want to use our brains and bodies to make new things, not just to passively buy and come home and mindlessly sit on the couch.

Well anyway, that’s my dream for now. The Makers Marketplace.

(And as for the photos? Well a few weeks ago some friends came over with 50lbs of apples and we had a fun and festive friday night making apple cider. about our press.)

(p.s. If you haven’t already signed up for it, go ahead and sign up for the Ultimate Bundles a FREE mini-course called “The 4 Essential Habits of Healthy Families”.)

Boy, it’s been over a month since I’ve checked in with you regarding knitting and reading and wouldn’t you know, the same project is on the needles! Scott’s sweater is a big project and you’ll be seeing it lots as I hopefully check in with you more often these days. Luckily it’s very enjoyable knitting to do and with a little drama and interest added with the cables, it feels like it’s going pretty fast.

I’ve been reading a lot this summer. Light reads like ‘The Power of Habit‘, ‘The Vacationers‘ and most recently ‘The Big Tiny‘ & ‘You Can Buy Happiness‘. The Big Tiny I found to be a really interesting read. It’s written by Dee Williams who is a pioneer of sorts in the tiny house movement. I really enjoyed her comedic and thoughful take on why her heart health issues changed her outlook on life and why she downsized so radically into living in a teeny tiny life. I highly recommend it. It gets you thinking. And purging. Two things I always welcome in my life.

You Can Buy Happiness is a good read, but since I’ve read a lot of things like this (simplify your life, downsize, get involved with the community, get out of debt etc) I just skimmed it.

In other exciting book news, my ebooklet Simple Handcrafted Body Care has been included in the upcoming Healthy Living Bundle. I bought this collection of ebooks last fall and I was thrilled that I was asked to participate in this years offering! The bundle isn’t for sale yet, but as a pre-sale offer the folks at Ultimate Bundles have put together a FREE mini-course called “The 4 Essential Habits of Healthy Families”.

The course contains a collection of quick and easy-to-follow lessons from trusted bloggers:

• Essential Habit #1: “Nurturing your Best Self” (with Heather from Mommypotamus)
• Essential Habit #2: “Staying Fit as a Family (Gym Membership Not Required)” (with Crystal from Money Saving Mom)
• Essential Habit #3: “From Scratch Meal-Making” (with Katie from Kitchen Stewardship)
• Essential Habit #4: “Using Natural Remedies” (with Katie from Wellness Mama)

Each lesson comes with a 25-minute audio lesson, PDF transcript, and a practical “Take Action” guide.

If you want to get your family on the road to real health, it’s simple to get started: sign up for your FREE mini-course now!

Hurry because this mini course is only available until Sunday, September 6th. Don’t miss your chance to access this exclusive content! Grab it now.

I’m certainly signing up because I really could use a kick in the rear this fall. This summer was sort of a hum-drum one, seriously lacking in drive and goals and positive motivation. I could really use some advise to make fall a better season.

How has this summer been going for you?

All that said, I picked a fairly complicated cabled sweater pattern. In fact it was seeing this pattern come out in Brooklyn Tweed that inspired me to knit him a sweater in the first place. It’s going to take a lot of time to knit this and a fair amount of brain energy to keep these cables straight, so after all of this, if he doesn’t wear this thing, I might just divorce him. Of course I’m completely kidding, it’s been really fun to knit. Not only does it have interesting cable patterns going on it’s full of tiny little details which I love. And I feel that it’s a knitting challenge to make this such a perfectly fitting and comfortable sweater that he’ll love putting it on. And if I achieve such a feat and if he still doesn’t wear it, well then….

In other knitting related news, I’m hooked back into natural dyeing. You remember I challenged myself to make a fair isle sweater out of yarn that I dyed from plants on our property. I sort of dyed myself out with that project. But this spring I’m starting to get hooked again. I watched this video of Sasha Duerr the other day, which is really inspiring. I have her book and Rebecca Burgess’ book as well. Both are really good books if you want to learn more yourself. Anyway, I watched her video in the middle of a sort of ‘down and out’ kind of day and I walked straight out into the garden and picked a large jar worth of marigolds, filled it with water and let it sit in the sun.

I was hoping that just sitting in the sun would be enough to extract the color, but it wasn’t, so I brought it in the house and poured it all into a pot and let it simmer on low for almost and hour. At the same time I simmered the yarn in alum, which is a mordant that helps the wool absorb and keep the color of the dye.

Now I’m not a scientific person by any means, so I can’t tell you the calculated weight of the marigolds nor did I set timers on any of this. I go about all of this in a very intuitive manner. So after simmering a jar full of marigolds for about an hour and then letting that sit for maybe another hour or two until I felt like all the color was extracted from the flowers, I strained it and added the yarn and turned the heat slowly back up to just below a simmer. I did that for about an hour then turned it all off, went to bed and woke up to this beautiful mustard yellow yarn.

It was so magical, I’m already planning on my next venture, which should be the niger hollyhocks. I think I’ve almost collected enough to give it a go. I just wanted to add, that natural dyeing isn’t hard. You don’t need complicated materials. If you are interested in trying this out, you can totally do it. All you need is 100% white wool or silk and alum, which can be found in the spice section of most grocery stores. Believe me, if you are having a hum drum day, and have access to any flowering marigold plants, which are abundant this time of year, you too can try this.

Try it and tell me how it goes, alright?

Most of our meals have been based on what we need to eat in the garden. For instance at the moment we are always thinking of new ways to use eggs, beans and zucchini. We had zucchini fritters last night which us adults loved, a much harder sell on the kiddos.

The kids and I ventured to the yarn store yesterday to stock up on white yarn. I plan on dying with those niger hollyhocks again and trying a dye with the marigolds too.

It rained yesterday! The craziest thing. A group of us had already planned on a pool playdate so we went ahead and followed through with it. California kids almost never get to swim in the rain. For us it’s been a really nice treat to have a rainy cozy day in the middle of our long, hot summer.

How’s your garden growing?

(joining up with Soulemama’s In the Garden)

Typically, on weeks that I join up with Ginny’s yarn along and Nicole’s Keep Calm, Craft On, I write about knitting and reading. But it’s hard with the children at home to find enough time to read so I hope you don’t mind that I pair knitting with gardening this week. These pictures seems so calm and soothing. Inside the house it’s a wild mess of sibling bickering this summer, so being outside is always a good place to be right now.

Yesterday I finally finished this cardigan that I’ve been working on since April. I used gorgeous Radius yarn from Knitterly. It’s a 100% merino wool from Vreseis Farm just an hour or so away from us. Dreamy stuff and would be perfect for a highly cabled fisherman’s sweater. The pattern is called Vodka Lemonade and I thought it would be a great little cropped, three-quarter sleeve cardigan to throw on over tank tops, which I wear all the time. I wear fairly simple clothes. Not much lace work or cables, but having the lace work go all the way up the back and the seed stitching makes this cardigan really pretty. Knitting it was fun, this pattern was the perfect blend of simple and interesting for me.

Small parts of our garden are starting to look like little meadows, this time of year at least. Walking around today I realized that I wouldn’t mind if it always looked a bit like a meadow. It takes me a long time to make design decisions regarding our house and our garden. Do we go with structured? Modern grasses? Overgrown, colorful homestead mish-mash? We’re hurting for water too much to go with overgrown and bountiful. Modern, symmetrical grasses planted in tidy rows are just too…structured for my taste. But I’m liking this meadow idea. Maybe I need to work on propagating the plants that are already here and spreading them outwards.

There is a lot of talk about this next winter being an El Nino year, which means that there is a chance that we could get a very rainy winter. Or it could be just as dry as it’s been the past four years. We won’t know until we go through it. But as always I remain hopeful so I allow myself to think that we’ll have enough water next spring that I can plant away, guilt free.

Today I asked my husband, Scott, to give us a little write up on how he’s learned to support our tomatoes. After 14+ summers of tomato gardening together, we’ve gotten it down to a fine science. Since tomato support is his task, I asked him to give us the low down on how to do it right.

Tomato Support
There are all sorts of support contraptions sold for tomato plants these days. Some have been around forever. Some are new ideas. Some work, some don’t. There are wooded stakes, spiral metal stakes, hoop cages, square collapsible cages, etc. I’ve tried many of these with only moderate success. Wooden stakes work well but it’s a lot of work getting them set in and then securing the vines to them with twine all season as the tomato grows. Cages are the convenient because it’s a one-time setup for the season. Most of the cages sold however are not big enough to hold a healthy tomato plant and many of the cheaper ones are too flimsy. The issues I would have is that the tomato plant would eventually grow over the cage out the top and down the sides making it hard to manage and stems would break. Or the weight of the plant would cause the whole thing to fall over. Also the hoop cages have narrower hoops at the bottom and some tomato plants don’t want to grow in a neat V-shape to fit that. I needed something strong, easy to get at, evenly spaced, tall enough, and easy to set up.

Many years ago, I noticed that my dad was using something that looked homemade.  They were heavy duty circular wire cages. I asked him where he got them and a friend who was a very experienced gardener had given them to him. They turned out to be concrete wire. Concrete wire comes in a roll. It is used for, you guessed it, concrete. It’s put in concrete patios and such along with rebar to strengthen and help with cracking. It comes in various widths and lengths and has a 6 inch squares which gives you room to get your hands and pruners in yet gives plenty of support for the vines as they grow. Anyway seeing them in action was one of those moments where you think this is the way, why did no one tell me? I’m telling you now, this is what you want. You will not be disappointed. They work the best hands down at containing and supporting a large healthy tomato plant. The only downside to these, and it is definitely worth considering if you are tight on space, is where to put them when they are not in use. They are rigid and big. They don’t collapse in any way so they take up a lot of room.  If you have a spot in or behind a shed or something they are completely worth it.

Building the Cages
Rather than going through the details of building the cage here, I found a good post here on the process. I will share some tips that I’m not sure if are included in that post. One is that you want the cages not to be too wide or narrow in diameter. Too narrow and the tomato will be constrained and sending a lot of shoots out the sides. Too wide and the plant can fall over inside. I agree with the Tomatoville post that the best diameter is between 20 and 22 inches. If you follow those instructions it should come out right. Concrete wire comes in various widths of 4, 5, 6, or 7 feet. I used the 5 foot width. My tomatoes often get big enough to spill over the top. If you want to go bigger, you can but just be aware that that the downside is manageability. Also a 50 or 100 ft roll of 7 ft concrete wire is HEAVY.  One time I ziptied 2 of the 5ft ones together for a 9.5 ft cage to see if I could grow the tomato that tall. It just made it   . Impressive but needing a ladder to pick tomatoes is kind of a pain and storing a large cage like that is a real hassle.

Setting the Cages in Place
Once you have your cages built and your tomato starts in the ground, it time to start thinking about putting them in. I wait until the plants are about 18 inches tall. Make sure and space the plants with enough room between them to accommodate the cages plus more if you use the drain pipes for deep watering. You need to install those drain pies first. For spacing the plants you need 2.5 to 3 feet between each plant. What I do is put mulch down first around the plant. Then I put the cage over it with the plant centered and the cage as level as possible. The next thing I learned the hard way. SECURE the cage. If you leave it at this point, everything will be fine until the plant gets big. Then one day a wind will come by and blow it over. If you are super unlucky like me one year it will domino and take them all down. So secure the cage to the ground. The best and easiest way to do this is to buy some rebar from the hardware store. You need it to be about 4 ft lengths. So if you can find that great otherwise buy 8 ft lengths and cut them with a hacksaw. I hammer one for each cage in the ground right next to the outside of the cage. It should go in a good 18 inches to be really secure. Then just secure the cage to it with twine or a zip tie. You should never need to mess with the cage again for the rest of the year.

I hope this helps. It sure has made a difference for me. You can support and easily manage bigger plants much more successfully giving you more tomatoes per plant.

As you can see from the photos here we have a few tomato cages built with left over deer fencing. You can see from that one (the one on the left) that it’s nowhere near as strong a support as the concrete wire. The mesh is also a lot closer together at the bottom, so in order to get at the tomatoes we’ve had to cut away some wire so we can reach in (below): 

 Share with us, how do you support your tomatoes?