So I know that we haven’t even hit the “official” first day of summer yet, but despite that fact if you live in zones 4, 5 or 6 it’s time to start thinking about your fall garden.  Yep, if you are planning on growing your own seedlings you need to start thinking hard about getting some seeds planted.

Fall is quickly becoming my favorite time of year to garden.  The cooler temperatures and dying pests make gardening easier and the veggies tastier.  Please keep in mind days to harvest, your seed packet may say that those broccoli plants will be producing in 55 days.  That number is based on spring production.  If you are planting in the fall you should add at least 10 days to your harvest time because the temperatures are getting cooler and the days shorter.

So what should you be thinking about right now?  Mainly you are going to want to get started on your Cole crops, Broccoli, Kohl Rabi, Cabbage and Kale.  These all take a little longer to get established in the fall garden so if you get those seeds planted indoors within the next 2 weeks or so you will have some healthy starts ready to go out in the garden in early to mid August.  Usually 6 to 8 weeks is plenty of time to get seedlings ready for the garden.  Be sure to plan on some time to “harden” your starts off.  Often the conditions in August are not the best for tender new seedlings, so be sure to give yourself a week or so to slowly introduce your seedlings to the August weather.

So what am I planting this week?

1.  Broccoli – 2 varieties Pack Man and Waltham – I know Pack Man is a steady producer in the fall.  It is a fairly short season crop with heads ready in about 50 days from the time the seedlings go out.  They also produce good side shoots for weeks after the main head is harvested.  So seedlings planted in early August should be ready to eat around October 1st.  My Waltham starts are an experiment.  Waltham produces bigger heads and I like them better but they are also 80 days to harvest so that puts us close to November, we will see if they work.  I will plant 20 Pack Man and 4 Waltham this week.

2.  Kohl Rabi – I’m hopping this year is our year for Kohl Rabi.  I have planted it for 3 years with only limited success.  We will have a lot of space this year in the home garden because there is no competing summer garden so I’m going to do 12 starts.  The seedlings are usually harvest ready in about 60 days which means we should have Kohl Rabi ready to eat in early October.  I will be growing both white & purple Vienna.

3.  Cabbage – An August planting of an early variety of cabbage like “Golden Acre” will produce some nice heads for us by mid October.  Remember that early varieties of cabbage are not as good for storage as some of the larger varieties, so if you are planting these don’t over do it, only plant what you can reasonably use in 30 to 45 days.  We will be planting 8 seedlings.

4.  Kale – I will be planting both Vates & Tuscan Kale.  These plants wont be as big as my spring and summer planted kale but they will provide us with lots of young and tender leaves.  And the plants are very hardy!  The Tuscan kale should keep producing leaves for us well into December with out any frost protection.  I will plant 4 seedlings of each variety.

5.  Brussels Sprouts – Mrs. Stoney loves Brussels Sprouts, I’ve been promising her that I would try to grow some of our own for years, and this year is the year!!  These are really new to our garden so we will call them an experimental crop and see how they do.  I will be planting 4 seedlings.

6.  Summer Crisp lettuce – I will be planting some more of the Summer Crisp lettuce variety Nevada this year.  We are always looking for ways to extend our lettuce harvest.  I’m hopping we will have this Lettuce ready to eat by late August, well before our traditional fall lettuce is ready.

7.  Swiss Chard – I will also be planting a little Swiss Chard this week for early fall harvest.  More will be started in 4 weeks for a late fall harvest.  I will be planting 4 seedlings of “bright lights” variety.

So what else can you be planting right now?  It’s still not too late to get some corn in and any beans planted between now and July 21st will still give you a good crop.  It’s also time to start thinking about a spot to plant some fall peas, you will want to get them in the last week of July for a late September harvest.

I’m linking up this week with the Monday Harvest report at Daphne’s Dandelions and The Tuesday Garden Party at An Oregon Cottage.

My seedlings along with everything else garden related have been neglected in favor of house  here lately.  Luckily seedlings do pretty well on their own.

These seedlings were planted on May 21st.  So they are looking pretty good for only 3 weeks.  I spent a few minutes transplanting a few plants from one cell to another.  My seed stock is getting a little old so germination was a little hit and miss.  You can see the cell pack in the top left it was pretty much all miss!!  So what is growing??

First are some summer crisp lettuce plants.  The variety is Nevada.  This will be my second attempt at summer lettuce.  Last years ended up failing because of the impending move.  These lettuce plants are a bib type lettuce and are very heat tolerant.  They should resist bolting in our summer heat, and I hope they also resist getting bitter.  They will be put to the test as they will be ready to go out into the garden the first week of July, right when the heat really turns on here in Utah.

Also up are 3 cabbage plants.  These are Golden Acres.  These are an experiment; I’ve never put cabbage out in the summer before.  My hope is they will be ready to eat in very early fall and give us some cold slaw to go along with our tomatoes and corn!!

This is Tuscan Kale, I’m hoping these will be big happy plants by early October and will provide us with plenty of leaves up until the hard freeze in early December.

Also on the right are some Vates Kale.  I’m very proud of these seedlings because they come from seeds I harvested myself last year!!

About 3 more weeks under the lights and they will be ready to hit the garden.  Now if I can only get some space ready for them!!

On Memorial Day we finally got a chance to get back to the home garden and do a little more work.

So this will be our first new garden bed.  The eventual plan is to have 6 or 7 beds that are 4 feet wide and around 30 feet long.  These beds will be border with lumber and slightly raised with 1 foot walk ways between.

You can see that this one is a long way from finished.  This year we are settling for just getting the grass out and the beds dug up.

I am trying to form up the dirt to reflect the eventual dimensions.

I’m not overly impressed with the soil here.  I have to admit I’m a little bummed about it.  The soil at our old place was really good and we are so close that I was hoping it would be the same.  But no such luck!!  Instead we have a fairly heavy clay soil.  It will need a lot of work and compost.  I’ve seen worse soil but it is going to take a few years to get it where we want it!

As soon as we finished digging this bed we added some compost and started planting.  I had a black berry start and 12 raspberries that have been sitting in the garage for 5 weeks.  On top of that we also had 100 bare-root strawberries.  I think the strawberries will be okay but I’m worried that the raspberries are not going to make it being planted bare-root this late in the season.  Oh well!  We couldn’t just let them sit there un-planted so I figured we should give them a try!

It feels good to actually have a little bit of tilled earth in the back yard again!

For those of you following our blog you know that we just moved into a new house.  We are super happy with the new house but the one thing it is missing is a garden.

This is the spot where the garden will go but we have been so busy with the house remodel that there was no chance we were going to get all that grass dug up in time to plant a summer garden.  Lucky for us we have lots of gardening friends.

Say hello to our borrowed garden.  It is on the property of a friend and neighbor in our old neighborhood.  I was over to his place a month of so ago to pick up some onion starts for my in-laws and I mentioned that we probably wouldn’t be planting a summer garden this year.  Leo very generously offered us some space in his garden.

To put it into perspective Leo has a 1 1/2 acre garden!!  So he was willing to give us a lot of space that was otherwise going to go unplanted this year.  For years Leo has used his huge garden to grow vegetable for the downtown farmers market.  His son has taken over the stand now and they don’t use all of Leo’s space.

So our borrowed garden is actually bigger than our new garden will be.  I was just overwhelmed with Leo’s generosity, he won’t even let me help pay the water bill.  Needless to say were are very excited to have somewhere to grow tomatoes this summer.  It also lets us take our time on the home garden and spend the summer getting the space ready for fall planting!!

So what did we plant?

2 – Sun Sugar Tomatoes

2- Big Beef Tomatoes

6 – Celebrity Tomatoes

A 50 foot row of Red Pontiac potatoes

A 50 foot row of Onion sets

2 small rows of green beans

A hill of zucchini

A hill of Patty Pan Squash

4 hills of Crimson Sweet Water melons

4 hills of Hales Best Cantaloupe

4 hills of Crenshaw Melons

1 small row of cucumbers

All of that took up a good portion of the space he gave us, but there is still a very large space that we are going to plant sweet corn in!!  Mrs. Stoney is thrilled, she loves home grown sweet corn but I seldom plant it because it takes up so much space.  We just need to figure out how to water the corn.

The other nice thing about this borrowed garden is it is fairly close to our new  house.  It’s only about a 3 minute drive or a 10 minute bike ride!!  I stopped by tonight and everything looks good.  The tomatoes are settling in just fine and some of the onion sets are coming up already!  A few more days and we should see most of the other seeds coming up as well!

We are finally settled enough that I felt like I could take a few minutes and focus on some gardening today!

So I got some seeds started inside for a little later in the summer.  It’s really hard to believe that it is May 21st and I am just starting my first seeds of the season.  In 2012 my first seeds went in on January 14th!  Ugh!!!  I have really missed gardening for the last 7 months as we have gone through this move.

Here’s where the seed starter will be in the new house.  The only spot we could find was in the garage. (As you can see the garage is still a mess)  The good thing about it is the seed starting rack is easy to get to and right by a nice bright window for some added natural light.  I’m a little worried about my late winter seedlings as the garage is sure to be pretty cold in January and February.  So we will have to see what we can do about that in 6 months.

Of course it’s very late to be starting any seeds indoors but there are a few things I wanted to get going:

1.  Summer Crisp Lettuce (Nevada) – 8 Cells

2.  Cabbage (Golden Acre) – 4 cells

3.  Kale (Vates) – 4 cells (I’m excited about this one as these are my first saved seeds, read more by clicking here)

4.  Kale (Luciano) – 4 cells

5.  Chives – 2 cells

6.  Parsley – 2 cells

The cabbage, chives and parsley are all experiments.  I’m worried it’s too late for the cabbage (and too early for fall starts), but figured it was worth a try.  The parsley is for the fall cold frames and I’m just hoping to get some chives established this year for next years harvest.

I dutifully recorded what I started in my garden journal.  If you don’t use a garden journal you are sure missing out.  I have been keeping one for 5 years now and it sure makes planning and record keeping easy!  (Click here to read more about my garden journal.)

We are hoping tomorrow we can get over to our borrowed garden and get all our summer crops planted!!

So now that we are finally closed on our new home I thought I would give you guys a little perspective on what it is like to buy a home that is a “short sale”.  I’m writing this article from the perspective of a buyer.  For the last 15 years I have been working in the accounting side of the real estate industry so I’m more familiar with how a short sale works than a lot of folks, but I am by no means an expert.  I’m writing this to give you guys a little taste of the process in case buying a short sale home is something you may be interested in.

There are four things I’m going to cover today: First, what is a “short sale”, second the offer process, third the bank approval process and forth other issues that can come up.

First off the word “short” in short sale has nothing to do with time.  In fact the process is not “short” at all.  A short sale refers to a home that is being sold for less than the amount owed on the home.  So the perfect example would be a home purchased in 2006 for $300,000, with a mortgage of $275,000.  Now after the “housing bubble” burst in 2008/2009 the home may only be worth $240,000.  So the owners of the home cannot sell it for what it is worth.  In many cases the mortgaging bank maybe willing to take a loss on the home.  So the bank will let the home be sold for $240,000 and they will “forgive’ the additional $35,000 in debt.

Often, but not always, a short sale home will be in distress.  The owner may be having trouble paying the mortgage and the bank is willing to do a short sale to get the distressed loan off it’s books,  instead of foreclosing on the home.

So why would you want to buy a short sale?  Well in our case we chose to buy our house because it was such a good deal.  Often there will be an additional discount built into the price of a short sale home.  In our case we got our home at about 90% of market value so that made it worth the wait.  This will not always be the case but you can often find a nice home at a really good price if you are willing and able to wait through the process.  Usually the home owner is still living in the home and caring for it so you have that advantage as well.  A foreclosure home may often be abandoned and not well cared for.

The offer process is the next topic that is very unique with many short sales.  In order to attract buyers, listing agents of short sale homes will some times list the home for a price that is much lower than what they actually expect to get.  In our case the home was listed for over $50,000 less than it was worth.  This practice brings a lot of interest quickly.  If the home is in good shape and is a good value there will be many offers.  So you need to do your homework quickly and decide what you are willing to pay.  This isn’t a traditional bidding process.  You may only get one chance for your offer to be considered so make it  your best.  But don’t allow that fact to cause you to over bid.

The real estate market in our town is currently has a lot of short sales (in fact at the time we made our offer the only homes for sale in our target area were short sales), so we looked at several and we have friends who have been as well.  I know of short sale homes in our town that have had over 25 offers within the first few days.  So don’t plan on coming in with a low ball offer and walking away with a steal.  Offer your best price and see what happens.  After all the offers are in the owner of the home chooses the best offer and that offer is submitted to the bank for approval.

The bank approval process is where most of the time and frustration comes on a short sale home.  Before the home can be sold the bank has to approve the sales price.  Many banks are not in a hurry to do this.  In our case it took 60 days for the bank to approve the deal.  From everything we have heard from our agent and many others that is actually fairly quick!  Many times you will be waiting 90 days or more (in fact I know of someone that has the primary offer on a home that has been waiting 6 months!).  I really have no idea why it takes this long.  While you are waiting expect all kinds of ups and downs.  We must have heard the words “we should hear something by next week” 15 times!!!!

Once the bank approval is in the closing should move forward fairly quickly with around a 30 day closing time frame.  So if you are really lucky you might be looking at a 3 month process.  But it could easily be 4 to 6 months from the time you made the offer till the day you close.  Remember though there is usually a price discount built in to help compensate you for the wait.

There is one question you should ask when you get an accepted offer.  Often if folks are having a hard time paying their mortgage they may be struggling with other things as well.  You would do well to find out if the sellers are in bankruptcy.  Bankruptcy adds an additional wrinkle to the process.  If the owners are in bankruptcy then there will be an additional delay once the bank approval is received.  The bankruptcy court will also need to approve the sale.  Usually that approval is just a formality but the wheels of government move slowly and this can add 30 or more days to the process.  Be sure you ask that question of the listing agent once you know your offer is the winning bid.  You don’t want to wait 3 months for bank approval, just to find out that you are going to have to wait another 30 days for court approval.  It’s better to know that up front.

So if you are going to make an offer on a short sale you need to go into the process with your eyes wide open.  It can easily take 4 months or more to close on the home.  In our case we ended up being 6 1/2 months from the day we made the offer to the day we closed on the home.  We were in the lucky position of having a great little apartment in my parents basement to live in.  That made it cheap and easy for us to wait out the time.  But you need to think really hard about an offer on a short sale if you don’t have somewhere to wait it out.

We love our new little home and the area it is in.  With a some minor work (mostly paint and flooring) we will have a beautiful home that is exact size we wanted in the area we wanted.  But would we do it again???   Well . . . probably (if you ask Mrs. Stoney you would get a big NO)!  We knew this was going to be a long frustrating process when we started.  But wow what an emotional roller coaster. The constant “we should hear something from the bank (or attorney, or trustee, or judge) next week” is pretty exhausting.  I can’t count the times we though we had a closing date set only to see it move back another week because someone didn’t get something done.  The only thing that kept us going through the whole process was how we felt when we first saw the house.  Mrs. Stoney and I left our first showing with a feeling that this was the place for our family and every time we went back that “feeling” was confirmed!  And that feeling kept us on track through the process.  Buying a short sale home is not for the faint of heart and it is not for everyone, but if you are willing to wait a bit you can come out of the process with a nice place at a nice price!!

I’d love your input as well, please feel free to leave comments if you have had an experience buying a short sale home!!

Well after 5 weeks of hard work we are finally living in the new home.  When we bought the house it was live-able, but just barely.  So we decided to use the fact that we were not in any real rush to move in to our advantage.  We have spent the last 5 weeks painting, installing new flooring, adding new trim and fixtures.  And after a lot of work and going way over budget we have a very beautiful home.  Some time soon I will take you on a tour and show you some before and after pictures.

Now that we are living in the house I felt like today was a good time to get started on the garden.

Here’s where the garden will go.  When we are all finished the garden will take up about 1200 square feet.  We plan on having 6 or 7 beds that will each be about 4 x 28 feet long with one foot paths between.  That’s the goal.  This year I would just be happy if we could get all the grass dug out and the ground tilled.

We are so late in the year that we have abandoned all hope of a summer garden here at home.  Instead we hope to have everything ready for our fall and winter garden.  A friend of ours who as a large (1.5 acre) garden has very generously offered to let us use some of his ground to plant our summer crops.  I’m going to visit with him on Wednesday and see how much space he can offer.  I’m hoping to have enough space for our tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and summer squash (and possibly some melons).

But we are under the gun to get some garden space available.  I ordered Blackberries, raspberries and strawberries from Miller Nurseries back in mid March when we thought were going to close.  I was able to delay the strawberry plants until this week.  But the raspberries have been sitting around in the garage for 2 weeks now.

So this evening I started the big task of tearing out the sod.  What you see here took me about 45 minuets of work.  I plan on renting a sod cutter to do the bulk of the work when we are ready but for now I’m just tearing it out with a shovel!

My biggest challenge is going to be what to do with all that sod.  I’m hoping to find a neighbor who has some land and needs a hole filled or something like that.  If not I guess it will be off to the land fill as I don’t have a compost system set up yet and I doubt I will get to it this year.

I’ve seen worse soil that what we have here, but I’ve also seen much better.  It’s pretty heavy clay so I’m going to need to add a lot of organic material!  I guess what I see is pretty much to be expected after the soil has been buried under grass for 15 years.  We are very excited to get started on our new garden.  I look forward to the challenge of growing more food on less land!  We hope to be topping out over 1000 pounds in a few years when the fruit trees start bearing!  And we hope to do that on 1/2 the land we had before!!

Finally after being homeless for 5 1/2 months we are happy to announce that we have closed on our new home!!  Boy what a struggle to get this house closed.  It was a short sale and it took 5 months and 10 days from the day we made the offer till the day it closed.  Wow, we are mentally and spiritually worn out!  But now we are very excited to start this next faze of our life.  So here’s the first shot of our new home!

It’s a cute 2500 square foot home on about a quarter of an acre.  It is only a mile down the road from our old house so the kids will all be able to stay in their same schools and we will still be close to all our friends.  This house offers some real advantages to our family.  First it’s all finished, our old home  had almost 1300 square feet unfinished. But even though this house is almost 1000 square feet smaller that our old house we will have more finished square feet.  Second the yard is a more manageable size.  The yard at the old Stoney Acres was beautiful, but to keep it that way was a lot of work (in the summer we would often spent 10 hours a week each working on the yard).  The new Stoney Acres will have almost as much garden space but a ton less grass and about a million fewer trees.  We will be able to focus on making our vegetable garden and small orchard very productive and we won’t have to worry any more about weeding all those flower beds!!  Third we got a great deal on this house.  It is in need of some TLC, that combined with the smaller yard and house (not to mention today’s great interest rates) mean we have a much smaller mortgage with a payment that is close to half what we were paying before!!

Now the fun part begins.  Before we can move in we have to paint and put all new flooring in.  While we are at it were are going to update all of the trim and make some other major repairs.  The garden will go in a very sunny part of the back yard that is currently grass, so we have a lot of work to do there as well.  So look forward to a bunch of post showing the progress.

DIY Friday is a feature that pops up every once and a while here on Stoney Acres.  We are BIG do it yourselfers around here so we will try to share some of our projects and trick that we have learned over the years.

Baking Soda and Vinegar are used a lot around our place.  We really are not big on chemicals so soda and vinegar are used in place of cleaning chemicals and for many other uses.  One of our favorites is using baking soda and vinegar to clean drains.

Plugged or slow drains are a way of life for us.  With 4 girls in the family all with long hair the shower drains and bathroom sink drains are always getting clogged!

Most commercial cleaners are made with lye.  Which is poisonous, rough on your pipes and really bad for the environment.   So we have found an organic method that works pretty well and doesn’t damage your pipes or put our families health at risk.

Here’s what you do:

1.  If possible take the drain screen off and try and get some of the hair out first.  This isn’t always possible so don’t kill yourself trying to figure out how to get the drain cover off.

2.  Slowly pour a big pot of boiling water down the drain and let it drain down.

3.  Pour 1/2 cup of baking soda down the drain and let it sit for 5 minutes.

4.  Add 1/2 to 1 cup of vinegar to the drain.  Quickly cover the drain with a towel and let it sit and bubble for 15 minutes.

5.  Next pour another pot of boiling water slowly down the drain.

6.  Repeat the whole process a couple of times if necessary.

7.  For really stubborn drains a plunger may help the process along.

Now I will be honest, we have never tried this on a drain that is 100% blocked.  I think you would need to get rid of any standing water and at least be able to get a little water flowing before you could really try this.  But it works wonders on slow drains.  It has never failed us on clearing out a very slow drain.  Some times it may take a treatment or two but it always gets the job done!

What other uses do you guys have for baking soda or vinegar.  I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments section!!

Hi guys.  We are still alive here at Stoney Acres, but we are still homeless.  The home we have an offer on is a short sale (someday I will have to post a little advice column about buying a short sale home).  Anyway, every day for the last 6 weeks we have been hearing the same thing “only a few more days”.  Ugh!!!  This process keeps dragging on and on!

We made the offer on this home 5 months ago today, and still it sits vacant and mocking us!

The hold up is some legal problems with the seller.  Their attorney messed up some paperwork and that mistake keeps delaying things.  We are really hopeful that we will get closed within the next week.  We love the house so much and the price is really great and that has kept us around.  But boy are we ready to get out of this apartment and back into a house!

I feel bad knowing there is no way we will get a spring garden in now.  The home currently doesn’t have a garden so we are planning on taking out the grass on about 1/2 of the backyard.  But that will be a lot of work.  We will be lucky now to have the garden ready for tomatoes and other summer crops in May.

Keep us in your prayers and hopefully very soon we will have at least part of an acre to blog about at Stoney Acres!!