Updates on My Gardens

Gardening, Backyard Chickens and Beekeeping During the Season of Covid-19 / Coronavirus

March 27, 2020 by Cathi Leave a Comment

How are you doing during this crazy, generation defining time? As for me, I still work full time. My husband and I own a retail, brick and mortar travel agency. This has been my career for more than half of my life. We have built our company through so many challenges. We were here when all of the planes were grounded after 9/11. We have been here through various issues made up by the media. The media lives to create fear in people. They’re pretty good at it.

Nothing could possibly have prepared us for what’s happening now. We have canceled every trip that was supposed to have traveled starting several weeks ago and continuing so far for two more months. Our company supports 15 families. Our employees are the primary breadwinners of their families. And now there is no revenue for at least three months, and it will likely be much longer than that in coming back.

Clearly, this is a very stressful time. But do you know what is saving my life right now? My gardens, my chickens and my bees.

Guess what is happening in the garden, in the pasture and in the bee yard? The same normal things that you would expect to see in late Marchin Texas.

The bees are making baby bees. The chickens are laying eggs. The garden is coming to life. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, the world keeps spinning.

So, I’ll keep starting seeds. I’ll keep building new chicken coops. I’ll still marvel at the bees and mostly try to stay out of their way.

What’s keeping you sane right now? Tell me in the comments.

Garden Goals for 2019

March 14, 2019 by Cathi Leave a Comment

If you follow my page on Facebook, you might remember that I LOVE going to Mother Earth News Fair every year. I love sitting in classes and workshops all day learning about these hobbies that fascinate me.

Every year I use it as a time to evaluate what I’m doing gardening and sustainability-wise and what I’d like to attempt for the coming year. At the 2018 fair I decided that I would be getting bees and chickens. Keep in mind that I had nowhere to put them at the time, but I resolved that I would indeed be getting bees and chickens. And I did. I also started seed starting with soil blocking which I had never done before at all. That was a LOT for one year. So what about 2019? What new endeavors am I undertaking this year?

Well, this year is largely about improving what I’m already doing.

Bees: I seem to have gotten through the winter with two thriving hives. We aren’t quite in the clear quite yet, but so far so good. I really want to actually have a honey harvest this summer. If I’m able to harvest honey, I will consider that a success.

Chickens: I’m going to add three hens to my flock and start to sell eggs.

Financial: I sat in an extended workshop led by Joel Salatin about homesteading and he touched on the need to keep specific financial records about your farm and it got an idea stirring around in my head that my endeavors should be at least somewhat self sustaining. I did some quick math and if I get three more hens and I sell my extra eggs, at least my chickens would be self sustaining. I also want to find somewhere to sell the honey I am hoping to harvest in July.

Cheese: I have been interested in making cheese for a while and this is on my list 19 things I want to do in 2019. I want to make mozzarella and I want to make a hard cheese.

Kombucha: I went to a hands on workshop on brewing kombucha and currently have some brewing in my pantry.

Seed Starting: I really want to up my game on seed starting. I’d love to really minimize the number of plants I buy at the garden center, both flowers and veggies. Home gardening struggles to break even anyway, and then if you’re buying plants for about as much as you could purchase the food at the store anyway then it really doesn’t make sense. (Except for the love of doing it, of course.) So far I’ve been really happy with how things have been turning out. The main challenge for me in seed starting is thinking enough in advance to get them started before it’s too late. It’s all a matter of planning.

What about you? What’re you planning in 2019 for your garden? How will you kick up your game a notch?

Garden Planning

December 30, 2018 by Cathi Leave a Comment

I have been feeling for a while that the next frontiers in gardening for me are record keeping and planning. I feel like better planning will allow me to make better use of the space I have to grow. Better record keeping will help me make better improvements year over year as I will more easily recognize wins and losses in the garden. What varieties worked well? How did things go when I plant earlier or later? Sure, over the years I remember as much as I can, but records will remind me of things that I would never remember.

The basic thing that has kept me from keeping good records in the past has been time. I haven’t had a good quick system for keeping track of what I did and when and how it did. Same thing about planning. I have played with various apps and websites, but haven’t been really happy with any of them.

I know myself well enough to know that if anything is too time consuming, I won’t do it. If I have time to dedicate to my garden, I want to actually be working my garden, not doing bookwork.

All difficulties aside, planning and record keeping are clearly the next frontier in my gardening adventure. So, I have to figure it out. Toward that end, I started thinking about what information I need out of a record keeping/planning system. I think basically I need to be able to look up either a specific crop or a given period of time to see what has happened in the past so that I can make decisions about what to do in the future.

So, I started with the best thing I could think of. A spreadsheet. I am a big fan of Google Drive because I want to be able to access information from anywhere.

On the first tab of the spreadsheet I made a plant list. I listed every crop I’ve grown or that I would like to grow. Then, based on the frost dates in my area, I’ve indicated the dates to sow indoors, or outdoors, and the how long it takes from planting to harvest.

Then on another tab, I’ve made a column of each planting area I have available to me. Then across the top, the first row indicates a date range. I made two week chunks. Column 1 is Jan 1, column 2 is Jan 15 and so forth. Then, informed by the dates on the first tab, I made an initial plan for the garden for the year. This chart tells me what plants will “live” in which areas of the garden throughout the year.

One of the rows is called “Seed Starting”. This row will tell me when different seeds need to be started.

Here is a link to my garden planning spreadsheet.

I’m thinking as the year goes on I’ll start a third tab where I will list which crop, variety, when it went in, how it did and when I pulled the plant.

I would love to hear how you do your record keeping!

Seven Reasons to Love Gardening

October 12, 2018 by Cathi Leave a Comment

Gardens make you more mindful. When you’re outside pulling weeds you can only go so fast. You can’t text, or Facebook or send an email. You can listen to a podcast though, which is great. :-).

Being outside tending to your garden on a regular basis also makes you more mindful of the seasons. Something I hear a lot is about how certain locations don’t have four seasons, or that a particular season is very short. Here in Texas, for instance, people are constantly saying that it goes from too hot to too cold in just a couple of days. It simply isn’t true. Most people go from inside their homes, to their cars to the mall or to their offices. The weather just isn’t in the top of their minds. So, the one time they go outside they notice the weather and they’ve missed an entire season. When you’re outside more regularly you really notice the difference in weather and the seasons.

Gardens teach you to appreciate your food more. If you ever begrudge the cost of organic produce, just try growing it. All of the sudden getting a zucchini before being overcome by squash vine borers seems like a minor miracle. Not only that, but seeing a perfect tomato, or berry, or leaf of chard is something you truly take the time to recognize and appreciate it.

Gardens make you move your body. When you garden, you spend time bending over working in the beds, carrying heavy bags of soil, moving throughout your garden, pulling on weeds and on and on and on. In most diet and exercise apps, gardening is even listed as an exercise that you can log and get calorie credit for.

Gardens allow you to be generous. When one of your crops are in season, especially if the crop doesn’t lend itself to being canned, frozen or otherwise preserved…or if you simply don’t have the time to preserve it… you can give away the excess to friends and neighbors. Many food pantries will take produce as well. So much of the food in pantries is packaged food, so the people who rely on them don’t get much that is fresh. What a treat.

Gardens are beautiful. I love staring at my garden. Gardens in general catch my eye. I’ve been known to swerve out of my lane when I first encounter a community garden I haven’t seen before. Gardens are just lovely to look at and spend time in.

Gardens allow for lifelong learning. There is always something to learn or improve on. You don’t have to look very far to see something new to try. Just when you think you know how to grow a tomato, you’ll have a season where there is a new pest or a new weather condition that sends you back to the books to research how that leaf looks or why something isn’t happening. I guess lifelong learning is another way to say that gardening keeps a person humble.

I know these reasons just barely scratch the surface of the reasons to love gardening. Why do you love gardening? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Four Basic Things to Consider When Starting a Garden

September 24, 2018 by Cathi Leave a Comment

Space: Do you have the space to put in a garden. Of course, if you aren’t blessed with much of a yard or if yours is filled up with a pool, or the kids trampoline, or whatever else, there are many many books and blog posts written about container gardening. If you want to do a raised bed on the ground, you can easily start with something even as small as four feet by four feet. In fact, starting small is a great idea. The last thing you want to do is put in too much garden, then wear yourself out and get frustrated trying to keep up with everything.

Gardening is like learning how to drive a car with a manual transmission. At first there is a lot to pay attention to. It’s frustrating and seems impossible. But then after a while it becomes more second nature and less overwhelming. So, starting small is a good idea. I started with a single bed that measured approximately 4 feet by 10 feet.

Sunlight: Everything you’ll want to grow needs sunlight. Lots and lots of sunlight. Sure, there are some things you can grow with slightly less sunlight, but even those things grow better with LOTS of sunlight. Most vegetables need about six hours of sunlight per day. Things like tomatoes and squash need more like 8. Plants where the part you eat is the root can tolerate less light than that. (Think beets and potatoes).

Irrigation: Your new garden is going to need to be watered regularly (although less than you might expect). Your enthusiasm will likely wane if you’re carrying water, or hauling hoses, or dealing with kinks in hoses, or any of a number of other watering inconveniences.

The easiest thing is to install a simple drip irrigation system. You could run a garden hose from the spigot on the house, to your garden bed, attach a timer to it, and water automatically.

Even if you don’t want to go to those lengths at first, at least try to make the garden bed on conveient proximity to a water source. Of course, don’t sacrifice sunlight. (See above.)

Soil: If the only thing you seek to do as a beginning gardener is to have good soil, you can’t help but be successful. Do what it takes to have healthy soil and everything else will fall into place. Add organic material regularly, and cover with a think layer of mulch.