Trying to keep up with family, church, animals, garden, farmers market, and various other obligations while keeping up on a blog has been...well...difficult. I have been offered permanent status with my job, which is good news, in a way, because I will be able to keep earning a paycheck, which we need right now. On the other hand, it was very hard to accept, because building the house is SO important, as well as taking care of my family, my animals, and my garden. Getting to Farmers Market has been difficult, but I have been able to make it quite often. Sadly my revenue has not been very high. I need more basil! LOL! Seriously, that's what I sold out of first. Sigh... finding time to grow more has been difficult.
Here is a great picture of one of our first Farmers Market set ups. My daughter does the flowers, I do the plants and herbs:
I had great success with my lettuces & kale this year until the rains came and the lettuces drowned (even though they're in raised beds) and the cabbage moths (which my daughter is a bug nut and says they are butterflies) gobbled my kale & broccoli! UGH! Using a home-made deterrent on them, and it's helping, but my broccoli is done for, and the kale will take quite a while to recover.
Here are some pictures of my garden in progress. I bought a few more raised beds from Walmart, and then 2 sets of raised beds from Sam's Club. The ones from Sam's are each only half the size of the singles from Walmart, but the price was right...4 squares for $40...vs each square for $27 at Walmart. I have spent a fortune on soil this year to fill them and all the buckets, too. It's well worth it, though, because the tomatoes & peppers aren't getting over watered and the root veggies are growing nicely, unlike in the clay & rock soil which the garden is mostly composed of. I have mostly onions & shallots in the small raised beds, radishes, turnips, beets, rutabaga and my lettuces & kales in the larger ones.
And a few more pictures. You can see that my tomatoes got hit with some early blight. I sprayed them with a homemade remedy I found on-line. So far most of them have perked back up quite nicely. The first Roma tomatoes I set out were hit quite hard, and are still struggling, but they are so loaded with tomatoes that I hate to uproot them and toss them...so I continue spraying them, cutting off the blighted branches, and hoping for the best.
I used LOTS of weed fabric to keep the weeds down this year, and hopefully keep the squash bugs from finding my squash. It's done wonders for the weeds, but I did have to squash about 4 squash bugs today. Thankfully they haven't been too bad yet this year. I really hope they leave my pumpkins alone this time...I'd like to get some pie pumpkins!!!!
Note that there are a few flowers here and there in my garden...Marigolds to keep bugs away from the tomatoes, nasturtiums to keep the squash bugs away from the squash, and bee balm to attract the bees for pollinating. :)
On the housing topic...we have not done much with the building this summer...we focused entirely til now on getting the land in our name through a local bank instead of owner carry, we feel much more secure now. The construction loan for the rest of the house should come through in the next week or so and then we'll call in the insulators to spray foam the crawlspace and 1st floor. Until the boys, who have started temporary jobs at my work on the graveyard shift (the store is remodeling and the boys are on the remodel crew...it's only 6 weeks) are done with their summer jobs, we can only do so much. Once they're done, Jason is taking 2 weeks off from work and really hitting it hard getting the 2nd story on. Once the roof is on, then everything else can be done a little at a time, as we have the time, probably mostly weekends. We also purchased a pickup truck recently to haul materials. Our old Jeep just wasn't cutting it. It's great as a 4 wheel drive vehicle, but for towing it was awful, and less than 8 miles to the gallon. :(
I'd like to post more info, but this one is getting long. If you have any questions, feel free to ask! As always, I LOVE feedback and hope you'll follow me, and share my blog with your friends. Thanks!!!
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