Wheat: a recipe, and cooking options

A great big thank you to Kristen at Harried Homemaker, who posted a recipe for Wheat Berry Spinach Salad, which looks really, really good. (Makes me wish I had planted spinach this year--wondering if it's too late at this point...) Gotta love more ways to use those wheat berries than just grinding them into flour.

When I saw that the salad recipe required cooked wheat, the first thing I thought of was the thermos method of cooking wheat, directions for which can be found here, at the Hillbilly Housewife website. Still, gotta love more options, so I e-mailed Kristen to ask how she cooked her wheat. She uses a pressure cooker, (which I don't have) but was kind enough to also include the following links on how to cook wheat:

---If you prefer to use a crockpot, you might wish to look here. (Thanks again, Hillbilly Housewife!)

---If you prefer to use a saucepan, you might wish to look here. I'm not familiar with this website, but sure appreciate the recipe!

Oh, yeah, gotta love having more options! Especially when it comes to wheat berries--and gotta love that people with expertise will share information!

Changing the subject, our little jalapeno pepper plant disappeared--the one that one of our children named "Jeff". As in, there is literally no sign of it anywhere, so it's not that it shriveled up due to mistreatment or bad weather or the like. Supposition around here is that one of the animals ate it, though why they would want to is beyond my understanding... We will probably return to the Farmer's Market and get another plant to try again. I hope everyone else's plants are still in their garden... :)

How does your garden grow?

Well, I'm actually talking literally, as in the size of the garden, since it hasn't been consistently warm enough to actually plant anything yet, but soon, soon, soon, or we won't have much of a growing season at all. As for the size of our garden, it grew significantly on Saturday because my husband expanded it. Less room for the children to play, but more room for growing food...

Also visited the farmer's market for the first time this season on Saturday, and the most exciting purchase was a jalapeno plant one of my children named Jeff. The name has since changed to something else, but hey, I'm still going to call it Jeff. :) Now that the garden is bigger, we are going to put the children in charge of sections that they can plant and take care of themselves. They have helped plant in the past, but there is general excitement about getting to pick what they will plant in their section. Of course, we haven't reached the weeding stage yet... :)

So, are you growing anything new this year? Jalapeno peppers are new to our garden, and we are going to try watermelon because the children want to, though I don't have great hopes for it in our climate. Oh, well, hope I'm the one that's surprised, and we turn out with a great watermelon harvest. :)

Corn grand total: 1

That's right--we got a total of one edible ear of corn from our garden this year. Frankly, it's one more than I was expecting, so I was glad to get the one. In other garden news, we have picked our first carrot, and the pumpkins look promising, so things are looking up...

In other "growing things" news, I recently did a project with some children, and they made terrariums. I researched it on the internet, and tried to find the least expensive (read: absolute cheapest) way to put together a terrarium, and after reading about cutting up soda bottles and using pebbles and other materials, I headed to the dollar store.

Granted, you can buy soda, and it's not that expensive, but my family doesn't drink that much soda, and given the number of terrariums that needed to be made, the amount of soda that would need consuming would be unhealthy by anyone's estimate. Soooo, I bought clear food containers with clear lids at $1.00 a piece, and headed to the local national chainstore for some potting soil.

My conscience was eased somewhat by the fact that the ingredient list on the potting soil was quite lengthy and included at least one of the materials that was needed in the directions for the more complicated terrariums I had researched. I had also done some good old- fashioned research by visiting the expert in the gardening section of a home improvement store, so by the time I purchased the barest minimum of supplies, I was pretty sure that there was a reasonable expectation that things might work out for our terrariums (I know, how could it fail when I was so certain about its success? :). I took the food containers, the potting soil, and some left-over bean seeds from our garden, and headed to the activity. (Note to self (and anyone who may be reading) : Don't expect the home improvement store to have any seeds if you wait to do terrariums until after the typical planting season....)

So, a good time was had by all, and the seeds were planted, the soil slightly dampened with a few drops of water, and the containers sealed. I told them not to put the plants in direct sunlight, but only in indirect sunlight. They went home, and I stopped thinking about it.

Well, last week, some of them told me that their plants were thriving, and that they had outgrown their containers pretty quickly. If memory serves, it was mentioned that one of the plants had to be transplanted. Sooooo----it worked!!!! Yeah, the joy is there. So now, I'm thinking, what could I plant this winter? Would there be enough sunlight in the Idaho winter to have plants actually produce food? Hey, I still have some potting soil left, and if I got just one ear of corn out of it.... :)

Ok, I'm kidding about the corn--but not about the rest of it. In any case, I could start some of my plants in terrariums next spring if we have weather like we did last spring, which delayed planting. Something to think about, anyway....

Check your Spaghetti-Os

Just saw this article about a Spaghetti-Os recall. If they are your canned comfort food spaghetti of choice, you may want to see if your stored cans are among those affected. It won't be much of a comfort food if it makes you sick in an emergency....

In other news of the more local (to me) variety, we finally had to resort to the more expensive option of internet service, and for now it is working well. Nice to have the internet work and work quickly at that. Yeah, the smile is there. :)

On the garden front, it is finally planted. Still looks pretty bleak out there, and that's not really a surprise, considering that there was a frost warning for last night and 42 degrees out the night before. For plants that like warmth, not much of an incentive to come out and check what's going on... And we insisted on planting corn again, because we're basically optimistic about things like that--can't see it being knee-high by the 4th of July, but hey, if it is, I'll take pictures! :)

Hope your garden is going well--our biggest producer at this point is rhubarb, which grows like a (very large and unruly) weed. Planning to hit the Farmers' Market tomorrow and may try to grow even more things. You don't know until you try.....

It's not for lack of trying....

Well, we have made an attempt to change internet providers so that we would stop having so many instances of "Internet not able to display webpage" or the like coming up. Twice, in fact. Come to find out that there are just too many trees in the way, and in both cases the installers didn't know until the day of installation that they weren't able to get service in our area. So our current providers came out and raised the antennae, and so far, a lot better internet connection. The only other options are a lot more expensive, so here's hoping....

Anyway, if you are interested in giveaways, you might want to check out:

-- The opportunity to enter to win a free Bosch mixer over at Deals to Meals. That contest closes June 30th.
--The opportunity to enter to win a variety of food storage items over at Preparedness Pro. That contest closes June 15th.

Yeah, I don't expect to win, but if you do, I would love to hear about it... :)

When it comes to gardening, my husband has now partially rototilled the garden, and some lovely little seed potatoes that I picked up at the farmers' market are going to make their way into the ground soon. Hope that we get them in soon enough that they will have a long enough growing season this year. Am also thinking about picking up some jalapeno pepper plants next time I'm at the farmers' market, but really have no idea about how well they do around here. The other seeds we are holding onto because winter is still around quite a bit--it snowed last Saturday (reminds of me of the joke that there are four seasons in Idaho--winter, winter, almost winter, and construction :) and though it was pretty nice yesterday, hard to know what it will be tomorrow. Need to get the planting going soon, though, if we want to eat anything out of the garden this year.

Hope all is going well with everyone, and if all goes well with the internet service, am planning to do more posts more often...thanks for coming back to read!

Farmers' Market and thinking about the garden

It's been awhile, in large part because our computer is having issues. Sometimes it will log on to the internet, and sometimes it won't. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that sometimes (ok, a lot of the time) the wind is blowing here, so perhaps the connection problems are weather-related. We have considered changing providers, but have not yet. It's easy to keep the same service when it's working.... :)

I have also been thinking about starting the garden, but when the children are still wearing their winter coats to school in the morning, and we have to fire up the woodstove a lot of the time, I am not quite ready to put any seeds/bulbs/starts in the ground yet. That didn't stop me from visiting the Farmers' Market that was held for the first time of the season on Saturday. Unfortunately, I had forgotten about it and got there when most of the people were packing up. There were flowers out, but I am more of a "if I'm going to plant it, I probably want to eat it" person, so I stopped at one stand that was selling vegetable seeds. They were a good price--I asked if they were non-hybrid, but the gentleman there indicated that they were most likely hybrid. There was also a spot on the table for Walla-Walla onion bulbs, but alas, it was empty. I want in the worst (or is it best?) way to be successful growing onions--but have had no edible results from my garden as of yet. Learned something interesting about Walla-Walla onions, though--they are not really storage onions. They need to be eaten within a couple of weeks of harvesting them, I guess. I'll most likely check back this week to see if there are any Walla-Walla onion bulbs (hope that is the right term) to be had, but I also want to get some onions growing that will store well.

Have you started your gardens yet? It seems like here it is always a line to be walked between starting too early and having your plants freeze (or perhaps get snowed on) and not giving the plants long enough to get anywhere because they are planted too late. Ah, well, we'll do our best....

The camera is back (plus more about pumpkins)

For wonderful information, for the whole process from growing to preserving pumpkins, check out the comments on my previous post. Thanks to Kristen, Anonymous, and Stephanie--another case of me finding out about things I didn't know I didn't know from my internet friends!

My husband found a cord that works with our camera, (hurray!!) so without further ado, a look at some of this year's pumpkins--

I would put this gem in the "green suits me so I'm not planning on changing anytime soon" category:

Then there is, as there was last year, a candidate for "most likely to be ripe in time for use as a jack-o-lantern" category:



And finally, there is the "we will keep you guessing" category, as in when will these little buddies be ready for harvest (if ever, in the case of the one on the left)... :



Ah, well. We have a few more, but these are the ones that made it into the photo shoot. Just glad the camera can be used with the computer again, and that it is highly likely that we will end up with more pumpkin puree in the freezer eventually....

The sure thing about this post is that there is valuable information in the comments left on my last post. If you have questions about pumpkins, be sure to check them out--you'll be glad you did.

I guess I got the "non-uniform" variety...

Now that the corn stalks, etc., are out of the garden, we have a much better view of our pumpkin patch. Some of the pumpkins are quite rotund. Some are rather orange and some are rather green. Some look rather like they will not be ready for Halloween. Or ever.

I would venture to say that none of them look remotely like the pumpkins piled up at the local national chainstore or various other locales in the vicinity. I know the pumpkins stacked up and for sale are all individual, and different sizes, and have their own pecularities. Here's the thing, no matter their size or individual personality quirks, they do have something my pumpkins do not: they are all orange and they are all ready for harvest. At the same time.

So, how do the pumpkin merchants do it? I'm not really worried about it-- I figure we'll be able to get plenty of pumpkin in the freezer and have jack-o-lanterns out for Halloween. I'm just wondering if it's a matter of seed variety, the climate, the location of the pumpkin patch relative to other plants, or if there are specialized pumpkin farms where they keep the pumpkins in specially shaped cages from the time the seeds sprout.....

Just kidding on that last one. :) Hope everyone is having a great pumpkin harvest.

Sometimes it's all about the source

When one of our children heard that we were having boiled potatoes as part of our dinner last night, there was not a great deal of enthusiasm expressed. When it was further revealed that they were potatoes from our own garden, there was a mad rush to tell another sibling that we were having potatoes from our garden (!!!!). Yeah, it's hard to put that kind of excitement in writing. And yes, sometimes it's all about the source....in this case our backyard.

We were fortunate and blessed to have had a good harvest from our first-time potato planting. We just used the garden, but it you look at this post over at Preparedness Pro, you'll see how to make the most of 10 lbs of potatoes (the comments are informational as well) using tires. And in this post over at Nova Scotia Preppers, you will see a first-hand account of how successful a tire garden can be, and if you search further back in the blog, the process is given in detail. Ahhh--and those blogs even have pictures....

If you haven't tried growing potatoes, I strongly recommend trying either a garden or tire space--lots of results for a little investment, and they sure are tasty. And anyone who helps will be glad to try the results of their labors. After all, consider the source... :)

It's that time again...

At least it should be--it has been awhile (toooo long) since I've updated my 72-hour kits, but the aim in our household is to update them in April and October. Time to renew this aim... I was reminded of this when I went by the Harried Homemaker website, where she is having a giveaway of Nature Valley products. I haven't tried the nut clusters, but have put Nature Valley granola bars in our kits because they have great expiration dates and they're tasty. Not in it to win, but you may like to swing by and enter, and hey, a reminder about 72-hour kits is always appreciated. Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I'm a big fan of products with far-in-the-future expiration dates..... :)

In other news, we should have perhaps checked our potatoes before, say, yesterday, seeing as how we do live in Idaho. Um, yeah, our potatoes are plentiful and huge, and we are very happy about it. Hope they taste as good as they grew. One of my children came running in when I came home from being out and told me one of the potatoes looked like a turkey. When I saw the gargantuan spud that had grown in a really unusual shape with plenty of unusual features, I understood the comparison. Our other potatoes are not quite as unusual, just larger than I expected. Wish our camera connecting cable would allow us to post pictures....

Also have a healthy number of beautiful cucumbers, and our pumpkins are coming along nicely. It's all good. And for the most part, the timing is great because it turned colder today. Now to figure out how to use all of the produce before it becomes unuseable.....not a bad problem to have. :)

How does your garden grow?

Well, as for ours, it's a bit of a slow go, but today we had:

--Some corn on the cob, which was the same kind of anemic as the stalks that it grew on, but what there was of it was tasty. Just little ears this year. Some of the stalks grew but forgot/refused to produce ears, so a little disappointing. Ah, well, hoping for better results next year...

--Some green beans straight from the garden patch. They were pretty tasty, and there are still some left, so no complaints here.

The potatoes are not yet ready, but they are easily the most-anticipated crop this year, at least for me. One of the children mentioned the pumpkins--I rarely pay attention to them because they do pretty well all by themselves every year--but I will have to go check out how they are doing. Raspberry season is basically over, which is always sad, but the bushes did a great job of producing this year.

Lamenting the fact that the cord to the computer is having a problem, and thus we are unable to put pictures up currently, but hopefully we will have that figured out soon. My posting numbers have been anemic lately, but hopefully I will get back in the habit of doing new (to me) food storage/emergency preparedness things sometime soon so there will be something to post about... hope all is well with everyone, and that all of your gardens are putting out a huge harvest!

Following a long tradition...

on my blog of having people leave great comments, as well as just plain old linking to other people's blogs when they post wonderful preparedness information, I present the following:

A huge thank you to Stephanie in AR, from over at Sooner or Later, for leaving this link from Down to Earth about making oil lamps in a comment on my last post. That looks like something I could do, and will probably try it soon. An oil lamp has been on my list of "things to have for emergency preparation" for a while now, and if I can do it like this, it will be crossed off a lot sooner. If you are interested in making your own oil lamp, you should check that link out....

Well, things are growing in the garden---the corn, as my husband says, looks "anemic" in terms of height, and in comparison to some corn fields we saw over the weekend, but hopefully we'll get something more out of the crop this year. The potatoes look like they are doing alright, but having no comparison because it is our first time growing them, we will just have to see. The beans look like they are doing well, and the pumpkins, a family favorite, appear to be on track. Time to think about late season planting, if memory serves--and to actually plant whatever we decide on very, very, soon....

Hope everyone is having a great summer--and that if you have a garden, that it's growing well!

Progress is good

Um, yeah, not sure which exact strawberry I took a picture of last time, but some of the strawberries are getting more and more red, and that's nice progress to have. Hopefully we'll get to them after they're ripe and before the birds do...

Also making progress, this time in the backyard, one of our potato plants:



There is now also additional space in our garden, in which has been planted more beans, more corn, and some cucumbers. It all adds up....how much, we'll find out at harvest. :)

(Green) Strawberries

Well, everyone in Idaho knows we have been having a good rain season here--raining, raining, and did I mention raining? We really need it, so no complaints here. I just kind of forgot to go out and take a look at the strawberries until someone in another state mentioned theirs. So I went out and hurray, the strawberry plant pictured above is progressing in my front yard. Somewhere amidst the flowers that are also in my front yard. Gotta love strawberries---or at least know someone who does...

Sometime in between the rain showers the corn, pumpkins, cucumbers and beans have been planted. It still is pretty cool out, so hoping we get a better harvest than last year.

Not much to post about--recently purchased some more soap (hand and dish) for the storage, as well as the occasional additional can of Spam and the like. Still increasing the size of the garden for planting later.

Changing the subject entirely.... I have heard about EMPs and need to do more research on them. Over at Preparedness Pro Kellene Bishop is doing a series on them, (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 are up as of this writing) so you might want to check it out. I know that I link a lot to other blogs and websites, but just trying to share what I've found---knowing where to find the information is sometimes half the battle. I had already put in a request at the local library for the book, One Second After , before I saw this series, so I wouldn't be surprised if I posted something about them sometime....the more we know, the better prepared we'll be.

Adventures in seed buying....

Well, went out some time last week to purchase more seeds. What I found out:

---Apparently, there is a difference between "organic" and "heirloom" seeds. Since I was lookng at a single brand at the time, the most striking difference I was able to detect was the difference in color on the packaging.... :) Well, I did manage to purchase the last heirloom package of pumpkin seeds that I saw, and that was truly what I was after, so mission accomplished.

---The seeds I saw that were marked "organic", "heirloom", or otherwise were remarkably well labeled by that company. Otherwise, labeling was hard to impossible to find. There were the occasional packages that were clearly marked as hybrids, but if memory serves, for the most part there was some kind of name or number on the package, and no indication of whether the seeds were hybrid or not. There was plenty of information on how, when, etc. to plant the seeds, but no indication if the resulting plants would have seeds you could use to grow the same kind of plants next year. Either they have a code I just plain don't understand, or they don't feel it necessary to share such information with the general seed-buying population. When I give them the benefit of the doubt, it is probably just a case of me needing to find more information...

---Just because someone is working in the gardening section of a store, it doesn't mean that they know if seeds are non-hybrid or not either. Asked someone there, and they had no idea, making me feel better about myself information-wise, but also leaving me unclear on whether or not the cucumber seeds I was purchasing were exactly what I wanted. Oh well. We can grow cucumbers this year, but I'll have to look elsewhere for non-hybrid seeds for storage.

Do you have seeds? When I saw the packages from the company previously mentioned that were clearly marked "heirloom", I actually picked up a couple of seed varieties that we don't usually grow just so we would have some on hand. I don't know if we will end up using them this year, but it's good to have them and not need them than the other way around. (Seems like I've written that before. Quite possibly more than once... :)

We got our corn and beans in in between rain showers, but still have quite a ways to go to finish planting our garden. Hope everyone else's gardens are prospering....

Will work for food

Ok, not exactly a direct exchange. More like working at a local farm and being given the opportunity to purchase produce at a really good price. And not exactly me, like the post title implies. More like (ok, exactly like) my husband doing all the work. But hey, fortunately for us this food storage thing is a combined effort.

Last night my husband went and worked on a local farm. It was a volunteer effort, and they were boxing potatoes. When he came home he had a 50 lb box of potatoes that he bought for $10. So now I have a 50 lb box of potatoes that I need to store downstairs and use before they get soft or grow so many eyes I'm afraid to go into the storeroom. Hmmm....or I could just use them. Thing is, we like baked potatoes, but not so much the heat it takes to bake the potatoes in the summer. Guess I'll go in search of a good potato salad recipe, or crockpot recipe, or hashbrowns....something. That's the thing about potatoes--so versatile. :)

And hopefully I'll have reason to use fresh potatoes more often than just baked, because we got ours planted. (This is the part where I should probably leave out the fact that so far they are the only thing that we have planted, due to recent weather....but we will remedy that soon.) I have instant potatoes in storage, but growing our own will hopefully allow me to put something back in the storage room instead of only taking things out. That's the plan, anyway. Sending good thoughts out to the potato portion of the garden....

In case you missed it, on my last post MatthiasJ, from over at Kentucky Preppers Network , left this link on preparing a 3 month supply for College Students. Excellent ideas that apply to anyone who is preparing, really, and the ideas are low cost. Double plus.

Kristen from Frugal Antics of a Harried Homemaker also left some good ideas that aren't complicated. The 3 month supply doesn't have to be fancy, but hey, if you can make it fancy, more power to you.... :) I go for simple myself.

Thanks to them and everyone who leaves helpful and encouraging comments. Now I'm just hoping that I'll get more potato ideas in comments this time.... :)

First the non-food, then the food...

Our main purchase this past week in terms of storage was laundry soap to put away. Yes, we will be using it just like normal, but it's a larger quantity that will hopefully last a really long time. We use a type that has little/no additives because we worry about skin sensitivities for our children. If used correctly, it will do like 224 loads (too lazy to go check the box, but I'm reasonably certain that I have that number right... :) and it's a brand that you can't just pick up in the store, so a last-minute rush to the store in an emergency--which I am trying to avoid at all costs anyway--wouldn't do any good. So, set on that for awhile, but have to save up for other stuff now....always more to do!

Visited my parents this weekend, and came back with various plants, but for the intents and purposes of this post, let's talk-- wait for it.....drumroll.....strawberries!! We actually have some strawberry plants already in our front yard, but now we have some in the back under our raspberry bushes, (why waste space?) and hopefully they will flourish. They certainly flourish for my mother, but since she has one of the greenest thumbs I know of, we will just hope for the best. It just got me thinking about how many sources of fruit we have in terms of storage/home production. We have raspberry bushes, and some strawberry plants, and that's about it at this point. In our climate, it would not be productive to grow melons, and we could (and probably will) grow tomatoes, which are technically a fruit, but the fresh variety are not popular with everyone in the household. Well, I have left off one plant that sits in the corner of our garden, but which my husband has continuously given away because I don't know what to do with it--a rhubarb plant---which must really like our yard, given the fact that it just gives and gives and gives. So it hasn't gone to waste, at least not very much, but it hasn't helped our food stores in any appreciable way. I only mention that in the interest of full disclosure, but it's amazing how many times full disclosure ends up making me look bad.... I know the leaves are poisonous, and you should only use the stalks. I just haven't used the stalks, so maybe I should look into that.

So we could always invest in lots and lots and lots of canned fruit, (as you can imagine, already in the plan) but fresh fruit is better, and what's more, if conditions are right, fruit bearing plants can be the gift that keeps on giving if they're properly tended. (For example, my husband is quite the expert at thinning out and properly maintaining the raspberry bushes, which can get quite exuberant in their growing habits.) My mom suggested fruit- bearing trees, but we are a little hesitant to make that investment at the moment, since we had to cut down the tree in our backyard after it died last year, and now it appears that some of the trees in neighboring yards are heading for the same fate. It also takes time for the fruit-bearing trees to actually produce fruit, but the sooner you start, the sooner you reap the benefits...

Anyway, I have decided to make fruit the subject of my poll this week. When I think about gardens, I usually think vegetables, vegetables, and more vegetables. I could always use more ideas on fruits that do well in colder climates and of course, high yield never hurts.... :)

(Less) food for thought

Well, I was going to write about how nice the weather was getting--warmer, etc.--and it ended up snowing today. So what I started (all three or four sentences of it :) has been deleted, and here's what will hopefully post before the weather changes again....

We are planning on expanding our garden space, and it sounds like it will probably come in handy, considering the news in this article, which details the decrease in crops taking place due to various reasons. Here's a small portion of said article (I hope you will read it in full--sobering stuff):

"Alarm bells are starting to ring about another food crisis this summer. Last week's acreage report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 7 million fewer acres were being planted for all crops. This came after the USDA's January report that noted that winter wheat acreage was down 7 percent. "

Yeah, not good news. The more we are able to plant for ourselves, the better the circumstances for everyone, because the more there will be to go around.

If you have gardening expertise (as so many of my commenters have) please consider sharing your information with the people running your state site at the American Preppers Network. I'm sure that any information that specifically applies to your best crops/climate/weather conditions would be greatly appreciated.

Fewer crops=less food available. More gardening crops=more food on the family table. I hope everyone will do what they can in their own situation. And that their yield for their garden is more than ours was last year--but if there is no garden, there will be no yield at all....

Inside, outside (in that order :)

Well, first things first--we finally found our camera, which we figured was lost because little hands can hide things very well. Wasn't the first time we've been wrong, and probably won't be the last...turns out, judging by the location in which it was found, it is highly more probable that we attempted to hide the camera from the children, and ended up hiding it from ourselves...ah, well. Anyway, it's back, hence the picture above.

One of our children brought the plant pictured above home from school a while ago, and I have managed to keep it alive, which is cause for much celebration, at least for me. The stick stuck in the soil along with it indicated that it is a pea plant, and hopefully it will make it to the garden sometime in the not so distant and warmer future.

Having not had that great of a success last year with the yield in our garden, perhaps due to cold weather later than expected (i.e. snow in June, resulting in late planting) I am thinking seriously of taking Anonymous' advice in a recent comment to start my seeds inside. I'm looking into it more, and considering timing, etc., but it would be great to be able to give the plants a head start on survival in the great outdoors.

Hence my poll question this week--have you had success with starting seeds inside? What kind of plants have you found do well/better if started this way? I know that you can buy some varieties of plants already started, but it seems to me that knowing how to best start your garden plants yourself would be a valuable skill to have...

Under construction, and all that...

Those of you who stop by regularly may have noticed that I have been playing with the blog format. Wish I knew more how to get things exactly the way I want them--kind of liked the last format with the yellow background, especially because the lists, etc. were on the right. The lists, etc. are on the left in this particular format, but I like a white background if it doesn't look too stark...anyway, hopefully I'll find one that I'm happy with and stick with it for awhile. (Who knows, it may be this one... :)

Ah, it's starting to feel (and act) like Spring around here, so I've got planting a little bit on the brain. I just mostly don't want to have results like last year, when we waited too long to plant, and then got low/no yield on some of our crops as a result. Kind of hard to judge when you are having snow in June, because you don't want to ruin your crops before they even start, either.

It's interesting, and I don't know why, but suddenly I am getting a lot of seed catalogs in my mail. Yeah, 'tis the season for planting, and all, but these aren't just addressed to "resident", so it makes me think that I got on someone's mailing list somewhere.... I haven't really looked at the catalogs in-depth, but I know I want heirloom, non-hybrid seeds, wherever I purchase them. I do have some seeds in storage in a can, but I'm not planning on using them until much later, or there is little/nothing else available, whichever comes first.

When I was out shopping for something else yesterday, I saw a display of seeds, and stopped to take a look. The company was very complimentary about their seeds (no big surprise there) but there were not many, if any, that were immediately evident as being non-hybrid. At this point, I'd have to answer "no, but planning to" on my own poll question, but since we are in the middle of planning what would be the best crops to plant in our limited garden space, (that we are planning to increase this year) I don't feel bad. Yet. :)

Going through my mind: tomatoes, (not loved by all in the household, but a good source of vitamin C) potatoes, (now that you know that I live in Idaho, kind of embarrassed that I don't know the ins and outs on this one, but a nice, filling crop all the same, and that tote idea found over at Johnson Family Farm would be nice because it would increase our yields without taking up actual garden space) corn, and I would love, love, love to be able to grow garlic. Besides adding great flavor to food, when I get a cold and the like, eating a clove can help a lot. With getting rid of the cold, but not necessarily making new friends and influencing people. :) Worth it, though, garlic scent and all....

So what are you planting this year? I would highly recommend non-hybrid seeds, and to plant as much as you can...