From Gardening to Homesteading, Part 2

Morning temp: 41F
Afternoon high:66%
Tonight's projected low: 43F
Humidity: 36%
Moon: Waning, 1%

Windy windy windy. In between our 12 Garden Beds, we've run long strips of cardboard. Provided that the cardboard is free of colored or excessive amount of black ink, it will biodegrade into the soil. Meanwhile, it provides a mud-free walking surface, while also keeping weeds and grass from sprouting up. In a sense, it's a kind of mulch for the Garden walkways. Well, the West wind, which gusted up to 40mph, had its way with the cardboard. Otherwise, the wind spirits were very kind and gentle during their visit. In truth, we found the wind exhilarating, cleansing and fun, and we hope that everyone visited by these spirits was kept safe. Perhaps with time we can learn to live more harmoniously with them.

1. M and I went to Lowes for two bags of mushroom compost, a tray of 36 purple Impatients for St. Fiacre's Flowerbed beside the Garden, two hanging pots of Impatients for our back porch, and a number of young plants we have marked for our two, red-bricked, Garden Herb Beds (#11, 12). Last year, we had a great experience with the Impatients on the back porch. We fed them worm-tea and water regularly, and they grew and grew and flowered into early November, after we had moved them indoors up on the fireplace mantle. They seem to be quite hardy plants that can bounce back from excessive heat and a lack of watering. They also seem to have a wonderfully peaceful energy about them, or so we felt.

2. We also transplanted a number of seedlings and plantlings to peat-pots and to larger plastic containers (we recycle our yogurt containers in this way). Our weather forecast for this week has improved (now they're saying the days will reach 70F+ and the nights no less than the mid-40s), so we're leaning towards moving all of our mature plants into the Garden tomorrow! We'll see how M feels; she's really the Garden Boss. I just do what she says, or at least what she approves of.

3. Throughout our work together, we talked a good bit about the kinds of home-based businesses we're interested in the starting, particularly after the move to up-state New York, which is looking ever more likely. Currently, our logic is as follows. As Homesteaders, we're interested in self-sufficiency, which entails learning a very wide range of skills, everything from growing your own food and making your own household items to building your own home. As part of this process, we're interested in making our own essential oils, herbal water mixtures (e.g., rose and lavender water) and herbal soaps. Indeed, we've begun to research these things, and M already makes her own herbal skin-cream. One thing we noticed with M's lavender skin-cream is that when people found out about it, they wanted to purchase some for themselves. So, perhaps these other endeavors could lead to a range of marketable products. As you may have guessed, this is why we've put in the two Herb Beds, to experiment with growing a number of herbal plants so that we can take this knowledge with us. Thankfully, other Homesteaders farther along than we are have also shown that such home-based businesses are possible, so we feel that we've got something reasonable to base our hopes upon.

Looking to the future: Pictures are coming! Of the Garden, of the various things we've built here so far, of Arjuna (our cat) and most especially of Helen, queen of the doggies! Ever so slowly, my technical skills are increasing, and before too long we'll see improvements to the blog. : )