Fall Planting

The time has arrived to start planning for your fall planting!  It is hard to take time away from an increasingly busy summer garden to think about fall however now is the time to plan what vegetables you would like to have growing when the leaves start to fall and the sweaters come out of storage.  We live in zone 6a which means each winter, on average, our risk of frost is from October 19 through April 22.  If you live in a different zone, the Virginia Cooperative Extension provides the following handy formula to help you determine when to plant for fall harvest.

• Take the first frost date for your area (ours is October 19^th)
• Subtract the number of days from seeding or transplanting outdoors to harvest (this is the days to maturity)
• Subtract the number of days from seed to transplant if you start your own seed
• Subtract the average harvest period (this is the length of time you expect to be harvesting your crop for fall)
• Subtract the Fall Factor (about two weeks)
• This equals your fall planting date

So, for example, here in Ohio our first frost date is October 19th and we want to figure out when to plant De Cicco broccoli for fall harvest, we approach finding the date like this:

The High Mowing Organic Seeds catalog lists the days to maturity for De Cicco broccoli at 48 days from transplant.  We need to add another 4 weeks, or 28 days, for the time from seed to transplant.  De Cicco has a long harvest window, so we will estimate 21 days for the harvest period.

• 48 days to maturity
• 28 days seed to transplant
• 15-20 days harvest period
• 10-14 days Fall Factor

This formula tells us that about 100 days before October 19th is when we want to seed, making the fall broccoli planting date around July 13th.

Here is a basic guide for planting dates in zone 5-6

Vegetable Planting Calender | eHow.com

Woodhaven Place

Welcome to Woodhaven Place Homestead and Gardens!  We moved in Christmas week and spent the last 6 months getting this wonderful property ready for the growing season.  For three years, we have been reading about homesteading and looking for a property that would fit our budget and location.  A complete stranger we met walking around an open house told us about what would become Woodhaven Place in September.  The house was not on the market; at the time the owners were remodeling it to sell as for-sale-by-owner.  We discussed an offer with the owners and two days later put our house on the market, 30 days later had an offer, and we closed both houses the same day one week before Christmas!  Talk about a God-thing, we were amazed over and over how the process just kept moving forward in spite of all the odds against this happening. 

This is what our property looked like when we moved in Christmas week

Woodhaven Place is almost 6 acres in the middle of the suburbs.  Driving up to our home you would never know a working homestead was in the back.  We are surrounded by woods on all four sides with (after much work) cleared acres in the middle for a garden.  We back up to farm land on one side and the other three sides have suburban homes hidden by a thick perimeter woods.  With huge evergreen trees and hardwoods protecting our little homestead on all sides, you get the feeling of being out in the middle of the country however are only 5 minutes away from the mall. 

 One acre is very beautiful dense woods.

We have been so blessed to find our dream property right in the middle of our family and friends.  

Because we really are “urban homesteaders” we have a fantastic opportunity to expose farming, bee keeping, food preservation, and many other homestead skills to the surrounding community.  We believe that we have been placed in the perfect position to do what we have always wanted, live a more self reliant life and show others how to do the same. 

Homemade Instant Oatmeal Packets

Instant Oatmeal is very simple to make at home. It takes 5 ingredients and about 20 minutes. 

Cinnamon Raisin Oatmeal

List of Ingredients (for each bag)

1/4 Cup of Quick Oats 

1 Tbsp Ground Quick Oats

1/2 tsp Sugar 

Pinch of salt

1/4 tsp Cinnamon

Handful of Raisins

 With the first four ingredients you can mix and match any dried fruit flavor combo you would like.

I listed ground oats as one of the ingredients above and that is the big trick to getting your homemade version to feel like the store bought kind. I put 1.5 cups of oats in my blender and mix them on low until they look like bread crumbs. 

You can add as much or as little of this mix to your bags as you want. I like 1Tbsp but if you want it to be thinner then go with less. 

20 bags (that is only 1/2 a box of oats)

I know the pictures is not that appealing but most oatmeal does not look all that great so no judging until you try it! I truly think that the homemade stuff tastes better but it is less sweet, if you need to have it sweeter then add a little more sugar or put some honey in it after you warm it up. I make mine with 1/2 a cup of milk.

Now for some stats 

Store bought Instant Oatmeal has around 31 ingredients

Homemade has 5 

The cost per packet for store bought is $0.30 per packet

Assuming you have sugar and salt and do not need to buy them

 homemade costs $0.15 per packet

300 Screws Later....

Spring has been extremely busy around here!

My hubby and I spent every available weekend this spring expanding and moving our square foot garden. As you remember I did quite a few posts last spring about my four raised beds. They did great and I learned a lot, including the fact that I need more growing space. There where a few things that greatly needed to change this year with our raised beds.

Placement
- The beds were not located in the best place for sun. I picked a convenient location for me but not really for the plants. Well that has changed, we moved the garden to the center of our backyard where we have the most sun! Who needs grass?

Construction
- We had great intentions with the first beds but they did not hold up well at all. This time around we made the beds to last. I am going to do a separate post on constructing raised beds. 

Size
- The first garden was a good start but this girl needs more space to grow! So we tripled the size of the garden and made a verity of different sized beds for both planting convenience and aesthetics.

Maintenance
- My hubby had a heck of a time mowing around the first garden and keeping the grass at bay. This time we made a substantial border, cut out the sod from the beginning and put down gravel.

Here are the beds set in place before we cut away the grass.  Let me tell you cutting out the grass and then leveling the beds was one of the hardest jobs we have done at our little homestead. I was sore for days after that step.

=

Here is the plot after we cut out the grass. We rented a sod cutter that runs a blade right under the grass and cuts it off at the roots. Then you have to roll up the sections of grass and move them somewhere else. Grass is very very heavy and we had to move A LOT of grass... I had no idea how hard this step would be.

Stay tuned for how we built the beds and how the garden looks now all filled with plants!

Dinosaurs and Oatmeal

I am going to let you in on a little secret, I get bored playing with my son's toys. I know that is shocking but fire trucks and Thomas can only keep me engaged for so long. I think that my little man feels that way too sometimes. Little man just turned two and is learning and exploring his world more than ever. 

I was on a mission to find activities that would keep his attention and keep me engaged and involved with play time.  It was getting way to easy for me to zone out and not engage as much now that he is able to have more self directed play and I did not want to lose that interaction completely. 

In comes the sensory box, and boy are they fun! I love a good theme and sensory boxes are all about the theme! What is a sensory box, you ask?

A sensory box is a container filled with any kind of tactile material that kids explore with their hands. With a sensory box, children are using their sight, touch, and smell to experience their environment in a totally new way. 

For our first box I used rolled oats and wheat puffs as the base, then added a $2 pack of dinosaurs and some old measuring spoons for digging. I set this up in the middle of our living room on a big sheet. This project took me 10 minutes to put together and $5 in materials that I will be able to reuse in different boxes.We spent the better half of an afternoon playing with the box and he absolutely LOVED it. 

All of our materials

An old plastic container as the box

Here it is all put together

Little man LOVED the box and only made a little mess. I did not mach his shirt to the box on purpose, although I do love a complete theme!

Mason Jars

I love Mason jars! 

I use them for canning, freezing, and short term food storage in both my fridge and pantry.

They hold spices on the walls of my kitchen. I am a very slow decorator, mostly because I cannot commit to anything and I'm not very good at seeing the whole decorating picture but I knew I wanted to do this as soon as we moved into the house.

My kitchen is very long with only one set of upper cabinets. I wanted something on that big wall that would stay clean but also be useful, in came the Mason jars.

You can use them as a flower vase 

Find this vase and many more here

I love the blue color here is the link

Turn them into soap dispensers!

You can buy these jars from this Etsy shop

Use them outside in the garden as hanging lights or lights for a party. 

You can find these lights here

Lifehackers has a great tutorial on how to make solar powered jar lights! I am going to make these in the spring and I will post our pictures then but here is a link to the project if you want to do an indoor project to get ready for spring! 

Follow this project here

I am lucky to still have old Mason jars from both my Grandmother and Great-Grandmother. They are the old blue jars that still have the Zinc lids, you can see one of them pictured above. I do not use the Zinc lids for canning but I do use them with my spice jars. If you like the look of the Zinc lids you can find bags of them at antique stores but they are becoming harder to find so grab them when you find them! 

How do you use Mason jars??

Exciting News

Well, it's 50 degrees outside. By the way, I live in OHIO! That is just crazy, I actually saw a tree budding today… boy, is he confused! 

I have some exciting news to share! My hubby and I are looking for homesteading property!  We looked at our first round of houses today. Most of them were no-goes for various reasons, too much money or damage that we do not want to deal with, etc. We are looking for our “forever” house so we are being fairly picky.

We did find one house that has a great 8 acre property with a small orchard and chicken coop! The house is very small… at this point I think we are just going to watch and wait. I have been doing research on what to look for in a homestead property and I am not coming up with a lot of people in the looking/buying stage. 

There are a lot of great established homesteading blogs out there but I thought I might talk about our search from the beginning. 

A lot of things go into finding the right property but we have really narrowed our scope to the big three as I will call them.

1.       Location of property – This is the biggest one for us. You cannot move the land once you buy it and we are trying to stay to a specific area to stay close to family. 

2.       The property itself – We can change something like plating the garden, adding trees, all of that, but we cannot bank on being able to buy more land around us so we need to be ok with the size; we are hoping between 5 and 12 acres. 

3.       The house – My husband is extremely handy and my father-in-law knows most things that my hubby does not. We can fix a lot about a house, but it needs good bones and we need to be able to live there right away. We also would like something a little bigger than we have now if possible.

I will keep everyone updated on the search and what we are finding!

Organized

O - Organized, I like to be organized. I feel much calmer in a space if it is cleaned an organized. Here are a few tips to organize your life!

Coupons
 I use a three ring binder and baseball card plastic sleeves to keep everything organized. I also break the coupons into sections by type and location in my store. Here is what I use.

You will need at least 25 sheets to get started. I use twice that.

Any three ring binder will do, just make sure it is big enough. I like the kind that has pockets on the inside, so I can put my list for the day there and the coupons I'm going to use.

Clothing 

I use space bags to store our clothes that are not in use or clothes that the baby grows out of. They really do work and keep dust and dirt off of everything. Then I can just slide the bags under the bed and out of the way. I do not recommend the kind that you can roll and use for traveling to use in long term storage, they let air in after a few weeks.

I also use the kind that are shaped like a cube just make sure it will fit under the bed or wherever you plan to store it. Also the bags can get heavy so make sure you can lift them.

Storage Cubes 

I use collapsible storage cubes for everything. Toys, clothes, books, winter stuff, we have one with an emergency kit for tornado weather, and one for camping. I got most of mine at Ikea and we use this bookshelf system with the cubes as a dresser in our master bedroom. We are able to put a lot more clothes in a small space by doing this. 

Big N, Little N, What Begins With N?

N – Intuition I know not an N, but for some reason I am an ENFJ so we are going to go with it. Intuition is preferred to sensing: ENFJs tend to be more abstract than concrete. They focus their attention on the big picture rather than the details, and on future possibilities rather than immediate realities.

N - Nosy, yes I can admit it I am nosy. Not because I want to gossip but I like to know what people are up to. My husband has to stop me from going to open houses in our neighborhood just because I want to see the inside of the house. I do not, however, like much reality TV. It's not real and just bugs me.

Here are some N's from Etsy follow the links below to find out more about them! 

Paperdoll

RingFling

Jack Dolan Woodcraft