While I’m no expert, I’m fairly familiar with grafting plants. Growing up, we had a dozen or so apple trees in the yard that were the result of some ISU Extension program from many years ago. While we got various types of apples from the trees, they were all grafted onto crab apple root systems. […]

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Sticking with Tuesday’s “goal” theme, it’s about time to start thinking about what’s going in the garden this year. We’re still eating potatoes, carrots, onions, squash, and garlic from last fall that were stored in the basement all winter. Plus, there’s all the stuff we canned, froze, or dehydrated: pickles, salsa, tomatoes, peas, beans, strawberries, […]

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It was a cold weekend… Oddly enough, it was perfect to start some of the flowers for this spring. The last few years, we’ve been starting our own sweet potato slips and moving them out the the garden. We normally plant two or three slips and end up with a few meals of sweet potatoes […]

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It’s probably something that shouldn’t work as well as it does and I may get burned on it some year. See, we plant some decorative corn in the garden each year, but the seed we use is a bit of a mystery at this point. A number of years ago one of the kids brought […]

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I can’t remember why we ended up with a packet of Musquee de Provence pumpkin seeds at this point. It couldn’t have been with Halloween in mind, as it looks nothing like a traditional jack-o-lantern. With its deep ribs, this heirloom variety is often referred to as the Fairy Tale pumpkin since its appearance congers […]

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Those of you that follow us know that we like our potatoes. Heck… it wouldn’t make much sense to call the boy Potato Boy if he preferred leafy greens. Ironically, with that said, we haven’t bought a potato in over 2 years – thanks to a big garden. It’d be great if we had perfect […]

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The kiddos love fresh carrots – except Peanut. She loves to chew fresh carrots. When she’s done chewing, well, I’ll let you figure that out. But even with the rest of the family constantly snacking on a bottomless bowl of carrot sticks in the fridge, we still have a lot of carrots in the garden. […]

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Since we haven’t shared much on the garden this year, here’s a quick look…

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I say it every year: black raspberry season is my favorite fruit season of the year. Now that we have our own plants established, I no longer have to trek through timber and brush fending of sparrow sized mosquitoes with one hand and carefully dodging the thorns of multi-flower rose bushes with the other while […]

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A tell-tale sign that spring has arrived….DANDELIONS! Here’s our solution… Just give them a bucket and let ’em go….hours of entertainment! If all else fails…mow them off – just not in front of the kids. We had a minor meltdown when “daddy cut off the rest of my yellow flowers!”

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