Wednesday, February 25, 2009

This and that:)

I have a bit of this and that to share today:)

First off is some stitching I've been doing. This is my spring bunny and the whole reason I needed a spring colored tuck. I have a red tuck that works for everyother season/holiday, but this one needed one of its own:)


Next is a beginning pic of my garden. Nothing going on here yet, but it does look better than it did a few days ago. My dh plowed this spot up and tilled it for me and now it looks nice and pretty. I don't know if you can see them, but there are a few chickens digging around in there looking for all sorts of yummy bugs for their dinner. If only they'd leave the worms:)



And lastly a pic of our boys. These are Jersey bull calves (how old do they have to be before they are not 'calves' anymore?). They are still very friendly and love to have their horns and ears scratched. We try real hard not to get too attached, so we don't have names for them other than 'dinner'. ;) They are obviously NOT doing their job of eating and getting fat right now, LOL!! Just a couple of lazy boys.


Tuesday, February 17, 2009

A stitchy post

Lots of stitching going on around here!!! First off, a gift. A friend saw my gardening plans and decided that I needed a 'good luck with the garden' gift:) So she made me a carrot pin. Isn't it the cutest thing? Monique (who made this) is the designer for My Mark Design. You can visit her blog at http://mymarkdesigns.wordpress.com/ and she has a link to all her very cute designs on her blog.


And this is where I put it, at least for now. I won't keep it there when I'm gardening though. Like all other things in my life, I tend to get messy when I garden:) I don't want to get my pin dirty, but for now it looks cute on my gardening hat.



This is a very bad pic of a project I am working on for me. We don't have much natural lighting in my house, so pics don't turn out very well. This is one I started in the beginning of January. I have been doing other projects in between working on this one, so it's going slow, but it is finally looking like I'm getting somewhere with it:)

And lastly, a tuck. I've been needing a spring colored one and couldn't find one that was already made that I liked the fabric, so I made my own. It needs a little help:) I should have got one corner punched out better and one of the straps it a little off, but all in all, I'm happy with how it turned out.

Happy Stitching:)







Monday, February 9, 2009

Happy Mail Day!!!

I had a good mail day!!! My garden seeds came today, minus the green bean seeds, they should be here soon. This is what came...



I also had a good mail day on Saturday. I had ordered a cross-stitch chart by Blackbird designs call 'Thank You, Sarah Tobias' and it came too:)


I love 'good mail' days:)






Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Goal for my garden

I just joined the 'Freedom Harvest Challenge' at freedomgardens.org

I'm really hoping that this helps keep me focused on our goals for in the garden this year. Since we moved to our 10 acres our goal has been to grow/raise/process as much of our food as possible. We are raising chickens (so far only for eggs as we have been too 'chicken' to slaughter any of them ourselves - we let the coyotes to that for us - YIKES), and we have 2 bull cavles that we'll take in for slaughter and processing when they are big enough. I did pretty well in the garden the first year, but last year I did really badly, planting more weed seeds than veggie seeds:(

So this year our plan is to expand our garden by more than twice the origanal size (I'll measure it when we get it all plotted out) and I am also wanting a couple 4x4 raised beds for salad greens and herbs. I figure the raised beds will be easier to cover when it is too cold or too hot. We would like to add some fruit trees/bushes as well, but so far haven't gotten to any of that. I did get my seeds ordered though. We order all of our seed from seedsavers.org because all of their seeds are heirloom and if I ever get around to it I'd also like to start saving seeds from my garden to use from one year to the next. One thing at a time though:)

I ordered....

green beans, broccoli, carrots, ground cherries, cucumber, cantaloupe, okra, peas, zucchini, pumpkin, spinach, watermelon, basil, chives, cilantro, cauliflower, sunberry, and several varieties of lettuce. I will buy potatoes, onion sets, tomato and pepper plants locally. I just can't keep tomato and pepper plants alive when growing from seed and I have a place where I can get heirloom tomato plants locally, but not the peppers. It'll have to do.

Anything else I've missed?
I'll be keeping an update here of my progress in the garden/kitchen.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

A little about me

I am new to blogging and hope to be able to keep up with this:)

My dh, dd and I live on 10 acres with our 2 dogs, 20 chickens, 150 thousand cats (not really:), 2 bull calves, a guinea pig and a fish. I love to cross-stitch, garden (veggies), read and homeschool my dd.

I am also hoping to start stitching up some ornaments and other things to sell on esty. I'll post a link to that as soon as I get it going.

That's all for now:)