Straw Bale Garden

My husband and I both grew up eating vegetables grown in our home gardens. Neither of us had ever eaten any veggies from the grocery store. It has been important to both of us to start our own garden, for our family. We have tried container gardening, and a raised bed garden. The container garden didn't do well for us because we used Terra Cotta pots, and it was too hard to keep the soil watered without over watering, and then the soil got too hot, and on and on it goes. The raised bed was better, but we were very limited with space. With our raised bed, it was also very expensive because we needed to buy the soil and the wood to build it. We just removed the bed, and found termites, which was disgusting, and a little scary. After all of those problems, I tried to find something else, and found straw bale gardening.

For us, straw bale gardening seems like the perfect solution. It doesn't cost much to start up, and seems to be a great way to have home grown vegetables. My only dilemma was trying to find out if the bales that you see at garden centers are treated with anything. I called two of my local garden centers and asked them where they get the bales, and they both told me the same farm. I decided to call the farm to ask them about the bales, and they told me that they get the straw from a variety of farmers, so they would have to call me back with an answer. Unfortunately, I never got a call back from them, so I was back to square one. My next step was to find organic straw bales. This is an impossible thing to do. I did a Google search, and was coming up with absolutely nothing in my area. Apparently there isn't a market for organic straw bales? I was getting frustrated, and was venting my frustrations to my husband when I said, "I'm gonna call some of the vendors from the local farmer's market, someone has to know an organic wheat farmer." Then it dawned on me...Google organic wheat farmers. When I did, I finally found what I was looking for. I found a certified organic farm about 45 minutes away. I was so happy! I called them, and he said they had some bales in their barn from about two years ago. He said they don't really do the small bales anymore because the people they usually sell their straw to are fellow farmers that are looking for bedding for their animals. The size that they sell now are too big for a little straw bale garden. He gave me his son's number and told me to give him a call because he's the one in charge of all of the straw stuff. So I called him and scheduled a time to go to the farm to pick up the bales. When we got there, I told him about my search, and suggested they get online and advertise that they have organic straw bales. He said he'd look into it, and might start doing small bales for just such a thing. He said it's more work to make the small bales, but I hope they will continue to do them, I told him I would give him some information on where to advertise, so hopefully he will do it.

Anyway, that's where we are now. I will be doing a lot of updates on this, as well as explaining, as we go along. In the meantime, here is a picture of what it looks like now:

Hu-Man and Robin

I have a funny story to tell about a Robin building its nest. Our swingset has a rock wall attached, and over several days we started noticing little bits of straw and grass and any sort of nesting material building up on the rocks. My husband would go out and take all the stuff off and get rid of it thinking the bird would stop because of the human scent. Finally one morning we noticed that there was a nest actually built up on a beam under the canopy of the swing set. The bird had the whole nest built except for the floor. I told my husband to go out and get rid of it before the bird came back. As my husband was up on the climber, I saw a Robin land in the tree not too far from the set, with his beak full of straw, and his head cocked to the side eyeballing my husband. I was standing safely inside the house looking out of the window and yelling to my husband that I think I see the bird responsible for building the nest. My husband looks over at the tree and tries to hurry taking down the nest. All the while I was teasing him from the window saying the bird was probably thinking "I just spent the better part of this morning building this nest and all I have to do is lay down my floor. Now this human is messing up my work. My wife is nagging me about being big and pregnant and needing to lay these eggs somewhere..." and as I was saying this I looked over and the bird started to nose dive towards my husband on the swing set. Now this platform is 5 feet tall so my husband could only escape by climbing down the rock wall, climbing down the ladder, or going down the slide. So, realizing this, I'm screaming "Oh my goodness! It's coming after you! Get down he's going to try to bite you!" My husband started to get a little concerned because his hysterical wife is screaming at him and he sees a bird coming to attack him. For whatever reason the birds just flew after him but didn't actually try to do anything to him. He just landed on the fence behind the swing set. My husband got down unscathed. Once I realized he was okay I could not stop laughing. I have not laughed that hard in a very long time. For sometime after that the bird just hopped around looking for the nest and after a while a friend of his joined him. So I started ad-libbing for them "What were you doing last night Rob? You don't remember where you left your nest?" "No seriously man, I know it was right here but this big human came and took it away, I even tried to get him but he was pretty fast for human." (Because even birds embellish stories).

I think this is the bird. It keeps coming back to this tree and looking at us while we're outside.  Look at the first picture. Doesn't he look like he's looking at me?

Ahh...Spring :)

How to Get Rid of Ants Naturally

Sometime in the past I know I wrote something about our ridiculous ant issues. I hate ants because they are wrecking havoc on my yard. When we were going to lay down mulch for our swing set, we noticed a little ant hill by the leg of the set. We were trying to figure out how to get rid of it without the use of chemicals. We took the handle of a shovel and poked deep holes in the mound. Then we filled it half way with baking soda, and the rest with vinegar. I think it killed some of the ants, but not all. In the past I have used boiling water on the hills, and that has worked really well, but you need a lot of water and you need to make it outside without sloshing water on yourself. My other trick has been cinnamon. Cinnamon doesn't kill the ants, but the don't like it, so they should leave the yard. I did this in my front yard, and they left, but my neighbor treats his yard with something, so they didn't go there. Guess where the went? That's right, my backyard. Now I have been trying to get rid of these annoying creatures ever since.

They haven't bothered me too much in the last couple of years because I wasn't spending a lot of time in the backyard, but now we are going outside every day and I refuse to have these pesky things crawling all over my family. I remembered reading something about ants not liking citrus, so I had a new plan of action.

I bought some oranges the other day and since they are no longer in season, the inside tasted just about as delicious as the peel. So I thought I'd go ahead and give this citrus thing a try. Instead of just using orange peel, I decided to add some cinnamon too...why not?

After I grated two oranges, I sprinkled it over the area that saw all of those nasty buggers. It actually covered a pretty large area for just two oranges. I wish that I had gotten a video of the ants trying to get away. There were so many ants, the mulch looked like it was moving. Within about 10 minutes, there wasn't an ant to be seen. AMAZING!

 

After realizing I missed the opportunity to capture the power of citrus and cinnamon on camera, I was on the lookout for ants. I finally found one on the slide. I didn't have enough oranges to spread over the entire area of mulch, but I did have enough cinnamon, so it got sprinkled everywhere. I think this ant was trying to escape the cinnamon, so he decided to use the slide as his escape route.

Here he is...happy as a clam. 

So I did the first thing that came to mind...I sprinkled him with cinnamon. He didn't know what to do!

In this picture he thought he had it figured out. When I originally sprinkled the slide with cinnamon, he just went up the side to try to climb over. That's when I did a mega sprinkle which created this awesome border of cinnamon. Look at how he's looking at it. This ant went back and forth, around and around. He never figured out how to escape. Finally a strong gust of wind came along and blew him off, only for him to land in more cinnamon on the ground.

I have to say I was pretty happy to see these horrible critters running away because that is what I have been doing with these stupid ant hills that I keep finding.

Now I'm going to go to the store and buy up all of their oranges and take turns with my mom and my husband grating up the biggest batch of ant repellant ever. I'm also going to buy more cinnamon, and sprinkle that stuff everywhere, and let the ants know they are no longer welcome.  As an added bonus, my yard will smell awesome!

I am going to have to put down ant traps too, because there are just too many ants. They take the stuff back to the queen and it kills them. But after that, I'm hoping my homemade concotion keeps them away. We'll see...

Rainbow Swing Set

In January we decided it was time to get a bigger play-set for our kids. The one that we had was a Step 2 set that we bought for our first child when she was 18 months. It had two swings and was great for her at the time, but when our new babies were born we decided we needed to get a new one because the Step 2 was now too small for our family.

We decided to go check out the Rainbow swing sets. Apparently they have closeout sales, so we got a great deal. We wanted it installed before Easter but we had to wait until temperatures were above 40°  for them to come out and install it. We also had a lot of other things that needed to be done before this new swing set arrived. We had to call someone out to cut down two trees from our backyard, as well as remove a limb from our neighbors huge cottonwood tree. We had two days of warm weather, so the first day we had our trees cut down, and the next day the swing set was installed. The kids were so excited to play on it so we let them play for a few minutes before it got dark and told them that they would probably be able to go out and play on it again the next day. Unfortunately, we couldn't seem to shake winter and it was a while before they were able to actually enjoy it.

While I was waiting for the weather to warm up, I spent hours online researching what was the proper type of material to use under a swing set for safety. I looked at pea gravel, rubber mulch, wood mulch, and wood chips. In the end we decided to go with wood mulch. There were pros and cons to each of the different materials, for example, the rubber mulch seemed great because it was a very nice landing pad from any sort of high place,  but I was concerned about any odor that it would emit over time, I was concerned about chemicals leaching  into the soil, and I was concerned about how hot it would get on a typical summer day, not to mention it was the most expensive choice.  My next choice was pea gravel. I thought this was a great idea because not only was it a safe landing zone, but my kids could  play in it sort of like sand without being a giant litter box for any neighborhood cats. I nixed this idea when I realized I needed about 9 inches of pea gravel which worked out to be something like 20 tons. I don't remember exactly how many tons, so 20 may be a bit much but it was definitely more than 10. My husband and I would have to lay all of it down wheelbarrow load  by wheelbarrow load, which didn't sound fun for anyone.  Also, if we ever move from this house we probably would have to remove it for the next owner which is not something we want to deal with. Our last two choices were woodchips or wood mulch. We decided to go with mulch because it seems to be a little more pleasant to land on if someone falls.

So now the weather is nice, the swing set is up, the mulch is laid down, and the edging is finally finished. But now we have a new problem...ants!

Where have I been?

Okay so where have I been since October?  Honestly I haven't been doing anything particularly interesting. I contemplated starting another blog because unfortunately my sister in law is no longer able to post due to the fact that she is busy with four out of five kids in school :) I'm not going to start a new blog because honestly I don't feel like starting over. I'm pretty sure I could just copy everything over, but I'd like to just keep going with this one. So from now on its just me, a home made sister I suppose :)

When I originally came up with the idea of starting a blog, I wanted to talk about things related to motherhood and all of the funny and interesting things that go along with raising kids, specifically as a stay at home mom. However, that never really happened, it turned into me posting about food and my sewing endeavors. I have decided that now I'm going to write about all of my endeavors, just in case there is someone out there like me who is wondering about something, or is thinking about trying something new and wants to find out if someone else has tried it too. I also plan to include stories of everyday life that might bring a smile to your face if you are having a bad day.

This year I plan on getting back on track with things because over the past two years I was either pregnant, or trying to get newborns to sleep through the night. I was also feeling a sense of accomplishment because I got through the "terrible twos" with an absolutely angelic child. But when my little one turned three, things changed! Whew, it was exhausting and trying, but now she's back to her normal sweet self, YAY! My "newborns" are now a year and half, and life is getting a little calmer. So here I am ready to share some of our experiences and hopefully keep up with this blog a little better!

On another note, a lot of my free time has been spent on Pinterest dreaming of Spring. Now that Spring is here things are starting to get busy again. I have gotten so many ideas from Pinterest it's hard to keep up with them, but that's why there is Pinterest so you can pin everything to remind yourself :) I have a huge list of things to do. My sofa and loveseat are over 10 years old and are starting to show their age, which means I can either replace them (not going to happen), or I can cover them. I want everything to look fresh and clean and I can't find anything that will fit my couches exactly so I have decided to make my own slipcovers.  I have never taken on such a daunting sewing project, so it will be an interesting undertaking. But that is a project for a later date because right now I have yard work to do!