This weekend I was excited to hear from a reader that has an AMAZING garden.  Her 1,000+ square feet of garden space is simply beautiful, as evidenced by the beautiful image below.  Karina’s garden features the following (plus, I have it on good authority that she also has a “mini” orchard with apples, peaches and pears.  Oh Karina, you and your family will be so thankful this winter when you pull from your pantry some wonderfully preserved foods that you yourself worked hard to lovingly prepare.

Reader "Karina's" awesome garden in CT.

So, dear readers, feast upon the following list of items Karina is enjoying.

• Snap peas
• Scarlett Runner Beans
• Bush Provider Beans
• Chives ( my first line of defense)
• African blue basil
• Nafal basil
• Lettuce
• Red carrots Fennel
• Broccoli
• Red cabbage
• Brussels sprouts
• Parsnip
• Sweet Potatoes
• Delicata squash
• Zucchini
• Butternut squash
• Peppers both bell n hot
• Kale
• Collard Greens
• Swiss Chard
• Pickle cucumbers
• Asparagus year 1 from seed

Karina is new to the art of preserving and storing food and we will be working together to make sure she has success and fun through the entire process.   Thus making it even more enjoyable for her next year (as her stress will be gone).

Stay tuned for canning tips, tricks and recipes to use with all of the food listed above.

The past year and a half, going on two years has been a wonderful experience for our family and we are ready to take on another challenge.

A Garden!

We have had gardens in the past but really we never pushed them for the crop yield that we could get from them.  We never really cared because we were living in rural America with fruit and vegetable stands on just about every corner.  We can pick up any fresh fruit or vegetable at almost any time.

This year, that is not enough, we want to can EVERYTHING.  If we are on this quest to live providently we want it to include the works, enjoyment and gratification of a well producing garden, but since we wanted a little more help than the local extension office and master gardeners we bought a book.

Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

We began by gracing the local bookstore and picked up a copy of Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space with Less Work by Mel Bartholomew.

As you can see I then began reading, or should I say devouring the book.  I have marked all of the areas that I thought I need help with… yes it is a lot, but no more than the average person I suppose.

So, after I devoured the book and determined that this is definitely something that I can do I went to work drawing up the plan for my square foot garden.

Soon I will be posting about our house and yard and walk you through the entire process of prepping  our yard for this great garden.  But for today I will just show you my plan.

So here it is!

LivingProvident's Square Foot Garden Plan

I know what you are saying… you can’t read that can you?

Well have no worry, I will tell you what it says.  Beginning in the lower left and working up and then to the right they are as follows:

Garden Plot 1

Garden plot 1 is going to have Tomatoes across the back with different herbs and celery in front. The aroma in this part of the garden should be heavenly. I hope that the Cherry Tomato plant (along with those I have in pots on the patio) produce a lot because I want to try making stewed/diced tomatoes using Cherry Tomatoes this year. I think this will reduce the amount of slicing and dicing that I have to do.

I will let you know if I was alright in my thinking or whether it was wishful thinking later this summer!

I have never grown celery so we will see how this turns out. I am excited because I love to eat it so much and we will use it when I can those stewed tomatoes I was talking about (if there is any left).

Garden Plot 2

Garden plot 2 will also be littered with Tomatoes. As I am sure you can see, we eat a lot of Tomatoes. So, we will have a few more Cherry Tomatoes so that we have some for our salads, and just eating whenever we walk into the pack yard and fell like a juicy mouthful.

We are also planting Tomatillos. Tomatillos are a Mexican Tomato that is perfect in Salsa. One plant will be a little tin, but I will put another 2 in patio pots.

All told, we will have 8 Tomato plants in the garden and then probably another 5 to 7 on the patio. I want about 15 total since we want to make a lot of stewed tomatoes and salsa. I generally have great success with tomatoes so I am excited about this.

Next, we have Chives… Yummmm… We are planting Chives because there is nothing better than a baked potato with homegrown chives. We get potatoes from my sister and brother-in-law so now we have yummy toppings for them as well.

We will also grow some Rosemary here and then Lettuce. Now we will have some great summer salads.

Garden Plot 3

Garden plot 3 is full of strawberries, we will not have enough to make jam because we use so many, but this will give a nice patch for us to just snack and eat off of.

The local Rotary Club lets you get strawberries by the gallon for a great price so I am not too worried about it.

Garden Plot 4

Garden plot 4 is the beginning of our Peas. We love to have fresh peas to eat raw in salads or put in stir fry. In total this year we will have 8 snap pea plants.

This garden plot will also have Cantaloupe and Watermelon. These items require two square feet for each plant. Everything will be growing upwards on metal supports.

Garden Plot 5

Garden plot 5 will also contain Peas but in addition it will have Dill. We plan on making cucumbers this year and I love fresh dill. This part of the garden will smell wonderful.

Garden Plot 6

Garden plot 6, right next to all the Dill will be the Cucumbers that will make those great pickles. We are growing pickling cucumbers. They are crisp to eat raw, with a right flavor that I love and perfect to put into jars without having to slice them.

In this plot we will also grow some pole beans. In total this year we will have three types of beans in 9 small plots. We will can the pole beans, but the others we want to dry out and store in buckets for soups and stews this year.

The mung beans will also be used to sprout throughout the year and use the sprouts on sandwiches. Oh, I am making myself hungry just thinking about it.

Lastly, we will grow three types of onion in this plot.

Garden Plot 7

Garden plot 7 will continue the beans the begin the carrots.

I originally wanted to grow about 50 pounds (1 bushel) of carrots this year so I could can about 24 quarts of carrots, but when I realized I would need about 300 carrots to do that I opted to can pints and will only get about 15 at that… Then when I went to the store to purchase the seeds I found this neat strip planter that I am going to try that is suppose to help you get more produce for the same space. I probably got ripped off (an extra $1.50 over a pack of seeds) but oh well I will try it once, because if there is a chance for 30 pints that would be great.

Carrots is truly going to be the produce to follow this summer.

Garden Plot 8

Garden plot 8 is going to finish off the carrots and also give us some Radishes, Garlic and Zucchini.

Have you ever had homegrown garlic? I think it is one of the most wonderful homegrown foods that exists. The garlic seems to have such a better flavor when you grow it in the garden and can smell its aroma all season.

As you can see Zucchini takes up a fair amount of space. It will require 4 square feet just for one plant.

Garden Plot 9

Garden plot 9 will also have an oversize item, pumpkin. It requires two square feet per plant also.

This plot will also grow our beets and begin the pepper plants.

Garden Plot 10

Garden plot 10 will house the remainder of the peppers that we want for our crop. We will use peppers in the stewed tomatoes, the salsa, for eating and probably freezing also. I may even dehydrate some this year. I hear they get really sweet when they are dehydrated.

All of this should make for a pretty fine crop of produce for our family of four.  We are still not experts, but I think with a crop like this we will be working towards it.

You most likely noticed that Potatoes and Corn are not in our garden.  Well, it is pointless for us to grow potatoes becuse my sister and brother-in-law raise potatoes for a living and he has the best potatoes in the world.  He is wonderful enough to give us as many as we want each year.

Corn is a crop that takes a lot of space for a small yield and since so many people grow it around here and sell it at the corner for $1 a bag I will just purchase it.  That way I can get enough to freeze corn on the cob and can pints of it cut off the cob.

Garden Seeds for LivingProvident's Garden!

Here is one final picture for you to enjoy of all the seeds we purchased today.

Happy Gardening!

Recently we received a great question from a reader that has a family of seven in Tennessee. She was curious about what garden plants to grow and when it was best to plant them.

The best resource I can provide her or anyone else of the University Extension office and Master Gardener group nearest to where you live.

Here is a map of all the Master Gardner Programs in the USA. http://www.ahs.org/master_gardeners/
If you are looking for the Extension Offices in the USA try this link. http://www.csrees.usda.gov/Extension/index.html

For our reader though I took the opportunity to put the following resource together for her. If you live in the Tennessee area this may help you as well:

First of all a wonderful resource in any state is the univeristy extension office. They generally have a Master Gardeners program that can provide you oodles of great information. The best one in Tennessee is http://mastergardener.tennessee.edu/. One of the resources I saw on their website was http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/spfiles/SP291-D.pdf this resource provides a high overview of care for gardens in Tennessee.

As far as what to plant/when here is a great guide to starting your plants and then transplanting into the garden http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/pbfiles/PB901.pdf . This resource http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/spfiles/SP291-M.pdf tells you what plants to grow next to one another so that you resist disease and cross polinate. It is a great resource and should make the crip more plentiful as polination is hard to achieve, especially if you live in a high population area where bees are not very plentiful.

If you like homemade salsa this was a fun resource http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/wfiles/W039.pdf.

If you like Asian foods this is a great garden resource http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/wfiles/W037.pdf.

Overall visit http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/homeGarden/default.asp#gardening and use the resources here to help you create the best garden that you possibly can.

I hope these resources help you, if you need anything else feel free to contact me.

Living Provident

I grew up on a farm and so we had lots of junk to play with.  Mostly out of the “Bone Yard”…

What you ask is the “Bone Yard”?

Well when you have a farm you often have many cars, trucks, tractors, and other farming projects they sometimes become…um…what is the word, dead… broke down… unfixable.  But most of all you can not haul them off because they are prime for future parts on farm projects, so you place them into the farm graveyard.  The word graveyard is pretty morbid so we, along with a lot of other farmers, call it the “Bone Yard”.

Well you get the drift a “Bone Yard” is a great place to find really useful stuff like an old Datsun pickup truck.  We took all of the body parts off that old truck until it was stropped down to just a frame.  We bolted two seats onto the frame around the middle area.

Unfortunately the steering column broke so we had to weld a steel plate into the gears and then a steel rod to it that went straight up.  Then another steel rod got welded to the first rod and it went back to the driver’s seat.  This make shift rudder was exactly that and it steered opposite, so if you turn the rudder left the truck (call it electric car) goes right.  OK all we need now is something to drive this beast with big snow tires on the back and little tires on the front.

We looked around until we found an electric motor from a forklift.  Perfect so we tied it into the differential at the rear axle.  We used a spider gear that gave it just enough play to be able to hook things up.  Now we needed some batteries.  We had 7 batteries laying around in various states of disrepair.  Dad went and got some old ones from work to top us off at 12 batteries.  We welded in a rack and hooked all of the batteries up and then the fun began.

To start off you have to understand that when all of the batteries are hooked up they give a high level of power and the electric motor reacts by going fully on.  There is noway to control the speed.  Either it is on or it is off and on has only one level, fast.  We did put in a break that was a pipe hooked to the emergency brake and a rope so we did have the ability to lock up the tires!

We were able to get a switch but the power was to much and it melted down.  My dad got a couple more switches and they melted down as well.  Finally one day my dad came home from work and says I have a switch that should work.  So we went to hook it up.  Normally we jack the car up on blocks and get ready for the electric motor to take off.  This time when we ask dad if we should get the jacks he said no this switch will work for sure.  So there is dad sitting backwards on the electric car with his legs dangling from the frame backwards as the switch melted down and the electric car takes off out of the shop.

The rudder, aka makeshift steering wheel, hit my dad in the arm as he looked over his shoulder to grab it.  Seeing that he is heading towards the suburban (freshly painted) he steers the electric car away but ends  up hitting the front of our little red car and bouncing back in the direction of the suburban.  My dad steers away again and misses the suburban by less than a foot.  Now the electric car is going full speed and is between the house and the suburban and the angle does not give dad any room to steer.  The electric car hits the corner of the house and starts to gouge into the siding.  This was not a bad thing because it slowed the electric car down and in fact to a stop.  With the rear wheels on the grass they simply spun and spun until one of the batteries blew up and ended the connection to the electric motor.

Wow, dad survived!  We were all stunned as we helped him pull the car off of the house.  The gouge was impressive but did not really hurt anything but the looks.  I remember saying with my brothers to dad that he was in big trouble when mom found out.  We had all gotten in a lot of trouble over the years being 4 boys there was not one door in the house that had not been replaced, and we won’t even get into the windows.

“Dad you are in trouble” we all said.  Dad shook his head and said “what do you mean I am not in trouble” and as he said it he pushed the shrubs up and covered the scared house so that the wound was gone!  He then looked at us and said “Mom better not find out about this”.  The look was one that only dads can give and this story was not shared until the siding was fixed.  We did get the car working again finally.

So the switches were not a good idea, we went to just arching two large wires together to get the power to the motor.  Finally the day came we rolled the car up to the pump house dirt road and got ready to see this car go.  I remember putting on my dads New York police biker leather jacket and some welding gloves.  My brother took the drivers seat and we both placed out feet awkwardly on the frame of the electric car.

Time to go…I carefully, which is the last time the word carefully was used again that day, I carefully put both wires in each hand with a tight grip.  It was like a was going to ride a bull but come to think on it I was not actually holding on to this bull.  Dad said go and I put the wires together…Boom…we were off at full speed as soon as the giant snow tires stopped spinning.  Bouncing down the road tossed and turned.  My brother tried to grasp the rudder with his hand and the understanding of how to steer this monster.  I remember thinking why doesn’t he stay on the dirt road as we swerved on and then off and then back on again.  I pulled the wires to get us going slower and my first attempt failed the wires had fused together!  I pulled harder and to my relief they came apart.  We slowed and my brother said go faster as a laugh came out of him.  I gave us more speed before the laugh and what it meant fully hit me.

I had often heard the laugh from my brother it was a trait he got from my father.  Basically my dad was laughing that same laugh when the electric car went flying out fo the shop with him sitting on it backwards.  You do not want to hear the laugh.  So I slowed us down even more with on, off, on, off of the wires held by my welding gloves.

Finally the spider gear blew out and we rolled to a stop.  The motor was no longer hooked to the differential that made the wheels move.  It was over, the first and only run, we would ever have.  My dad and mom looked at each other as we bounced up and down on this beast we had created and they knew we would end up getting hurt really bad.  My dad decided because of a look from mom that he would not be able to find another spider gear for our electric car.  It all worked out though because later we turned that electric car into a giant catapult that shot basket balls 70 feet.  That is a story for another day.

Speaking of the story for another day when I was looking for the video of the electric car at my parents I found this short clip. Here is the catapult.

This is a motivational story to help us all understand that we are not limited ever!  If a couple of kids could build an electric car out of the “Bone Yard” than anything is possible!  Get out there and build something, do not spend a fortune to do what you can do with a little sweat equity.

I have a friend that converted a car into fully electric, you can see it at his web site Brooksolar.com.

Rhett Out

Are you looking for a safe way to keep weeds and grasses from growing in the cracks of your driveway, sidewalk, walkway and paving stones?

Try this:
Sprinkle handfuls of baking soda onto the concrete and then sweep it into the cracks where the weed s are or wherever you want to prevent them from growing.

The added sodium will make the area much less hospitable to dandelions and their friends.

To purchase Baking soda in bulk the most cost effective way click here (just over $1 per pund).