2016 Spring Garden

Square foot garden

We are hobby gardeners. By hobby, I mean, we really enjoy gardening but don't produce enough to feed our family throughout the year and spend more on gardening than it would cost to purchase organic food from the store. However, it's a great learning experience and we're learning as a family how to grow things organically. As part of our homeschooling, I decided that this year, we will weigh what we harvest. This way we can keep track of how much food we're producing and get an idea of how our garden is growing and feeding our family. I'm not including the cost of seeds since most of them we either saved or bought in the past. Not to mention, seeds are pretty cheap. I also didn't include the cost of soil or any gardening supplies. My goal is to grow 25 lbs this year. At the end of the year, we'll compare the cost of organic food from the store with the cost of organic food we've grown in our garden. In the future I hope to add more details about our garden such as how long each crop took to grow, the total cost involved, and how much time daily we spent watering the garden and taking care of it. But to start, weighing the crops is enough. I was excited to finally justify the cost of a kitchen scale.

We harvested our first crops a few weeks ago and some more earlier this week. So far, we have harvested carrots and onions and are just over 4.5 lbs. If our pumpkins, cantaloupes, and watermelon grow, we might make our goal before the Fall harvest. We have harvested some kale but I didn't weigh it. We should be getting some tomatoes as well. Our tomato plant is a great example of how my husband planted an organic tomato that we got from the store, in a pot of soil. The seeds have grown and produced lovely tomato plants that have been very fruitful the past few years. 

This year, we added a two barrel compost. That along with the compost tube from our Garden Tower should really help our soil naturally. Here are some pictures of our garden. I'll start with some pictures of my family, since I know that's what my family enjoys seeing the most. Scroll down and you'll see pictures of our garden and gardening supplies. We're growing a lot of things. The Garden Tower mostly has herbs, strawberries, and greens. The square foot has pumpkins, onions, cantaloupes, peas, and potatoes. Our tomato plant is in the pot in front of our square foot. Depending on how this year goes, we may expand our garden next year. We'd love eventually become more self sufficient. On a side note, we have not had to run our sprinklers this Spring yet. Thankfully we've gotten some good rain and we've been able to use the rain from our rain barrels to water our garden, which is the best kind of water to use. Plants love rain water.  

My four loves!

This cute baby loves helping in the garden!

Three carrots we harvested.

Her first carrot to harvest.

Yum!

Harvested onions

Our cute wild bunny that lives in our yard.

Pitcher plant, to hopefully help catch all the fruit flies in our kitchen.

One of several really long onions

Such great helpers!

Compost barrels

Rain barrels

Garden Tower, filled with herbs, strawberries, and greens.

Mosquito repelling plants

Several herbs

Where we just pulled some carrots and onions.  Don't worry, new seeds have been planted.

We had to pull the kale from our Garden Tower but don't worry, there's more growing here.

Upcycle Kids Clothing and make a Fishing Game

I made a fishing game for my daughter's Curious George birthday party. These took about 5 minutes to make per fish. Rather than run to the store to buy some fabric, I decided to re-purpose some clothes that no longer fit my kids. I cut out some fish shapes from their clothes, put the outside of the fabric facing each other. Sewed all but the tail. Turned the fish right side out, filled the fish with rice and then sewed up the tail. Then I hand sewed a washer to the mouth. It was such a fun and practically free game for the party! I put the fish on a blue pillow case so they could pretend they were fishing in water. I already had the fishing pool from a toy exchange I did last year. 

How to Make an Advent Calendar

Blue Rock has a cultural fair at school. His country to research was Switzerland. Advent Calendars are big there so I decided to think of a way he could make one. I usually buy the chocolate ones but did not see any this year.

I took various pictures from Switzerland and made them different sizes where I had a total of 25. You could just have 24 if you want. Then I had Blue Rock cut some squares and tape the left side of the square over each picture so you could open them every day and see what was behind it. Then he numbered each square 1 to 25.  This was a very easy diy advent calendar project.

Easy to Make Sinus and Allergy Shower Discs

I'm participating in two more swaps. The next one is a Sip, Swap, and Snack, Homemade Edition. Nobody knows what people are going to be swapping but it has to be homemade. I got this idea from the last swap I did, the Crunchy Body Swap. Someone made some citrus shower discs and I thought I should make some but would gear them toward sinuses and allergies since Fall and Winter will be here before we know it. I decided to make mini discs and ended up making 72. I wanted to have enough for 20 women to get 3 each and have some left over. Some will probably break as you're getting them out of the liners. I think I lost 4 of the 72. I'm not sure how many ladies will be participating in this upcoming swap as the last day to commit is this Friday. However, being as pregnant as I am, I had to get this done.

Here's how you make these awesome discs! I made two kinds. One geared toward adults and one geared toward kids age 2-10. You can basically add any combination of essential oils you want, as long as they are considered safe for who ever will be using the discs. In the main disc, I used Eucalyptus, lavender, and cedarwood, which are all good at helping with allergies and sinuses. In the kid safe version, I used a a KidSafe blend*.

Allergy Shower Discs 
a knock-off of Vick's Shower Tablets

2 cups baking soda
2/3 cups of water
pure Eucalyptus essential oil (not recommended for children under 10)
pure Lavendar essential oil
pure Cedarwood essential oil
foil mini muffin liners
mini muffin pan
food coloring, optional

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line your mini muffin pan with foil cupcake liners. Then mix the baking soda and water, it should be a thick paste. Add food coloring if you want. Fill each muffin liner halfway with the baking soda mix, add 2-3 drops of each essential oil, then add more baking soda mix on top. Then bake for 15 minutes. Remove from oven, let cool completely. Then carefully remove the discs from the liners. Add another 2-3 drops of essential oil to each disc. Let dry and wrap individually in plastic wrap. Store in a sealed container. I put these in snack size baggies, since I always have plenty of those, and will add a label to each one. I put three per bag.

*To make it kid friendly, avoid Eucalyptus essential oil. I used Plant Therapy's KidSafe, Sniffle Stopper. I also added a few drops of green food coloring to the mix so we could easily tell the difference.

Another good combination would be peppermint, lavender, and lemon. However, since I'm about to have another baby, I'm going to avoid peppermint essential oil since I'll be breastfeeding.

Crunchy Body Swap!

Everything from the Body Swap!

What happens when you get 25 crunchy moms together for a swap? You get some pretty awesome stuff! I like participating in swaps and have attended several over the past few years: toddler busy bag swap 1, toddler busy bag swap 2, 4 and 5 year old busy bag swap,  a toy exchange, and even a science bag swap, although I never got around to blogging about it. I have not, however, participated in a body swap before. The rules were only 25 women could participate. If you get more than that, it ends up costing everyone a lot more time and money. Sadly, someone wasn't able to make it the last minute. So we each ended up with 24 things, which is still great! The way it worked was that everyone posted in the group what they were going to make and made 25 of them. Then we all got together and swapped items and went home with some pretty cool natural body stuff! We met at a park so we could all bring our kids and they could play while we swapped natural products with one another. I'll post links to what is some of the products. 

Here's what I got and made!

Natural Hair Detangler/leave in conditioner - this is what I made

Hot/Cold Rice Pad

Organic Caffeine Eye Serum

Shower Discs

Black Head Remover Scrub

Organic Massage Oil

Grapefruit Bath Salts

Detox Bath Salts

Lavender Bath Fizz

Bug Spray

Bug Bite Salve

Whipped Organic Beeswax Lotion

Headband

Wild Orange Deodorant Spray

Himalayan Sea Salt Body Spray

Coffee Scrub

Honey Facial Mask

Orange/Brown Sugar Honey Scrub

Make Up Remover

All Purpose Salve

Dry Shampoo

Citrus Chocolate Bentonite Mask

Milk and Clay Mask Mix