It’s Still Alive….!!! (Botanical Experiment Part II)

As you can see from the picture our seedlings have really taken off (they all most seem to have life of their own). I’m really excited about growing our own food, and trying our hand at preserving what we don’t eat. These little guys (and gals) will get transplanted to larger planters early next week (I will post pictures of the process because I know how everyone likes to see pictures (visual aids are great)). We still don’t have a garden full of dirt, but we have some leads on where we might get some (hopefully it will pan out because we plan to plant the plants on or near the 1st of April (and it would be nice to have some where to plant them)).
In other news we are headed to the opening of Momentum tonight to see all the art (I’m going mostly so I can eat some really good Pho (a Vietnamese delicacy in soup form)). Also, I’m hopeful that we will sell at least one of our motorbikes this month (mostly because the weather is starting to get really nice, which makes for good riding), and I can buy a pottery wheel so all of you can read something other than just about our plants (although I know how exciting it is). I also acquired a biscuit joiner, so you might have some wood working to look forward to as well as pottery (hopefully before the end of summer I will turn out some wood work (I just need to acquire a couple other tools, such as a router and bits to go with it)). I think that is enough parentheses for one day ( I have been told I use to many (I was also told that parentheses inside of parentheses are a bad way to write (so I wanted to try for a third parentheses inside of the other two to see how it will go over with my critic (my wife, oh that was one more than I thought I would do)))).

It’s Alive….!!!

So we finally planted our seeds this past weekend (even with our garden unfilled/finished). We thought we would go ahead because if we waited until the garden was finished all of our plants would be way behind on the growing curve. Here is a list of plants that we are planning on growing in (and around) our garden:


Oregano
Basil
Cilantro
Sage
Tomato (heirloom)
Zucchini
Cucumber (heirloom)
Squash
Sweet Peas
Green Beans
Bell Pepper (heirloom)
Serrano
Cayenne
Jalapeño (heirloom)
Green Onions (heirloom)
Leek
Carrots (heirloom)
Butter Crunch Lettuce (heirloom)
Brussels Sprouts
Cauliflower
Pumpkin
Watermelon
Corn
Potato (Purple)
Spring Mix/Mesclun Mix
Sunflower
Sweet Onion
Garlic
Sweet Potato
Blue Berries
Black Berries
Raspberries
Strawberries
Grapes

The heirloom seeds we got for free from a man named Ray who does Youtube videos about gardening (go and check him out he's pretty amusing and informing).


Here are a couple of pictures of our seeds in their little seed flats,







as you can see some of them have all ready sprouted. I am not sure which ones sprouted (we have a diagram but I didn’t have it with me), but quite a few did. We are growing the seedlings at my mother –in-law’s house because we don’t have the space or the sunlight in our house. So she graciously allowed us to grow them there (which I appreciate a lot!).

So we are still having problems getting soil for our garden, but it is coming together slowly. We got some soil from my mother-in-law, and some from one of my sisters-in-law. We will also go and pick up some more manure from our friends farm (ranch?) so we are getting there it is just taking more time than I thought it would.

On another note we joined an Etsy “Team” called Baha’is on Etsy, you all should go check it out. There are a lot of talented people from all over the country in that group (team?).

Going. Going. Sold.

We sold our first (and second) piece of pottery on Etsy today, just about 4 hours ago. We were both so surprised and got really worked up. We then realized that we under priced on shipping and now have to pay half of it out of pocket. It’s not a big deal but we quickly went back through the rest of our Etsy products and changed the shipping on them. Some of them went up quite a bit because we could not fit them into those flat rate boxes, and shipping something as light as 4 pounds through the USPS cost about 36 dollars (we were both amazed at this, we thought it wouldn’t be much more than the flat rate boxes which can hold up to 20 pounds for about 10 dollars). Anyway, I’m headed to the post office first thing in the morning to send the pottery to Tennessee were they will live out the rest of their lives in blissful usefulness (hopefully). We will now have some more money so we can get to posting the rest of the hundreds of pieces of pottery we have in our office (thankfully most of it is on the smaller side so it doesn’t take up a lot of space, if it was the stuff I made for my MFA show we would be living in the garage while our house was stuffed with large spinning pottery).

Garden Party

We finally started work on our garden. We built it out of old railroad ties (only $5 apiece). As you can see we layered them two high, because the area we built it on was full of gravel and we needed enough space for soil. So next is to get dirt and plants. We will be getting manure from a friend, compost from the city (both for free), and top soil (from a store I guess). It only cost us $46 for the railroad ties, and shouldn't cost more than that for the soil. So only about $100 investment for fresh veggies. Next step is to learn how to preserve it all for the winter months.


This next photo is where we will be planting zucchini, squash, cucumbers, and melons. We will plant them next to the fence so that they climb up instead of out. We are also planning to grow sunflowers down father where the fence is higher.


On the pottery front, we’re selling our motorcycles so that we can really get our studio up and running the way we wanted. We figured that if we were really serious about doing it we wouldn’t let anything hold us back (i.e. Money), so we posted our bikes on Craigslist today. So hopefully we will sell them and can start buying pottery equipment (like a pottery wheel and clay).