Fill-Er-Up

This is the sixth installment in the 5×5 Garden Challenge Series. Every Wednesday I’ll be posting about the challenge, covering topics that will help all the new gardeners get started. If you haven’t heard about the challenge head on over to the 5×5 Challenge Website, we’ll also be putting up a page here that pulls in all the 5×5 Challenge posts.

Last night things had dried out enough for me to fill up the 5×5 Challenge Garden in the front yard. I didn’t bother with any special raised bed mix. In the past when I had raised beds, I used Mel’s Mix from Square Foot Gardening. I wasn’t happy with the mix and found that simply adding a sandy loam soil to a raised bed worked best. It retains moisture better and my plants grew much better in real soil.

As you can see my garden helper was on hand to survey my work and make sure I was doing it properly.

After filling it up, I had grand plans of planting all my seeds. It’s finally warm enough here to not worry too much about frost. Then the mosquitos started buzzing in my ear.

I’ll get the entire garden planted tomorrow, following my handy planned out guide of course. It sure is nice to finally be planting something. I can’t wait to see how well everything does, will we have any seeds germinating already by next week?

When’s your last frost date?  Have you planted your heat loving crops in the garden yet? 

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Soaking up the Sun

Last week, we had a straight week of rainy, cool weather. The total rain amount for the week was 6 inches. It was OK for the first few days, then it started to get a little miserable. Everyone was miserable, the chickens, the pigs, the chicks, the dog and the cats. The ducks however, were in seventh heaven!


Thankfully, yesterday the sun came out. Everyone was happy: the chicks frolicked in the front yard, the pigs enjoyed their new garden space, I mowed and weeded all day, Mr Chiots mowed and built a few things in the garage, the chiots basked in the sunny spot on the lawn and Dexter spent all day hunting tiny rodents.

A day of sunshine after so much rain is appreciated more deeply than other sunny days. It’s kind of like taking a hot shower at home after you’ve been backpacking for a week!

What’s the weather like in your garden?

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Cultivate Simple 31: Five Things

Today we discuss the 5 things that would we like to learn next. We are always learning about new skills or topics that interest us. Our attitude is, “If they can do it, so can we!”

Brian’s Five Things

• Welding
• Small Engine Repair
• Cider/Beer Brewing
• Horse Back Riding
• Sailing

Susy’s Five Things

• Making Silage
• Traditional European Butchery
• Keeping a Dairy Cow
• Mushroom Foraging
• Laying Hedgerows

Brian’s Geeky Corner

Use Skitch to capture and annotate screen shots. These can be automatically uploaded to Evernote. This is handy when you want to save a receipt or a snippet of a website, like a recipe.

Google Sketchup of Chicken Nesting Boxes

Books of the Week

Brain Pickings Blog, one of my favorites.

What are your Five Things?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:25:19 — 59.3MB)

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Quote of the Day: Weston A Price

‎”The quality of our food determines in large part the quality of our lives. And the quality of what we eat is determined by every step that goes into production and processing – the feeding of the animals, care of the soil, preservation, storage and even cooking methods.”

Weston A. Price (Nutrition and Physical Degeneration)

Yesterday, I made a batch of butter using the spring grass milk I picked up from a local farm. This time of year it’s always amazing to note how yellow the cream starts to get. In the winter, you can see the cream line in the milk, but this time of year it’s like night and day. The milk is white and the cream is a vibrant yellow. This yellow cream makes the most beautifully yellow butter. You can see the nourishment as you’re rinsing it.

The cream is so yellow because the cows are eating the lush spring grass. Our farmer pastures her cows, they’re 100% grass fed. The results are easy to see and taste. While winter milk is still much tastier than store bought milk, spring milk is out of this world in creaminess and sweetness.

There’s nothing I love more than freshly made butter slathered on a piece of homemade sourdough bread. Life is certainly good this morning here at Chiot’s Run!

What delicious seasonal foods are you enjoying this week?

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Food from a Truck?

Yesterday, Mr Chiots and I had to run a bunch of errands. While out and about, we decided to stop at a food truck for lunch. Generally, this wouldn’t be something we would do, in fact I’ve never purchased food from a food truck before. This one is different, Good ‘n’ You in Belfast has homemade food with many ingredients sourced from local farms.

Mr Chiots ordered a burrito and I got a Maine shrimp taco, we split an order of jalapeño poppers as well. We grabbed our food and headed down to the shore and chatted while we watched a few boats and tourists walking around.

With Dailon back in Ohio for a few weeks and all of our guests gone, it’s really nice to be able to spend some time together. Next week, we’ll celebrate our 15 year anniversary. It’s certainly hard to believe that it’s been that long, yet hard to imagine a time when we weren’t together. We’re not big on celebrating events like this, yesterday was probably as much celebrating as we’ll do.

Have you ever purchased food from a food truck?

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