It’s a sign of the coming spring and that makes me happy. It means we are close to planting and I need to get my seeds out, organized and started.
This year I plan on NOT failing my seedlings! A friend of mine has a greenhouse and has offered to start some seeds for me, since she is doing her own in there anyway.  She says its as easy as flipping a switch when she goes out to do chores each day so I’m taking her up on it. I’ve got two flats of soil prepped and ready with the seeds. OH, HAPPINESS!
My sweet lover has also been in the mood for farming. He has gotten 2 loads of compost, and one load of manure, delivered and tilled into the ground.

Our lettuce be is sending up a handful of volunteers amongst the carrots we’ve planted, ‘and the peas and safely tucked in their beds. I am resisting the urge to go dig one up avery few hours to see if they’ve begun to sprout.

I’m hoping to keep up my enthusiasm and not sequester myself in the air-conditioned house once it gets really hot out there. For now, I refuse to think about those couple months of heat over a hundred degrees. For now, I’m happy in today, thankful for today.

Happy First Day of Spring!

My soul with gratitude is filled,
My heart with mother love is thrilled,
My eyes brim o’er with new-born joy,
While gazing on my cherub boy.

O precious one! Through tears I see
A mighty task awaiting me.
My happy sky frowns overcast,
Life’s duties looms so grand, so vast.

To shield from wrong, to right incline,
This little life now linked to mine-
Divine the gift. Oh may the mould
A heart of truth and honor hold!

Help me, kind Heaven, to know the way
From out the tangle of each day,
To guide him safe to manhood’s prime,
And all the glory shall be Thine.

M.E. Piatt

What I was doing 10 yrs ago:

In the summer of 1998 I was so young, wow. My cousin got married and for her wedding I flew to Missouri with my #2, David, who was just turning 1 year old. That was interesting: flying on a plane with an infant, by myself out of Las Vegas! Yikes! I even had to take the shuttle the 2 hours to the airport by myself.  I remember how intimidated I felt, and how strong and independent when I got home safely. Silly me.

We sold our first home that year, to build another while renting a tiny duplex with no yard. So we ended up moving twice within a year.

I got pregnant with my Lovely Lizzi. She was my first home birth, the next spring. I actually went into labor while laying tile in the new house. She was born posterior into my friend Gretchen’s loving hands, at home. What a great birth!

I grew leaps and bounds in the Lord that year, through an informal ladies’ Bible study. I read The Way of Agape, by Nancy Missler that changed my life in so many ways. It helped me understand God’s Love to a depth I never knew before.

Five things on my to do list for today:

Water garden

Teach school-correct all work.

Make bread or muffins or something. (I love baking.)

Hang out some laundry

Plan meals for this weekend

Five things on my to do list for tomorrow:

Thin the clothes and toys

Drop off boxes to thrift store

Weed my flower bed

Nap (it’s allowed on Saturday, lol)

Get my sewing machine out and running.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Offerings to the Lord (of course)

Pay bills and debts

Fence in my property and put in irrigation systems to support my own beef and milk cow(s).

Replace ALL my clothes. (I know that sounds vain and self-indulgent, but I would. And probably buy some jewelry too.)

Travel. I’d like to see the Amazon River Basin. I like to see the lands of my heritage: Ireland, Germany, England. I’d like to see Africa and Asia and Australia. I’d do some roaming.

Three of my bad habits:

gullible~ I tend to be too trusting. It’s a good thing my dh is so down to earth. He steadies me.

flakey~ flexible to a fault. Here also my dh reminds me of the time when I’m late, reminds me of appointments, tells me when to say, “No,” to those too-demanding fun commitments.

worrier~ It’s how I say I love you. So if you give me an ulcer it’s because I care.

Five places I have lived:

Missouri

Utah (urban)

Utah (rural)

Texas

Mexico

Five jobs I have had:

housekeeping- hotel

cashier at a small grocery store

retail in a shop in the mall

Customer service rep for ordering center (Phone job)

But the best and most rewarding of all is Wife and Mother. I love my role as a homemaker more than any corporate job. Even my dream of becoming a lawyer has paled to oblivion.

If you’ve read this, consider yourself tagged.  The first 5 people to leave me a message are “it.”

Hello.  I wanted to post a picture of our garden before everything gets into full swing. We have our lettuce bed there behind the irises doing well. It sure doesn’t look like much of a lettuce bed, but I’ll tell you what, that is plenty for our family of 9 to harvest enough for 2 meals a week. We’ve been using it for burritos and tacos, taco salad, and regular green salads. So, plenty plenty. I’ll remember, for next year, to plant in several installments, rather than all at once.

My irises have done very well this year. Last year I planted them the summer before last and then in the spring and they weren’t really established, but this year I’ve had just hundreds of blooms. I love them.

The fruit and nut trees survived the late frost, so we will have fruit. THe nut trees are still very young so I doubt we’ll get anything from them for a bit, yet. But still, it’s exciting to see them flourishing in new leafiness.

I neglected my starts and all my baby plants died one warm day while we were out and about. Normally I’m home and would have remembered to water, but well, there is no excuse and they’re all dead. SO, we bought a few varieties of tomatoes and peppers, and a few herbs from the nursery,  and replanted some of the not-so-cool-weather  plants from seed.  I think we’ve missed the window for cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts and cabbage. The peas are doing well and blossoming already. So hopefully soon we’ll have peas for our stirfy! Also a new thing this year: we planted the entire front yard in popcorn. Should be a fun harvest for the kids. I don’t know how well our neighbors will like our new landscaping plan, but so what. We are in a pretty laid-back area, so I’m hoping people will laugh and not make waves over it. Wes built a drip system out of a piece of pvc pipe, drilled with holes at the spacing of our rows. It’s wonderful.

Chas has a tutorial on growing potatoes. If I can get hold of some seed potatoes I’m going to try it. Thanks Chas!

Have a gorgeous day!

This is the clothes-line that my sweet lover built for me. I’ve been wanting one for years and have had the wires hung up at different places, just draped here and there. It looked a little like white-trash (BTDT…. lol!) but I don’t care. It is sure nice to let the clothes dry in 45 minutes of clean, fresh, desert air, than it is to let them dry in 45 minutes of either our previous electric or now gas heated dryer. IT’S SO SO MUCH NICER.

So, we’ve been her for a few years without a line and I threatened to wrap the wires around the vinyl posts of the back patio. I threatened more than once or twice but never did it. This set-up with the poles is much nicer and won’t damage the posts. I’m thankful Wes had the time and materials to do some welding. Doesn’t it look great!?

The down-side to not having a manicured lawn is that if the wind blows any clothes off the line they get PRETTY dirty on the dusty, sandy ground. We do get some gusts too. Twice the wind has lifted our trampoline off the ground and set it down somewhere else. Yeah, I know! Unbelievable! I’m totally serious though. And yes it’s a full-sized trampoline.

So! I was thinking today about the things we buy out of convenience, since I don’t need dryer sheets anymore. I wondered how many things we could really do without, make do with what we have, or make ourselves with our already available resources. Such as lotion, shampoo, soap, laundry detergent, paper towels, tissue, and toilet and other paper products for the home. I wondered how difficult it would be to incorporate more cloth items like feminine pads and diapers and baby wipes.

This laundry line is a baby step toward being more efficient with our resources, and more self-sufficient. I have many plans in the works and will share them as I go. Thanks for reading and pop in again.

So I got some worms from a lady in my neighborhood that uses this method to compost the manure from her sheep pen.

Here are some pictures of me making a home for them:

Drilling air holes. Power tools are for women too.

Here, I’ve put in a bit of shredded paper.

Then, I added some bits of cardboard, and some broken twigs that I cut out of the Autumn Aster bed.

I had some helpers breaking up the aster stems. Don’t you love the “garden” gloves they found to use while helping me? My children are Adorable!

I mixed this all up added some water till it was nice and mushy, but not too sloppy (we don’t want our little fellas to drown now do we?) On top of all this I added a few big gobs of straw/manure from the chicken coup, more water. And then, I popped the lid on and set it in the sun so it’ll get nice and steamy and ready for the worms.

In the meantime, while they are waiting for their big farmhouse, they’ll have to settle for a small townhome under my kitchen sink. I’ve added a little bit of straw stuff, an apple core and a tea bag, just till the bin is ready. You can see one of the little guys on the far rim of the container. Woohoo.

Here are the worms. They are not regular nightcrawlers or earth worms you buy in a bait shop. These are composting worms called redworms, aka red wrigglers.

So that’s my fun Saturday project… yes still it counts as school.

Here’s the flower bed I put in a few summers ago. The irises are doing well. I’m really pleased with the way it’s turning out. Later in the summer the sage bushes will be flowering the prettiest dusky purple with honey bees buzzing all over it. I love it!

This is the trellis that Wes built for me for Mother’s Day last year. Shame on me! I haven’t sealed it yet. That was the deal: he built it, I was to seal it. I need to get some linseed oil soon!

This is our peach tree blossoming. Last year we had a cold spell that froze all the blossoms and we didn’t get a single peach. I’m hoping that we are past all that for this year. We’ve been watching the forecast just in case. The weather has been so nice, but we had a couple cold nights this week. For a few nights, we covered the trees with tarps and pulled extension cords to dangle  a light bulb over a branch beneath the tarp, hoping to  avoid the catastrophe of last year.  Keeping our fingers crossed.

This is our lettuce bed. The rebar dome is for the plastic we used to create a mini greenhouse type of situation. Since lettuce is a cool weather plant we started it super early. Once it starts warming up in the desert it doesn’t stop.  We’ll hit over a hundred degrees way too soon for lettuce to mature if we wait for the last frost date. Behind this box you can see the other boxes with beets, spinich and other misc. good things in the ground waiting to peep out. To the left you can see Wes watering the baby peas. YEAH!

For whatever reason, Andrew really does thrive on being helpful. If ever I have difficulty with an attitude of his, I give him a job and watch the selfishness melt away and the confidence blossom. He likes work.

Here he is, today, cutting the Scotch Thistle sprouts with a shovel… in the neighboring lot no less! No one asked him to, he just knows that they spread like crazy and we don’t want them on our property. Isn’t he thoughtful? What a great kid!

We have been raising lambs for 4 years for the 4-h livestock program. I think that it’s been very beneficial for the development of character and diligence. I love to see my children growing out of the selfishness of babyhood and developing the skills of caring for something besides their own wants and needs. I have seen them becoming more consciously thoughtful. They also learn a lot about investing and money management, much much more than I ever did in public school.

It’s David’s first year. He’s still learning and struggling to train his lamb for the show ring. It is a difficult job. They both will have to enter the ring without any sort of halter and show their lambs using nothing but their hands. Andrew has a real knack for it after training three others. SO, the rest of this month will be the most important days in training. Then, off to market they go. It’s bitter-sweet for us to see them go. They are such a hassle, but we do love them so. We feel proud to be offering such good healthy clean meat to whomever will be the buyer.

The Lambs have just been sheered and in a post coming soon I’ll show you what we do with all that wool.

The reason they have their jackets on is not because it’s cold in my house. It’s because they are required to feed the lambs before they eat themselves.Did I say I love homeschooling? I DO! I love seeing my sweet children love learning. I love seeing them seek out new things to learn, and soak it all up with near perfect comprehension. Here’s a little gushy momma love~ Ahhhh! My kids are are so smart.