This week I’m setting apart for fall cleaning. This is partly because we were traveling yesterday, which would have made a 4-day week for school. I don’t like doing 4-day weeks, so I just made this week a fall break in which all of us will be cleaning/de-cluttering the house. I don’t like to clean, but I like to de-clutter because it makes cleaning easier the rest of the year. I can tell it’s been 6 months since spring cleaning, as it has been harder to keep up with silly messes.

Cleaning for today:
-Laundry
-finish the summer to fall clothes transition by getting everything packed up and ready to take to the shed
-de-clutter closets
-Boys’ room:
-wash bedding
-dust mop walls
-clean woodwork
-dust mop floor
-mop floor
-Girls’ room:
-wash bedding
-dust mop walls
-clean woodwork
-dust mop floor
-mop floor

Tomorrow will be our bedroom and the bathroom. Thursday will be the office and kitchen. Friday will be the den and laundry room. Saturday will be the porches and outside chores.

My hubby is 38 today. We have been married for 11 years and together for 12. He is my best friend. REALLY! Not just saying that….

He’s a great hubby and an awesome Dad!

Well, it did last week anyway. Not much is happening around here as far as horticulture goes. The garden is finished. The canning is finished.

Our budget is tight right now, because I had to buy fall clothes. I was able to find decent prices, but still. Fitting together wardrobes for 5 children can often be expensive no matter how frugal of a shopper you are. Luckily Eric and I don’t need anything new. I pretty much can use everything that I used last year, plus I wear some clothes all year round. I’m hoping that it will be better from here on out.

School is going great. I’m always impressed by how much information Lilly and Aggie pick up. They LOVE school. I didn’t love school until I went to college the second time. Arden is starting to like it, which is good because two years ago she would throw fits every time I did school with her. Last year she did it without the fits, but she still didn’t like it. I’m glad that she’s gaining some interest in it. I think that if I wanted to work on it more, Liam will be reading fluently by the end of the school year. I just don’t like to push. I did that with potty training and it didn’t turn out so hot.

We were outside yesterday– the first day it didn’t rain in probably 2 weeks. I love the cool breeze and the smell of the air. It won’t be much longer before the leaves start turning. I’m telling you– the effect of the leaves here in the TN hills is breathtakingly beautiful. I’ll get a pic when it starts changing.

It has been raining a lot here in the last few days. Today has been especially wet. Our septic system is full of water…no flushing today. (GAG)

On the other hand, it’s nice to get rain. Until this year, middle TN had been in a three year drought. It’s rained quite a bit more this year and brought up the water levels. This is good for all of the farmers. (Gardeners too.)

I love this type of rain. It’s a gentle thundershower- no threat of nasty winds or hail. There is a gentle downpour beating on the windows and roof. It’s relaxing, I think. This rain is healing in more ways than one.

The deer came back while I was on vacation and ate all of my tomatoes, cucumbers and melon. They also invaded my pumpkin/winter squash patch. I hate deer.

Back in June, my computer’s motherboard went kaput. I wasn’t able to get any of my pics onto our other laptop, which is a very junky one which belongs to our kids. Finally about 2 weeks ago, we bought a MacBook pro for me. I’ve recently put the photo program onto the computer. And now I can update with pics!

I’ve either been too busy to blog or not interested in blogging lately. I can’t put up any pics, because my laptop is broken and the computer I am using doesn’t have the camera program on it. I was going to post some pics today, but….
So I’ll summarize an update of the past month:

Family- Sean is 7 months now! Crazy how fast that happened. He has two of his bottom teeth and the dr. said his top ones will come soon. He rolls everywhere and sits up mostly. He’d rather pull up to standing than do something boring like sit up! Arden’s birthday was yesterday. She’s 6 now and will be starting 1st grade soon. More craziness! Lilly will be in 5th grade and Aggie will be in 3rd. Liam will be in Pre-K. So it will be a busy school year this year! But I love it. I’ll be using Sonlight again. This will be our fifth year using it- even more craziness…our fifth year of homeschool! The kids are growing like weeds, much like the weeds growing in my….

Garden- The grass here is unbelievable. I can’t believe it’s production rate in my garden nor its tenacity. It’s a continual chore. One reason I can’t wait to do my sq. ft. boxes for ALL of my gardening and do them the RIGHT way. I will be using weed paper for them now, as I tried both newspaper and brown paper bags. Both of the latter did not beat this grass we have. I don’t like having to weed something that I wasn’t expecting to have to. The weed paper was successful in getting rid of the weeds. I haven’t had to pull one weed. Niiiiice.

Garden production:
~ quite a bit of lettuce
~radishes
~sugar snap peas (my sweet peas didn’t do so hot)
~a lot of garlic
~ a few raspberries

Soon to produce:
~tomatoes
~peppers

Growing well:
~tomatoes
~peppers…sort of…at least producing SOMETHING
~beans (bush and especially pole)
~carrots
~melons
~cucumbers
~gherkins

Not doing well:
~onions (they prefer our weird TN soil as opposed to the boxes)
~collards (grasshopper food)
~kale (grasshopper food)
~swiss chard (too hot)
~spinach (went to seed with two small leaves….quite the joke)

I’ll be planting the pumpkin and winter squash either today or sometime this weekend. The sooner the better. I’m a tiny bit behind there, as I’ve been all growing season! In August, we’re going to redo some of the boxes with weed paper and no hummus. My fall crops will be beets, collards, kale, swiss chard, spinach, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and broccoli rabe. I just got done drying out our garlic crop in the sun for a few days. I’m going to try to braid them, but I’m not so sure that it will work. That’s one of today’s chores along with cleaning the house.

We’ve been really busy lately trying to get the garden functioning. We decided that we really don’t have the money this year to completely convert from the traditional gardening method to the new square foot gardening one. So maybe more next year…

I’ve done so much in the garden the last few days that I can’t even remember ALL that I did nor the order in which I did it, but here is a sum-up:

~ dug up tomatoes that I planted from seed

~re-tilled the weed infested garden so that we can start from square one. (When Eric originally tilled up the garden he thought it was stupid of me to want to rake up the weeds. I did it his way, tried weeding for one week and then decided to tear almost everything out and start over.)

~ re-planted the tomatoes, plus added some from Lowe’s. (rip-off)

~ planted all of the beans, bush and pole. I put the bush beans in sq.ft. garden boxes and the pole beans in my front yard so that the deer will be uncomfortable with the thought of having to go into our front yard to eat them.

~weeded all of the sq. ft. garden boxes.

~thinned out the lettuce box. Lettuce is growing like crazy.

~gave up on the spinach and beets…tore them out. (Radishes too, but that’s because the weather is too warm now for them.)

~planted onions in place of the spinach and eggplant in place of the beets and radishes.

~ put up bamboo poles for my cucumbers and gherkins and planted those. These are in my traditional portion of garden this year.

~put together a box for the melon. We made this one 4 x 8.

Still to do within the next few days:

~ make a bottom for my melon box.

~ plant the melons

~ plant herbs SOMEWHERE….haven’t decided what to do with those yet. Some will go in the traditional garden.

In the next month:

~ harvest the garlic

~ braid it and hang it to dry

~ till the garlic bed

~ plant the pumpkins and winter squash

So this is the busy time of the year. I’m glad that I don’t plan for school until August!

A little bit better is still a little bit better. Although we are having some issues with soil quality in our Sq. Ft. gardens, we are doing better production-wise than last year. I’m still getting the hang of it. Building my own soil is completely new to me.

I was checking out the garden today and discovered that the swiss chard I planted in the garden last fall is up and looks NICE! This was unexpected because I thought that we had tilled it up! I love swiss chard stir fried and eaten with buckwheat noodles or brown rice. Mmmm.

I had some luck with the tomatoes that I planted, but I only had two of my Amish Paste tomatoes come up. I was disappointed about that, because I love paste tomatoes for canning. I also have basil and cilantro coming up. We have a few marigolds also. My peppers are slooooow-growing. So because I didn’t get all of the tomato plants that I wanted to, I caved and bought some at Lowe’s. Pepper plants too. I hate doing that because they are severely over-priced. Next year I’m going to plant the tomatoes and peppers in the ground mid-April. It seemed to work okay.

I thinned out the lettuce today. It’s growing great. I planted a couple of varieties that have purple veined in the leaves. It’s so pretty! Imagine eating a pretty salad. I also harvested the rest of the sugar snap peas. Next year the plan is to plant MANY more and by a higher stake. That way I’ll get a bigger harvest. I really only had enough for two meals. So much for freezing them this year… The radishes are done. They were a little weird this year, but still tasted good. The shape was different than it was supposed to be, but oh well.

Tomorrow I’ll be planting beans, melons and cukes from seed. Also the plants I bought at Lowe’s will be going in. In the garden that isn’t sq. ft. gardening, I am having a heck of a time with the weeds. My plan is to remove the baby tomato plants and till up the ground and rake. Then I’m going to put the plants back in. Hopefully this works…

The thing with gardening is that one learns something new all the time. So far this year I have learned that I NEED TO LEARN how to harden seedlings. I also have discovered that I don’t like the soil mix that I used for my square foot gardening. I believe it was because I used the cheapest products available. The mix is too dry and there is too much wood in it. Sometimes it is good to pinch pennies and sometimes it isn’t. This was a case of “isn’t”.

I also tried to use paper bags to keep out the weeds. It didn’t work. The grass here is so aggressive that it just pushed the bags out of the way. So in essence, I’ll be changing up the soil and bottom of the stuff. However, I won’t have to be at square one because we have the boxes, tops and wire for the bottom still.

My carrots seem to like the soil. I’ve never had a productive carrot crop. We’ll see how it looks when the carrots are done though. The beets are doing poorly. I think that I am about to call it quits there. Really everything got a slow start because of the poor soil quality. I have been able to harvest some peas, radishes and lettuce. The lettuce likes the soil after awhile. It just took awhile to bolt. I wish that I knew the reasons behind it beyond the generic “poor soil quality”.

Anyway, this weekend I hope to make a long box for melon which I will plant. I plan to weed either today or tomorrow, depending on weather. I also plan to plant some beans, peppers and tomatoes. The peppers and tomatoes I’ll buy at the Farmer’s Market in Franklin on Saturday.

At any rate, I’ve produced more this year than last year at this time, so I’m happy with that! Hopefully every year, as I gain knowledge, our garden will produce enough for us to eat fresh, put away for the winter and maybe some to sell also.