Spring...

No gardening for me this spring :( Luckily my aunt has one so I can get my gardening fix vicariously. And meanwhile, I can read about gardening zones and daydream about what I will grow when I get a chance.

• Arizona Plant Climate Zone Map
• Arizona Plant Climate Zones
• Arizona Interactive USDA Gardening and Plant Hardiness Zone Map

I use these three maps to find my gardening zone. The first two links probably won't help you if you don't live in Arizona, but the last link is on a site that I believe has interactive USDA Gardening and Plant Hardiness Zone Maps for other states. You just have to go to this part of the website and type in your zip code, or click on your state (there's a list on the left).

The Food Safety Modernization Act

Lawyers and such swear up and down that S.501 ("The Food Safety Modernization Act") won't affect anyone's small farm or backyard garden. Psh, how's this?

It all starts with a farmer named Roscoe Filburn, a modest farmer who grew wheat in his own back yard in order to feed his chickens.

One day, a U.S. government official showed up at his farm. Noting that Filburn was growing a lot of wheat, this government official determined that Filburn was growing too much wheat and ordered Filburn to destroy his wheat crops and pay a large fine to the federal government.

The year was 1940, you see. And through a highly protectionist policy, the federal government had decided to artificially drive up the prices of wheat by limiting the amount of wheat that could be grown on any given acre. This is all part of Big Government's "infinite wisdom" of trying to somehow improve prosperity by destroying food and impairing economic productivity. (Be wary any time the government says it's going to "solve problems" for you.)

The federal government, of course, claims authority over all commerce (even when such claims are blatantly in violation of the limitations placed upon government by the Constitution). But Roscoe Filburn wasn't selling his wheat to anyone. Thus, he was not engaged in interstate commerce. He wasn't growing wheat as something to use for commerce at all, in fact. He was simply growing wheat in his back yard and feeding it to his chickens. That's not commerce. That's just growing your own food.

Read more...

If you can control the food supply, you can control the people. It's like NAIS, only with plants.

My Garden is Coming Along Nicely

So my mothers camera (aka high megapixel camera) is still "missing." BUT my sister's red one was available. So I took some pictures of the plants in my garden.

This is my melon. I forget what kind of melon it is. I had three or four kinds, planted two, and one survived. But which of the four did I plant and which of the two survived?
These are my onions. Some were red onions and some were walking onions. I just can't tell which are which is all. But hey tasty onions are tasty onions, no?
This is my parsley plant. The picture is blurry because the wind was blowing when I took it and the camera is not good at taking non-blurry pics unless the subject and the camera are held very still before, during, and for a few seconds after you press the button to take the picture. So I took two pictures. Neither is particularly clear, but hey, I tried.
This is the larger of my two Calendulas. I have decided that Calendulas are one of my favorites to grow because they grow fast. When I started the various plants inside, they were the biggest of the baby plants. Of course now the beans are bigger....
These are some of my bush beans. I have a huge amount. I didn't expect them to grow when I threw a bunch of beans out into my garden, but they grew anyways. Only problem? My mother (who gave me the beans to plant) has no idea what kind she gave me. Thus, more mystery plants. :)
There aren't any pictures of the mint because mint like cool and wet and the temporary drought (due to my whole forgetting-to-water-thing) didn't do them any favors. So one of the nine or seven or however many I planted is still alive, but very yellow-and-crinkly-like-to-die

I didn't get any pictures of the cake, either (due to the MIA cameras), so we just ate it. It isn't hard to picture it. A 13x9 inch Devil's Food Cake with thick chocolate frosting all over it and then in green gel frosting, it said "Happy 17th Birthday, Froggy!" He was very pleased we remembered his birthday.

It's really stormy out now (my preferred gardening weather), so I'm thinking I'll go out to weed. I usually only pull up the prickly/thorny weeds (tumbleweed and such) and then any of the others I leave there, so long as they're not crowding out anything I planted.

Oh, and One More Thing...

So my mom came back from town with my tickets. One of my guy friends and I are going to a Lady Antebellum concert on the 22nd, and I'm excited. I'm not sure who else is coming with us. I think one other friend for sure, but that's all I know of.

When I water the garden I half expect the ground to start sizzling like a frying pan does when you flick water on it. It wasn't hot at all until mid-July (about a week ago). We just used the cooler for the first time three or four days ago.

Can I just say that having 75F weather here is incredibly strange? So now that it's getting into the 100F's it's much more normal if incredibly HOT.

I finished the cake. I'll post pictures later when I get some. It's beautiful ha ha. I wanted to draw a frog, but I didn't have enough of the green gel frosting stuff. Not that there was much room for it, but still...

I'll also post pictures of some of what is growing in my little garden later.

This Time I Really Did Want to Blog

I was on my normal don't-feel-like-blogging but then the keyboard just stopped working. Again. So there was a week or so when I wanted to blog but couldn't because of the whole thing where keys "U," "Y," "M," "W," "C," "J," and a few mutinous others were refusing to do their job. That is, put a letter down when they were pressed. I still managed to chat with friends on Facebook between our two broken keyboards and the on-screen keyboard. But it was slow going and now that we have a new keyboard, I'm reminded that now I can write my thoughts almost as fast as they come.

On of my friends is turning seventeen on Sunday, so I'm baking a tasty chocolate cake for him that I'll bring to tonight's movie night. It's all chocolate chocolate chocolate, luckily when I asked him if he liked chocolate cake (AFTER buying the ingredients, mind you) he said "duh," so I was relieved. He doesn't like green, but the letters are still going to be green because green is like frogs (and also looks good with brown), and his nickname is "Froggy."

Hopefully this cake will survive to be eaten. In January my group of friends threw me (and another guy whose birthday is three days before mine) a birthday party. One of the cakes never got to be eaten. Instead, Frank started a cake fight and then we ended up sticking candles into a stick of butter and decorating the butter with sprinkles and then having him blow those candles out (along with mine since I kind of disappeared when they decided to sing happy birthday).

But Frank isn't coming so she won't have the opportunity to throw cake and I don't think it will occur to anyone else. :P

Next, I'm going out to the garden to water, weed, and take pictures (okay so it's 100F in the shade and 85F indoors...still...) :P

Sucking Eggs

I found the strangest thing in my garden yesterday afternoon. It's a tiny little egg, not much bigger than a quarter. There's a tiny little crack thing in it and it appears that the insides have been sucked out. I found it near this hole in my garden that I think is from some sort of animal. I'm just not sure what kind of animal it is. I wonder if the animal is an egg-sucker of some sort? What kind of animals suck eggs anyways?

This is a picture. It's kind of fuzzy because the camera doesn't do close-ups very well ever since the flash broke, but it's okay. The round, flat, gray object is a quarter to show the size. And fuzz or no fuzz, the little dent where the egg got sucked out is a little bit visible. It's on the right half of the egg; kind of at the top.

I Made Bread

I haven't been on in ages. But maybe that's a good thing. It means I have more to tell.

My garden this year has turned out to be kind of small. I have 2 Calendulas, 1 Parsley, 8 (0r was it 9?) onions, a plant that is either a melon of some kind or Armenian Cucumber, and a huge patch of beans. Yesterday I also planted nine mint starts. They're not exactly edible mint (they're eau de parfum kinda thing), but my reasons for planting them were a) mint is invasive so it should crowd out the other, prickly, thorny, sticker-y weeds; b) to till under at the end of the growing season to compost during winter and improve the soil; c) to add more green to my patch of ground.

We haven't had a full day of sun since March/April -ish. The temperature never hits above the late seventies. I'm not complaining. It's more pleasant to weed with rain sprinkling on your head than the sun beating down on your back and making you sweat for it.

It's very strange, though. We usually never have temperatures under 90-95 -ish.

I made bread for the first time on my own the other day. As usually occurs with my cooking, my family loved it and gobbled it down, but I was more picky. It had a nice taste, but it was too heavy and I'm pretty sure yeast hates me. I nearly never get it to rise right. The only time I ever got it to work like it should was with a Swedish sweetbread I made one Christmas season; Swedish Kardemummakrans (the main problem with the Swedish bread is how fast it get stale. It has to be eaten within a day or two of baking).

I think the main problem with my bread I just made was in the rising. It calls for letting it rise once and then putting it into the loaf pans to let it rise one more time before baking. I was thinking I would try either letting it rise longer or else having it rise twice before I put it into the pans to rise. The other thing is, it called for hot water to mix with the flour before adding the yeast, and I use boiling water. So maybe cooler water, as well. I also plan on using that trick where you put a wet dishtowel over the bowl of dough while it rises.

This is the recipe I used:

Whole-Wheat Bread

Ingredients:

• 3 Tablespoons yeast
• 1/2 cup warm water
• 5 cups hot water
• 7 cups whole-wheat flour
• 2/3 cup creamed honey
• 2/3 cup olive oil
• 2 Tablespoons salt
• 6 cups whole wheat flour

1. In small bowl dissolve yeast in 1/2 cup warm water; set aside. In a large mixing bowl, combine hot water and 7 cups whole wheat flour. Beat vigorously with a wooden spoon (or mixer) until smooth. Add 4 cups whole-wheat flour. Mix well. Let stand for 15 minutes; then turn dough out onto a floured board and knead in 1 to 2 cups wheat flour--enough to form a smiith, elastic dough.
2. Put dough into a greased bowl; cover. Let stand in a warm place for at least 30 minutes or until double in bulk. Turn onto a greased board and divide into 4 equal portions. FOrm loaves and place in greased loaf pans. Let rise until double in bulk. Bake at 350 degrees for 30-45 minutes. Bake 15 minutes longer if you like your bread crusty.
   

I have also found the camera cord for the better (read: twice as many megapixels) camera. Now I can start posting pictures! :)


ETA: The texture and flavor (aside from the heaviness) is quite good. The bread is soft just like the store bought stuff and I have had no such problems with it being too crumbly. If I can get the rising part right, this recipe's a keeper.

Garden Goals Accomplished?

I'm sure I talk about the weather a lot. Probably because it's so fascinating? ha ha. So on Thursday, April 16th, it snowed. The next day it was clear and the wind was freezing cold. Then on Saturday, the weather was perfect and it held out for almost a whole week. Yesterday it started blowing again, and it is still windy. But except for that, it's pretty great outside.

I decided to prune back the bush rather than remove it for a lot of reasons. It was there first, it will provide shade for plants that need it, et cetera... That bush actually turned out to be two bushes. A large alive one, and a smaller dead one. I cleared out the dead bush and pruned the dead branches off of the alive plant. For my trouble I got a beautiful healthy-looking bush, scratches all over my arms (about half of which were deep enough to bleed, so now I have some wicked-looking scratches...makes me feel tough lol), and a nice sunburn on my back, shoulders, and upper arms.

We don't have a rototiller, so I have been tilling the soil with a pitchfork. I turned over an 8x12 patch of dirt around the dirt, and will turn over the rest of my 20x30 garden next week. Our soil is what I consider a blank slate: clay with pretty much no minerals, etc for the plants to feast upon. I would like to mix in sand from a nearby wash and manure from the local dairy to improve the soil. We will see what actually happens.

Oh! Some of my plant babies have sprouted! I wish I could find a camera. My Calendula is just starting out, and my Walking Onions are growing so fast, I can almost see them growing!

My "floorplan" for my garden has most of the garden as a food garden, but there is also a small amount of space set aside for a flower, herb, water, and rock garden as well.

My goals for this coming week are: turn over the rest of my garden, build a compost pile, decide if I'm going to use grow boxes, start my cold weather plants, and begin improving the soil.

Catch-Up Post: Peat Pots, Career, Survivalists, etc

I haven't posted in awhile, I know. And I really wish that either my mom's camera could be found or else that my sister's camera had batteries (and that the cord weren't MIA), because I really want to post some pictures of the seeds I have started in peat pots.

Oh well.

So I have 50 plants started:

• 4 parsley
• 3 jalapeno peppers (capsicum annuum)
• 5 catnip (nepeta cataria)
• 4 calendula (calendula officinalis)
• 12 onion (Walking & Red Weaver)
• 6 I forgot to label (I hope I actually planted something in there!!!)
• 5 various melons (Schoon's Hard Shell Melon, Bush Sugar Baby Watermelon, Minnesota Midget Melon, and Eden's Gem Melon)
• 7 tomatoes (Big Red & Manitoba)
• 2 Armenian cucumber
• 1 pumpkin (nondescript kind from a store in town. Pumpkins don't like being transplanted--or so I've read--and so this is a test to see if that's true)

(That's only 49, which one did I forget to list??? Or did I add up the numbers incorrectly?)

The weather here sucks. It's either stormy or else bitter cold which doesn't make for pleasant gardening weather. I guess I'm just being a wuss and need to bite the bullet (although it has been snowing the last few days...) and get to work. It never frosts after Mother's Day, so that's when the plants need to go in, while I need to put in the plants that don't mind the cold now, as well as prepare the soil and trim back the bush.

My mother has actually been considering getting a milk cow and perhaps a sheep, if she can get the right fencing for them. I feel like "O_O" because she has always been anti-animal before. She didn't mind cats and she dealt with my chickens, but in all honesty, livestock has always been something she wasn't the slightest bit interested in, while I felt like a bit of an oddball dreaming about cows and horses and chickens and sheep and goats and...well, you get the picture.

So now she's wanting a cow for raw milk (we can get raw milk at the dairy in town, though) and she's wanting a sheep to munch the weeds until they are dead. I guess I'm having trouble adjusting because although raised a city girl, she likes the country but she has never really been into country stuff. Or at least not in my seventeen years. Now, she is suddenly into gardening food rather than just trees and the occasional tomato or vine and and wishing for livestock. Now before you get the wrong idea, I am pleased, just reeling in surprise and trying to get used to the idea. I think it might be a little bit spurred by her obsession (dare I call it that?) with TEOTWAWKI.

Incidently, most people in this tiny settlement are Survivalists. I am not talking the positive, more 'normal' survivalist, either. I am talking guns (for when they become the new Waco), nuclear bomb shelters (for when Obama decides to exterminate them), gardens, solar power, horses (to go get water up the canyon), marijuana (because it's an herb, and inhaling smoke is very beneficial to the lungs), a disregard for building codes (we're talking septic system so many feet from your water supply, not whether your house is underground or made of strawbales), a disregard for laws (like registering one's kids for homeschooling) and other things that make life tougher (not getting a legal birth certificate for their children or a social security number, teaching their children to be afraid of the government in much the same way as a rabbit is afraid of its predator, etc).

Most of these things are not bad in and of themselves. What is wrong is the attitude that accompanies them. Guns are not bad. Stocking up on guns because you think the government is going to massacre you is not a healthy attitude. Sure, the government does things that aren't right, but I doubt any of their plans include genocide in a remote settlement in the middle of nowhere. Realism, please, people!

This is turning out to be a long post. :)

Our washing machine is quite broken. It doesn't switch from cycle to cycle. You start it at the beginning of the cycle and it fills up with water and then agitates forever until you tell it to spin. Then it spins for awhile, then it does this weird thing that I can't explain until you switch it to rinse or else off... We really need to get that fixed.

I am finishing my schooling years and now I have to figure out what's next. I do want to end up homesteading, but the 'from here to there' is a little tricky. I need a field. I'm considering veterinary medicine, but I am not a fan of the years of schooling it will take. I'd like to write and/or maybe something artistic, but I am still weighing the positives and negatives of each. A positive would be something like "working freelance from home" while a negative would be something like the erratic income from such a job.

There are also other fields I am looking at, but I really am having difficulty finding which one would be the best choice. My specific religion has a belief system that includes being a mother and not working outside the home once I marry, but not only am I opposed to the attitude of "just get married and let him take care of you" and not only do I think that living with "marriage" as one's center of the universe, but I also believe that a stay-at-home mother is a good thing.

So more or less, I need a career I can continue after marriage with plenty of time for family but I need a career I can make plenty of money to support myself anyways (because I am planning to homestead in the near future and let marriage happen when it happens, so marriage could be before or after I get started with this dream of mine...doesn't matter). I also need something I can do while homesteading because I don't want to homestead as anything more than a hobby. That may change in the future, but at the moment I'd rather have it as a (time consuming, frustrating) hobby than something to make into a lucrative endeavor (way to add stress, IMO).

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it SNOW!!!

The Weather lately has been insane. I went to bed at 5am this morning and consequently did not awaken until 3pm. Part of the reason I woke up so late (aside from the late night) was that it was very cloudy. When I woke up, it was snowing! It rained last Sunday, so I figured that was what we would be getting from here on out. Instead, it snowed a half inch or so. Then, it sleeted another half inch ('sleet' is what you call those tiny little balls that fall from the sky that look like fairy snowballs--as opposed to iceballs that we refer to as 'hail'--right?). Now it's snowing hard and fast and we already have a few inches of it and more is coming down.

My "L" key only seems to work every other time I press it, so if some words don't seem like words, try inserting an "L" at random and see if it makes sense.

My little sister bought the newest Fablehaven book four days after it came out and now she's finished it, so I get to read it now!

With my Garden buried under snow, I don't think I'll be working on it much right now. I should be starting seeds right now, and I should be planting the cold weather stuff. I have 1001 reason why I'm not, but that would make this post too long LOL. The main reason, though, is that I've never had a real garden. As a child I would plant seeds in the ground, maybe dig some canals for irrigation, fill up the canals, and for the most part forget about it, returning to water perhaps two more times. Naturally, living in the Gila Valley in AZ, nothing ever grew. Even when I moved to this climate, it still didn't grow...probably something to do with the billions of weeds choking my "garden."

So to prevent abandonment, I am planning to have just a few different plants: some fruits veggies, herbs and flowers. Once I see how I am with a garden (now, at my grand old age of 17 :P) and make all my beginning mistakes, I will add more plants a little at a time so I don't overwhelm myself and abandon the whole project out of confusion.

I made enchiladas. Yum! I wanted to post a picture but my mother's camera is MIA, so I can't post beautiful pictures of corn tortillas marinated in red sauce and cheese... :*( Oh well.

Spring is in the Air!

I have decided to stick to Blogger when it comes to reading other blogs. I have a very difficult time reading back entries on places like Wordpress. It doesn't make any sense to me and I end up getting very lost.

A friend of mine has stayed over every night this week except Sunday night and Wednesday night. Normally I love having visitors and everything, but these specific friends think they don't have to knock on the door when they show up or ask if they can have a specific item of food before they eat it or ask to use the computer. Instead, they just do. I'm not being stingy. I just like people to ask permission. Most likely, I will give permission, but I still think it's good manners to ask and to knock instead of just doing it because you know that the answer would probably be yes if you asked.

I am starting a compost pile. So far I have only found two designs that I can make. For the first, you make a wooden box with three sides. The fourth, open, side is made so you gradually add board as your pile grows. For the second design, it is just chicken wire arranged in a circle.

The chicken wire design would be easier to make but the wooden box might be more durable. I just don't know. I have considered a free standing pile, but I've decided that the drawbacks (like animals messing with it and the vast quantities of wind we have around here) far outweigh the positives (i.e., no time spent breaking my fingers and cursing the building materials and my idiotic mistakes). So the free-standing pile is out. I suppose something like stacked tires or cinderblocks are also options except then I am faced with the daunting task of finding supplies, while the board and chickenwire ideas I already have the supplies for.

Also, my garden is about ready to be mixed up with some nice, tasty mulch. After laying fallow all year and with no one walking on it, the mostly-clay that is my soil is NOT compacted and is, in fact, quite loose and therefore will be at least a little less backbreaking to till by hand (by hand, rather than by rototiller because this spot has never been gardened and probably has more than a few boulders waiting to munch on a nice, expensive machine). I can't wait to plant!

I've cleared out the tumbleweeds that have grown up right next to the fence and I have yet to pull the weeds that are just starting to grow. I also need to start some of the seeds SOON. It never frosts after Mothers' Day around here and so I have until sometime in May to get my garden ready. Some things you plant a few weeks before the last frost date and so those will go in sometime in April.

Now for some celebration. Since today is the official first day of spring and spring is in the air, I am celebrating. As much as I love snow and cold, I am ready for a change, and so I am celebrating the nice weather for a change.

HAPPY SPRING!
(and Equinox...)

Pictorial Springfest with images from Photobucket (a few of the pictures are of my area):

Oh guess what! I've noticed that a lot of people are frustrated with how slowly Blogger uploads pictures. I have high speed and it was slow for me, so I can only imagine how annoying it must be for those who have dial-up. I have since found a better way. Photobucket uploads faster than Blogger, so I upload the photos there and then copy and paste the html code into my post where I want it. And the pictures stay online in case you want to use them again in other posts. You might try it and see if it works for you.

We moved our trampoline from the back yard to the front. Tonight, we're having a movie and game night with everyone. I can't wait for the fun summer will bring!

Catch-All Catch-Up Post

I have been so sick for the past five or six days. Fever, coughing fits, headache, weakness all over, lightheadedness, constant sleep, the works. I'm better now except for small bouts of lightheadedness, a voracious appetite (I am never hungry), and a craving for peppermint tea and lemons.

I try to post at least once a week (my computer day is Friday) but last Friday, I was so sick, even being on the internet was awful. But here I am. I had planned on doing some intensive physical labor on my someday garden and I have a recipe I want to post as soon as I find the camera with the pics on it.

So far, I have been trying to get a compost pile going. It takes three months for compost to mature, I'm told, and that is about when I need it to go on plants and seedlings. So I'm trying to build such a pile rather quickly. I have a little green discarded wastebasket on the front porch into which all my candidates for compost status go. It's not very full, but I am working on it trying very hard not to blame illness for not doing more.

I don't have much more to say and indeed should stop speaking a 19th century British/contemporary American English hybrid. It sounds strange even to my own ears.

I hope I snap out of it.

Garden Update

The first step to getting my garden up is to get it ready for planting. The fence is already up, as I before mentioned, but there are some other things I need to do before I can plant in May. The first thing is the ginormous bush smack in the middle. I could leave it there, but there's at least 45 square feet of garden space that it covers...plus most of the bush is dead. So the bush will be my first project. Digging it up and removing it, along with some of the smaller weeds.

Next, I need to improve the soil. It would have been best to start this last fall so that it would have time to break down and whatever. I could list a couple of pages of excuses, including it not occurring to me, but there's really no point. I didn't do it, and so I need to do it now. Our dirt is almost totally clay. Hard as a rock if you get it wet and step on it a lot. Then nothing grows on it and you have a footpath. So, from what I've read about good soil being equal parts sand, silt, and clay, I'm going to need to bring in extra soil. Luckily, the nearest town has a large creek that runs through it with lots of white sand which no one cares if you take some.

Another thing about our soil is it's red color. Not red as in "iron-rich," red as in "virgin soil." No real anything to feed plants. Luckily my garden spot was where our last batch of chickens lived, so there's chicken manure that's been there since last summer. This is good, because chicken manure is high in Nitrogen which would burn most plants if I put fresh straight on. Also, the nearest town has a dairy and they sell their (semi-fresh) manure from their cows for $20 a tractor scoop. My mother is trying to find someone with a truck who will help her get three scoops for her garden. When I get money next, I'll give her some of it and then get her to go get some for her garden and mine. If I remind her often enough, she might actually do it.

I'll probably try my hand at a compost pile next. It might take some time to get my family to put their plant wastes in a bucket to go out to compost, but it's a good idea, and, anyways, I want to try it.

That's my plan for this next bit. There's still plenty to do after all of the above is completed, but if I try everything all at once, I'll overwhelm myself and then I won't do any of it. :)

Beginning Steps to My First Garden

Last night I had a lovely dream about sheep. I dreamed I had eight sheep and five of them were pregnant. And they had cute little lambs. It was a homesteading dream, or else I wouldn't have mentioned it in this blog.

You probably know from my blog description that I am a teenager who wants to be a homesteader. If you know what homesteading is, you probably know that most teenagers (at least the ones I know) want to be fashion designers and doctors and actors and authors and veterinarians and brain surgeons and singers, and artists, and archeologists. All those subjects fascinate me, yes, but I want to be a homesteader. I want cows and sheep goats and chickens and a garden and cats and dogs and children on a nice size piece of land in the Rocky Mountains where I can live a life that makes sense to me. Right now I'm learning as much as I can about cooking and sewing and crocheting and other domestic chores as well as more homesteady things like gardening and animal husbandry. Most of my experience in the homesteady things up until now has been book learning and blog reading.

I am still working on that, but now I have decided to plant a garden. I figure now is a good time to start when I have a ton of time on my hands (and I'm graduating this spring even though I just turned seventeen last month, so I'll have even more time on my hands, soon). I don't want to do animals just yet because I'm going to do college and and the job thing before I do the homesteading thing and it's a little difficult to take care of a dog when you're busy with college and all that fun stuff. At least you could leave it home and ask your mom to take care of it (I don't have a dog, just so you know).

My mom really doesn't know the first thing about chickens. She likes cats and tiny dogs. The one time I had her take care of my chickens (because I was at youth conference for four days), she didn't give them any water and they started eating their eggs to compensate. So any animals I have from now on will be at a time I can take care of them. Now back to the subject I'm writing this post on: gardening.

Now is about right to start doing the garden thing. There's never a frost after Mother's Day (ironically, it has sometimes snowed for the last time on Mother's Day and then all melted away and been sunny and just like spring the next day, but it has never broken the rule), so anything I want to start indoors needs to be planted in March or April. Therefore planning is in February (or January if you're really organized and motivated, which I am not under normal circumstances).

I am doing a 20'x30' garden this year. I figure it's a good size. I'll be able to have some variety but not be overwhelmed. Plus it's already fenced off with four feet of chicken wire above the ground and 6-8" buried. And these are the plants I want to grow:

• Tomatoes
  
• Cucumber
  
• Zucchini
  
• Onions
  
• Garlic
  
• Herbs (haven't decided which yet, but definitely the kind for pizza/spaghetti sauce)
  
• Carrots
  
• Lettuce
  
• Some berries
  
• Maybe some flowers
  
• etc
  

This is far from an exhaustive list. It's just kind of a general idea, I may add some plants, I may take away some plants, I'll probably add more details and whatnot. You'll see. I'll post my plans as they develop and become more specific and specialized.