Autumn is here!

Not much has happened since our last blog post, but things are going well with our garden! Nothing has died yet, and seems to be hanging on. I have a habit of killing plants, so planting a garden was going to be a big challenge for me.

In other news, we got some green slat thingys to put in the fence, for privacy. We have a ton of it, it'll probably cover the whole fence! Here is what we have so far...

Some work done this past weekend.

A fence I built from pallets to divide the chicken run area from the rest of the yard.

Ellen planting flowers in the peace garden.

Ellen's new tropical garden, peppers still growing here.

Peanut mowing the lawn.

The peace garden is coming along, walkway and vegetable gardens slowly getting some shape.

Vegies nearly ready for transplant into the ground, better hurry up with them boxes. ;)

Catching up!

 So to catch up some previously unrecorded history on our family garden....

This path was built between our driveway and back porch, we call it  Peanut's path. 

The fire pit built for us as a wedding present by our friends. 

chicken coop, compost tumbler, rain barrel, and the gardeners bench. 

The onions and oregano. 

The pepper garden... which actually has peppers growing!

Pallet upcycle

Pallets can be used for some cool stuff!

With all the recent rains we have avoided trying to plant seedlings for fear they would simply float away, however, we have been doing some work to make sure our garden sees future success. Today Caleb and I built a box to make a raised bed out of an old pallet. Work at the bike shop sees pallets coming loaded full of bicycles, and usually strangers pick up these pallets and profit off of them... I figured, why should they benefit off of our loss? So I brought a couple home.

This box will be one of 3 or 4 that will be raised enough to keep the  flood waters at bay.

The oval to the right will be our "peace garden", the box is on the left.  We also recently staked in those bamboo borders to designate the walkways inner border.

And Out Pours the Rain

Apparently there is a tropical storm somewhere out in the Gulf, which is causing us to have all kinds of rain this weekend. We've been working out in the yard and getting stuff ready for our garden, with a few snafu's that have gotten in the way. Our seed starting box toppled over in the wind a few days ago, and some of the pots were dumped out. We think we were able to salvage some of it, and we hope they will still grow. We'll see as the weeks go on...

For Father's Day, Brian got a wind chime from his parents. Once we have our garden built and growing, it will be put out in our "peace garden". Right now, it's swaying in the wind and rain, chiming away on this drenched Florida day.

The Garden (getting started)

 Over the past weekend Ellen and I uprooted and hoed a portion of our yard to use for a Garden. With the weather easily approaching the 90s it was a rather hot day but we had a lot of fun with it. We have some fun plans for this garden but first and foremost is spending time together doing something constructive. We hope to put raised beds all along the fence for the veges, and will eventually put stone pavers in for the walkway around the peace garden.

Ellen pulling up weeds while Jethro (sheltie) and Yoshi (Jack Russel) wander
around in their new dirt pile. Where is Jack?

We used grade stakes and twine to visualize where the walkway will go.
The veges will go along the outside by the fence, the middle of the
circle will be our peace garden, with butterfly flowers. 

The transplants: lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, and both sweet and hot peppers.
Not shown are the direct sow bunch: beans, radish, carrot, pumpkin and several herbs. 

This was our first garden bed when we moved into the house, we have turned
it into our yard waste compost pit. 

Making Salt

It's Summer and school is officially out, though we are homeschooling, I figured it was time for some fun lessons rather than just sitting around writing reports and doing math problems. 

Today Caleb and I decided to pursue the time honored tradition of making salt. The history of salt making goes back as far as the earliest recordings of history and perhaps beyond that. Salt has been used as a food preservative especially for meat and as a flavoring for foods. Salt has many other uses such as being used in paper making and in clothing dye. Caleb and I collected sea water from the Tampa Bay in order to boil it and extract the salt. After boiling in the house we have to lay out the remaining brine water in pans out in the sun to evaporate the remaining water. 

Of course we took the bikes. 

b

Maybe not the best location to get water, but it is sea water. 

Coffee Pot Bayou, an inlet off of Tampa Bay.

Collecting water

Using the water-proof function of my camera. 

hauling away our harvest

Filtering out the floaties.

Again, water proof cameras are fun, this one from inside the pot!

A lesson in distilling... didn't work great but what little water
we got tasted pure!

after we boiled off most of the water we let the goopy mess
of salt brine roast in the sun in the bed of my truck. This is the end result.

A Whole New World!

ok...so... We decided to do a family blog. We are the Shermans... Ellen and Brian were married this past February and we bought a house the June prior.  Brian has a ten year old son that Ellen has all but adopted as hers and together we are the Shermans. We are a modern family living in the city, trying to live life as a rural, country family with classical ideals. Our home in St. Petersburg atypically spans 2 lots, which gives us plenty of space to garden! Before we moved in, we both decided that our home would be out everlasting art project, and we are currently including gardening into this adventure.We hope you enjoy watching our progress with our home, as much as we are enjoying doing it!