Homeopathic Mosquito Repellent

It's starting to get warm in this sauna of a state. With all the resent rain we have had the mosquitoes are starting get thick! I look down while in the garden and my legs are covered in those blood suckers! Naturally, I start beating the heck out of my legs. So we got to thinking, how about some repellent. Wait a minute! That stuff stinks and it has ingredients we can't even pronounce. Why not make our own? We didn't hesitate... We headed to Drug  Emporium to get Eucalyptus and Lemon oils. We mixed the oils with rubbing alcohol into a spray bottle at a ratio of 10:1 alcohol to oil. It smells great and we aren't putting something on our body that is known to the "state of california" to cause cancer! The oils are great on the skin but the alcohol can dry your skin so we will try witch hazel next batch.

Homemade areoponics planter

As dirty little tree huggers, we don't like to buy stuff that we believe we can build. Instead of purchasing those really expensive "Toppsy Turvy" planters, we got creative. Imagine that! We decided to purchase some cheap, small pots from the local Home Depot. With those and some wire coat hangers, we produced our own "Toppsy Turvys". Cool huh? The pots were about $2 a piece. We made 5 of them. That saved us about $65!
Directions:
1. Drill two 3/16" holes in the pot, one adjacent from the other.
2. Straighten a metal coat hanger.
3. Put both ends of the hanger through the holes and even them out.
4. Twist and bend a hook at the end.
Congrats! Now that's being resoureful!

snakes, frogs, and rocks... oh my!

Busy weekend in the land of stinky farmers. We have the second bed completely installed except the seeds. It's going to have two different types of cucumber, variegated lettuce, and basil. Today were hard at work clearing out all the debris that has been accumulating along the side of the back porch for the past two or three years. All the leaves, sticks, and other mess filled up an entire composter. Underneath we found all kinds of wildlife, our final count was 7 frogs and 3 snakes.

After we cleared out all the debris we re-released them into the plant beds so that they could eat the pests that have been munching on our squash leaves.

The initial bed, onion bed, and melon bed are now equipped with a great drip irrigation system via cloth soaker hoses. I'm personally excited about not spending as much time hose watering.

We've also lined the space outside of the back porch area that was previously occupied by debris in rocks. Our plan is to fill it with pea gravel, stepping stones, a fire pit, seating, and raised flower planters as an additional chill spot for spring gatherings. Moving all those rocks(yet again) was hard work but I got some help from a very special person.

Thats right, my little prince came by and loaded an ENTIRE wheelbarrow of rocks for me. He also used clippers to trim out all the saplings that were trying to take over the foxglove bed. Until next time!

April 2, 2011 Second Bed

Here is the begining of the second bed. In addition to Grassy Toes Last post, these are the 84 blocks we found for 60 cents per. She can stack them well. Don't worry, Dirty Feet helped. This load really made the truck squat! It was way better than having a pallet of blocks directly over the axle. This load was way more spread out.

Melons and More Cinderblocks

Saturday was another VERY busy gardening day. On Friday night Mr. Dirty Feet and I drove out to Justin (about 30 minutes away) to pick up more cinderblocks for the wonderful low price of 60 cents each. We nabbed 84 blocks total and made it back to town for games.

Saturday afternoon Dirty Feet and I unloaded all the cinderblocks then took off to the City of Denton dump grounds for MORE dyno dirt (the old man that runs the booth is starting to recognize us).

Going to get Dyno Dirt is always fun until you get home and the shoveling starts. Luckily we had help shoveling again, my best friend's husband came by to get all sweaty and filthy with us. He and I emptied out the first truck load while Dirty Feet started digging out roots along the North fenceline where we had decided to put the second raised bed.

His root digging got interupted because the bestie's husband and I had the truck cleaned out in record time and the three of us had just enough time to make a mad dash back up to Dyno Dirt for another load before they closed at 3. Here is a video so you can see how the dirt is loaded :)

We returned from our excursion and got back to work on unloading yet another bed of rich, wonderful Dyno Lite Blend. Midway through Arab the Tree Climber came to lend another helping hand.

We unloaded all of the second load onto a tarp, removed all the giant roots, and got EVEN MORE of those darn Irises pulled up then all of us got to work moving rocks to the other side of the yard for our (slightly) raised melon bed. Under the rocks we found some really beautiful spiders (the pictures don't even do them justice). They were almost the color of merlot with white spots. We left the egg sacs and mommy spiders alone so they could help with pest control this spring. We had to call Saturday an early day for gardening due to our evening plans but in summary: we have a fully lined (but not yet filled) melon bed, the cinderblocks are almost in place for the second raised bed, and two cubic yards of dirt are sitting in the back yard waiting to go in both of the beds. We wouldn't be nearly as efficient without our stinky help, Arab the Tree Climber and the Bestie's hubby.... who has yet to create his stinky farmer name. Great work boys!