Imagine my surprise when I went out to check my garden after I got home from work and discovered that some of my new green bean plants have been eaten! Needless to say, I am not a happy camper.  While I am a huge animal lover, I am not a fan of my garden being eaten.  Not one bit.  So I decided I’d try to beat the rain and make a trip up to Home Depot to buy some stakes to put leftover chicken wire on to keep the rascals out. I purchased 10 stakes plus ties.  It cost me $20.  When I got home, I ran around looking for the hammer.  After I found it, I pounded some stakes in the corners of the boxes, attached some of the chicken wire plus this green mesh netting thing around the green bean bed and tied it to the stakes.  That ought to hold for a few days until I can get more blood meal or whatever it is that deters rabbits.  I’m half tempted to leave my dogs out in [...]

For awhile now we’ve wanted to harvest our rainwater from our roof.  I’ve been checking out various places online and it seems 55 gallon rain barrels normally run at least $100.  Yikes!  Of course I decided to research the best way to make our own, and was on a hunt for some food grade plastic barrels.  While I don’t think plastic is the best, I figured that at least I could recycle a plastic barrel and stop it from going into a landfill.  You would think that because Mr. Money is a chef, he’d have easy access to a 55 gallon food grade barrel, right?  I did too.  It turns out they are harder to come by than I thought. I started searching Craig’s List for a rain barrel, and about a week into my search I came across some 55 gallon drums that had been storing soda syrup (ours had Mountain Dew in it).  The company is located about an hour and a half from us, and luckily Mr. Money was attending a food show close to there and [...]

One of my favorite things about owning this house is the fact we have enough land to have a garden to grow our own vegetables.  I love the idea of homesteading, and we’re trying to create our own little homestead here in our neck of the woods.  This year we got started a little late so we’re only enjoying copious amounts of yellow squash so far.  This is the third year we’ve had a garden, and each year we enjoy it more and more.  The more we add our compost to the soil, the more the plants take off! Here’s how our garden looked this spring, before planting: And here it is today: In this bed we have zucchini, yellow squash, patty pan squash, okra, sugar snap peas, and bush beans. The huge plants on the right are the yellow squash plants. To the right of this bed we have some volunteer tomato plants that came up from seed by themselves and I transplanted (I don’t have the heart to kill them!): Our first tomato: Near the back fence of [...]