starting some seeds this weekend

Today at work, we had to take down some of our display fixtures.  I work in retail and the company is downsizing its retail area.  The subcontracted employees were instructed to toss the fixture in the garbage…….so instead….I brought it home.  It will work perfectly for my seed starting station!  It is a bunch of pieces of metal with pegboard and shelving (i will take a picture once it is all assembled).  I have a fluorescent fixture, some seed flats with domes, some soil, and seeds to get the vegetables started.  I unloaded it this evening, and i will most likely assemble it sometime this week.  I will start lettuce, cabbage,and perhaps spinach this weekend.  All of these are colder weather crops.  I will start them inside and then put them into a cold frame. 

 The past month has been a month of planning, ordering, and collecting.  My wife is excellent with craigslist.  She is always finding great deals.  Within the last month, we have acquired about 50 cedar fence posts, a 10×10 foot storage shed, and a dog kennel from craigslist.  All of these projects happening. 

 Here’s the short list:

•  We have to get the 10×10 shed moved from about 30 minutes north to our house.
• We have to retrofit the shed to be 1/3 chicken coop and 2/3 storage.
• We have to assemble the dog kennel and customize it to be a chicken run.
• We have to construct a fence around the property to keep our animals in and other animals out.
• We have to build a brooder for the one day old chicks we are picking up.

Those are just a few things.  It will be a lot of work, but well worth it.  This blog, for me anyhow, will help track our progress as we work on and complete these jobs.  A lot of this stuff is brand new to us.  I am sure i will make plenty of mistakes along the way, but this will help us chart our progress.  Right now the yard is just waiting for us to work it and grow more things in it.  Currently it has many different types of plants (the neighbor before us liked plants a lot).  We have amaranth, paw paws, mint, raspberries, anise, St. Johns Wort, bamboo, and many other interesting plants already established.  There is no grass in our front yard (and no longer any yucca either!!) and the garden soil is very rich from composting leaf matter.  It will be quite an eventful year.  We belong to Enright Urban Ecovillage, and they just acquired a green house for our community CSA.  We have been rehabbing that on the weekends and with our other free time, we have been clearing honeysuckle on the hill in our backyard to make way for all of the fruit trees we have purchased.  Huddled together in the back yard currently are 5 fruit trees.  We have one pear and four apple trees.  There is so much to tell and so much to do.  Hopefully you stay tuned, for there is much more to come in the coming days.  Growing produce on our own property and becoming more self sufficient is our goal for the year. We will see how it goes and we will spill out our journey onto this screen to track our successes and failure.  To fail is expected.  Failing is not bad at all.  The acronym for FAIL is the First Action In Learning.  And that is exactly what it is.  Regardless of the outcome of this journey, I am sure of one thing….we will learn quite a lot.