Garden Update

Compost Compost Compost! Wow that stuff really is a garden's best friend. I have been feeding all of my plants with compost tea and re potting with compost soil. My garden was OK before but now its really taken off.

My garden has suffered snail infestation, fungus gnats, fungus and caterpillars. Okinawa environment is a perfect breeding place for all the above and then some. I am actually amazed that I have any plants at all.

To be fair, I fuss over my garden every morning for about 30 minutes unless there's something that requires immediate attention other than my usual water and pest lookout routine. The great snail pellet fiasco comes to mind. I had to remove the top soil of all my plants because of the pellets I sprinkled in all their pots to keep the snails from eating up all my plants.

Not sure if all snail pellets do this or not but after a rain shower, the day after I applied pellets to my pots and yard, all of my potted plants had a scary top layer of fungus on their soil. Nasty white and grey spider web looking fungus. It ended up killing half my strawberries, most of my four leaf clovers and did a number on my mints and succulents.

I had to use up all of the bagged soil I had left to save what I could. For about two weeks my stuff was on the verge of dying.

I then decided to blow through all of my rain water reserves to make compost tea. I water everything every morning with it. I re potted strawberries in the compost that was left. I did this for about a week and a half and my garden bounced back and then some.

Strawberries look very green and leafy, the baby strawberry plants are sprouting new leaves like mad. My mints are flowering and my clovers made a new blanket of growth to cover the yuck that happened to them. I ripped out two thirds of my clovers to replace the soil.

Catastrophes happen to gardens, especially newbie gardeners that do dumb things like I did and go nuts on snail killer. Lesson learned.

Let's discuss COMPOST! Yes, let's. My family and I live in a rental home. Small yard...tiny! Compared to typical American yards. Actually in Japan the yard I have is quite large.

So in case some are wondering I do not have a large yard. I do not have animals. I have just yard grass, a nearby jungle forest and whatever produce I buy for dinner. I still make compost. Its crazy easy.

My method, on the Internet you will get many different answers, is roughly 1 part brown to 1 part for every green thrown in. I may use a little more green at time but I try to keep it even. I try not to sweat it too much.

I use everything I can find that is free or just going in the trash bin. Last weekend, since I used up all my compost for the fungus eradication, I had to rebuild a new batch. My husband and I went to the jungle forest and scooped up bunch of grass clippings and small twigs. Our produce availability is nonexistent since we haven't bought any supplies for the kitchen yet. Then my daughter and I cut up a brown cardboard box into small pieces and threw in half of those with the grass clippings. We then added some extra soil we had bought and watered it all down. Our compost bin is a large plastic pot we keep on the driveway where it can get sun and rain exposure. I usually turn my the pile every 4th day if I remember. To be honest, I am very forgetful but the compost I've made in the past worked very well. During the time as, I wait on thing to break down,  I will add coffee grounds and more produce with brown paper bag bits.

I also read or heard somewhere that adding fertilizer like blood meal speeds up the break down. I want to say that really helped my last batch but I had also threw in worms to finish up the job. Not sure but I will just say, watch videos on compost methods. My experience with creating this wonderful stuff is that it doesn't need PRECISE measurements and on the spot watering and turning. My method works for me in the Okinawa environment. Its muggy all day, rains and the heat is pretty intense. That's my conditions here. I encourage you to try! A small pot with veggie and fruit scraps mixed in with brown cardboard or untreated wood shavings and a little extra soil.

Any how that is my way of composting and here are the results of my garden thus far. You can still see some damage from the fungus but things are on the upswing.

My Mini Garden

Recently right before spring I decided to retry gardening. I am very new to this but since I have an uncanny knack for killing even the hardiest of plants. I needed to do some research on what was easy to grow and how. My first attempt was green onions:

Green Onion

I watch plenty of YouTube videos on gardening and growing your own greens. Most of the videos I watched for beginners said to try growing green onions bought from the store. After you cut what you need for cooking don't throw the lower halves away! Put them in water, rain water preferably. I placed the cuttings in a clear glass vase and filled it half way up the stems with water. I'm fortunate enough to have a windowsill that got a lot of sun all day with a wide surface for placing vases.

It took about a week and a half, the greens took off! I have a small bushel of greens and it grows faster than I can use. I cook rice and meat a lot and I use green onions as toppers. Just about every four days I will clip two long stems and by the time I need more I use two different stems. Cycling this way keeps me in the greens. I currently have two pots with green onions. They are tastier than when I first got them from the grocery store. I planted them in pots once the roots started curling around the bottom of the vase. Also just a quick note, if you try this be sure to change your water out once every two days till you are ready to pot. You can feasibly keep them in water the whole time but the taste will fade, at least that is what I noticed. Once I got them in pots the flavors grew intense.

Ginger

After I felt like I wasn't the destroyer of plants I moved onto ginger. I noticed that the ginger I got from the grocery store was starting to stem. So I plopped it in soil without any research. A few weeks went by and nothing. So I dug up the bulb and it had rotted. With a deflated ego, I looked online and found out that the little stem or node was suppose to be outside of the soil. So I went rummaging through my ginger stash and found one that seemed ready to be planted. Ginger will look ready to be planted when they look a bit shriveled up and dry. I then took my shriveled up ginger piece and placed it in water for 24 hours because the Youtube said so. lol. I then selected a container with good drainage and place it node up. After two weeks I saw my first promise of life by a thick green stem spearing out of the soil. The above pic is about three weeks of growth.  I have three containers of ginger now. I have yet to know when to harvest but I think they are slow growers. Will research that more.

Even with my two successes with onions and ginger I had epic failures, that was growing potatoes. I watched videos and realized that I was doing it very wrong. I had placed the whole potato in the large container with the eyes down. Also the container I placed it in had no drainage. Needless to say the potato rotted.

This was around the time I had decided to try making compost. I threw the rotted potato and most of its dirt into a big container and started throwing veggie food scraps, brown cardboard, leaves, coffee, dried crushed eggshells, seaweed and many assortment of things. The only things I didn't throw in were meats, dairies and anything with oils. By the time my ginger along with two successful garlics were nice and green and mature looking some of the compost was ready to throw in. About a month and a half. I used it on my tomatoes, garlic, gingers, blueberries, strawberries, flowering plants, green onions. Everything! Compost makes all the difference! A future homesteader should think about making their own compost. Its so easy and it's so beneficial.

Other than the green onions, ginger, garlic and one of the rosemaries. I bought the other plants already established. My biggest failure has ALWAYS been strawberries. My husband talks about how he threw them in dirt and bam!! More strawberries than he knew what to do with when he was a kid. I kill them with a touch. That was my thing, killing strawberries.

So I tried again and things were looking good. Compost and some dirt. Well drained, plenty of sun. The plants were sending runners out like crazy but no flowers. So I read up and watched more videos; all suggest to cut the runners to get more energy to flowering. I cut about 3/4 of the runners and allowed a few to root. I got flowers about two weeks ago and strawberries are forming. I won't call this a success till I get a red juicy berry in my mouth. =) But hey, at least they are alive.

Strawberry Plant

My thoughts on growing food is that it is possibly the most empowering thing a human can do for themselves. Make compost, collect rain water if able and educate on the varieties that interest you. You will be surprised by the ease of it. Yes, there is work but its good work. Even if you fail, understand how you failed and continue. I by no means had a green thumb before starting all of this. I killed weeds if I watered them. BUT I can feel my thumbs turning green now. Its not a process you can hurry or find a magical fix. It takes a bit of research and some level of attentiveness. But you can see results after awhile. Here is my gardens as of now:

                                                                         Tomato Plant

                                                                       Green Onion

                                                                    Tomato Seedlings

                                                                     Blueberry Bush

                                                                        Garlics

                                                                         Hibiscus

                                                                   Four Leaf Clovers

Various Flowering

Rosemary

In the beginning...

Hello and welcome to the first page of my blog. I would like to dedicate the topics to crafting, homesteading and my own spiritualism.

My husband and I are at a point in our lives that we want to retire and find another adventure to pursue. We want to be debt free as much as possible; no mortgage, no car payments and definitely no credit card bills (which we hadn't since 2007).

Our paradise would be about five acres of land, growing our own produce, raising a couple of goats, half a dozen chickens and caring for bees. Being free to live off our retirements and VA and answering to no one.

We are NOT preppers! We are in it for self sustainability, freedom from the 9-5 rat race and to find a better way of living.

I approached my husband one day and I asked him what he thought about homesteading. We had no plans other than enjoy the island we are on before heading back to the states, buy another house and have nothing real to show for all the hours he and I have worked in our lives. He needed more context.

So I told him what would he think about buying a few acres of land and building most if not all of our home and NOT have a mortgage. We could grow our own food, raise our own animals for meat, eggs and milk. We could explore establishing our own small business. I'm thinking farmer's market, providing organics for restaurants and various crafts.

If we bought our land outright and build most of our home and other structures we could live off of our monthly earnings from our time in the military. He thought about this long and hard and being the  ever skeptic, he decided to do some research on his own before he got back to me about it.

He came home one day and said, "Let's do this!"

We figured our time on Okinawa is set at 4 years from this date before we move back to the states. That gives us time to save money. I also wanted to go back to work once we return to help with the savings. I told my husband we need at least three year's worth of savings from the time we got back to the U.S. to the time we pop chocks to live on our land. Why three years (actually seven from now)? Figure in soil amendments, money to buy materials to get the home up and livable, gardening equipment, land clearing, plus cushion of capital for the "OH NOES".

We been doing research on tiny homes, home kits, and yurts. A conventional home isn't in the cards for us. The cheaper the better. Trailers, mobile homes and the ilk are not an option. Its just not the type of home we want. We want something that will appeal to us in some way.

The big main question we been wrestling with is WHERE to plant roots. We are looking in North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania and most of the Northwest. There are going to be a few factors that come into play when choosing a place. Deed restrictions, zoning and overall accessibility to a community that is culturally diverse if at all possible.

The number one area we wanted is near Asheville, NC. That town is amazing from all the videos and pictures we seen. We even had people tell us that place is beautiful.

OK gonna keep this first page short but I will be posting about my gardening progress and the type of business and crafts I created.

This will be a long journey but a good one.