Tall seedlings

We're a bit worried about our super-tall tomato seedlings.  Hopefully they fill out a bit soon.

Also, we planted some Black Diamond watermelon seeds from Sustainable Seed Co today.

Flour milling

We milled some flour today!  This time, we used our fairly cheap hand grinder, so it took a while. The kids helped a little, but turning the crank was pretty tough for them.

Starting with about 4 cups(?) of hard red wheat berries (the seeds), we milled and sifted down to about 1.2 cups of fine flour, several cups of coarse flour, and maybe a half cup of coarse bran.  We've been making 100% whole wheat bread (with gluten flour) in our bread machine lately, so we'll try for a loaf from a mix of coarse and fine flour.

Tomatoes sprouting!

Our Roma tomato seeds are sprouting!  They're leaning a lot because we put them too high at the window(?)  They're now down a shelf.  Hopefully they'll be ready for potting soon.

Cover oats sprouting!

We're preparing a 25ft x 15ft field for wheat later this year, with sheet mulching and animal feed oats as a cover crop.  We vastly overseeded it, but it looks like one patch is beginning to grow! (The patch on the right)

Hugelkultur Material

We had a lot of tree work done today, including taking down 2 large Elm trees.  This wood will become our Hugelkultur core someday.

First garden frost

Going to get below freezing tonight, so we're trying a garden cover (20x30 tarp) for the first time.  We hid the potted plants between the beds for shelter.

Starting tomatoes

(2/6/2018, edited 2/12/2018)
Today we planted some Roma tomato seeds.  Our kids helped, so each pot has between 0 and 3 seeds. :p

The seeds are Roma tomato seeds from Cornucopia (picked up at Bloomers).

We're putting them on a shelf near a south facing window, in a jiffy seed starter thing.

Strawberries and others

(Sat Feb 3 2018)
Our first plants for the raised bed are strawberries we bought bare root from Bloomer's Garden Center.  I don't know the exact variety, but I was told they're indeterminate.  Thanks to Texas summers, they will end in June unless we take special precautions to keep them alive, which the garden store person said was possible (for strawberries).

We also got several grape plants (2 Mars, 2 Carlos, and 5 Mystery grapes).  And, despite concerns about invasive blackberry plants in other parts of the U.S., we picked up 2 Prime Ark Traveler thornless blackberry plants.  It will take some time before they produce fruit, but they should be a nice addition along the South and East fence lines.

Blank slate

(Jan 27 2018) We set up 2 raised beds with gardeners mix compost from LoneStar Compost.  It took about 9 yards of dirt and 150-160 cinder blocks.  We tried rinsing the cinder blocks before moving them.