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Today I am going to show you how to make markers for your vegetable garden, using old spoons.
You Will Need:
Some old silver spoons
A hammer (or rubber mallet)
A black permanent market
A set of alphabet metal stamps
A piece of steel wool
A piece of steel, or something hard to hammer the spoons flat on
Instructions:
As these markers are for the garden, it doesn't matter what condition the silverware is in. I used some pretty crusty ones I picked up at a garage sale. I got 30 spoons for $3!
First you will need to flatten the spoons. I did this by placing my spoon on top of a piece of steel and then whacking it with a hammer:
Hammering it in this way will leave marks (like in the picture below), so if you don't want the marks you are best to use a rubber mallet instead and wrap your spoon in a piece of cloth (which is how I flattened the spoons for the coat rack)
You will need to turn your spoon over periodically to flatten it out successfully. I sometimes need to turn the spoon over a good 8 or 9 times, so don't give up too early! Eventually it will be flat, like this:
Once your spoon is flat, grab a black permanent marker and place large dots where you want your letters to be. This helps the letters to stand out once stamped in. As I am making a marker for 'lettuce', I have placed 7 dots on the spoon.
Next, place the spoon on top of the piece of steel. I clamp it all to the bench so that it doesn't move around too much during the next step.
Take your metal stamps and your hammer and punch the word into the top of the spoon.
Next, get a piece of steel wool and buff away at the black marker until it disappears.
Now make as many markers as you need and then pop them in your garden!
Lately, crafting has been turning into a bit of a chore. I think it is because I've had things that have simply HAD to be done, like the owl mobiles and the redwork quilt. I'm feeling unmotivated and like I'm getting no stress relief.
So in light of the above I have taken up gardening as a hobby, since it forces me to get outside and away from things for a bit.
In the week since I have taken up this hobby, I have turned this piece of weed infested garden:
into this:
Those of you with a keen eye might notice 2 things in the photo above - The huge pile of bark that I still have to spread *sigh* and perhaps more importantly....There looks to be something growing in my raised garden beds.
There may be some of you who remember last years failed attempt at growing a vegetable garden. Lets just say that this years attempt is going a lot better so far. I would have taken a photo of the garden close up for you, but this is Ballarat.... and of course that means it's raining! Maybe tomorrow.
So, a while back we started making a raised vegetable garden. Due to the weather being either too hot, too cold or Matty and I simply wanting to spend time together rather than working on house stuff, the garden still isn't planted. The boxes are, however, filled and ready to go:
Now I said I would show you the process I used to fill up the boxes, but lets face it.. it really isn't that hard. We popped in some soil, some bags of poop and some dynamic lifter and it's all ready to go. It's a shame that the vegetable seeds aren't!
The last time you saw the seeds they looked like this:
Now they look like this:
What happened you may ask? Well, it got cold... so I cranked the central heating and fried the lettuce and the snow peas as they were sitting right next to the vent lol.
I am not overly concerned though as they are still 'in season', so I can just do a new lot! Remember that this is my year for working out what does and doesn't work, so if we end up with no vegetables at all that is fine.
Lesson number 1 : Don't put your seeds near the heating vent if you have intentions of turning it on!
Remember a couple of weeks ago when I planted some seeds for the raised vegetable garden? Well the last time I showed them to you, they looked like this:
The plan was to plant them on Valentines day but as most of you will know, I went into labour that day and gave birth to a beautiful little boy. As a result, the seeds weren't planted. Imagine my surprise when I came home from hospital and found them looking like this:
Oh my! It's a snowpea jungle! lol
The new plan is to plant them some time this week while Matty is still home with me, so I will be sure to write a post on how and what we filled the raised garden beds with. I am pleased to report that the egg cartons are starting to break down a little, just as we hoped they would.
To mark the birth of our baby boy, we were lucky enough to be given a lemon tree from my dad and a crab apple tree from one of my oldest friends to add to our vegetable garden, so we will need to do something with those too at some point. As we don't plan on staying in this house long term, we are going to plant the trees in half wine barrels so that we can take them with us when we move.
I feel as though we are getting there. It is going to be a slow process, but I can't wait to eat the first harvest of vegetables from our garden!
Imagine my surprise when I went to water my vegetable seeds this morning and found that some had sprouted!
So far the iceberg lettuce, snow peas and beetroot have began to come up. I am so excited!You may remember that my original plan had been to keep the seeds in the shed and bring them out daily for some sunlight before putting them away again at night. Well, unfortunately that plan didn't work so well.For starters, it was getting close to 10am before I remembered I even needed to bring them out of the shed each day. On top of that, the harsh weather we have been having lately meant they were drying out very fast when sitting in the sun. Because of this, I decided to bring them inside and just leave them under the window in an unused part of the house. Three days later, I have sprouts!As a person who really does not have a 'green thumb', the fact that my seeds are sprouting at all is a monumental achievement and enough to deem this project a success lol! I can't wait to see if any of the others sprout over the coming week.
Best get Matty onto filling up our vegetable planter boxes with suitable materials on the weekend!
I used to be afraid of failure. So afraid, in fact, that I wouldn't even try new things in case it didn't yield the perfect results I was after. Over time I have come to realise that failures actually have a place in everyone's life, whether that be to teach us that we can't be perfect all of the time or to enable us to grow both emotionally and mentally.
Today, I tackled a project where the result is well and truly out of my hands and which has the potential to fail dismally - I planted my vegetable seeds!
The old traditional, non hybrid, open pollinated seeds I ordered from Eden Seeds last week arrived in the mail on Monday. I used their planting guide to determine which seeds out of the ones I purchased I could plant straight away and which would have to wait until other times throughout the year. Today I was able to plant the carrot, lettuce, beetroot, pea, onion and broccoletti seeds.
After doing some research on how to grow seeds I learned that I could use old egg cartons to plant my seeds in rather than fancy seed pots, so this saved us a little bit of money. Basically the seeds can be grown in each pocket of the egg carton and when they have grown enough to be transferred to the raised vegetable garden beds, the pockets are simply cut apart and planted straight into the soil. Watering the seeds in the egg carton prior to them being transferred weakens the structural integrity of the cardboard in the egg carton, so it will break down rather easily once planted - Nifty hey!
In order to plant seeds, you will need a bag of seed raising potting mix. I just used the Yates variety which was about $7 for a bag that will last me quite a while! Once the egg cartons were filled with the mix, I used the end of a pencil to make a hole in each of the pockets at the depth indicated on the back of the individual seed packets. I then popped a couple of seeds into each hole, covered the hole up and gave them a good water.
I plan on bringing my seeds out each morning and placing them in a nice sunny spot on our deck for the day, before popping them in the shed overnight to protect them. As such, I have placed the egg cartons on trays to enable me to move them easily. Here is a picture of my seeds,.complete with little 'seed flags' on the deck this afternoon:
I will keep you up to date with the progress of the seeds and hopefully we will be seeing some sprouts within a week or two!
So what do you do when the project you've been working on for the past 8 months is finally finished? Well, you start something brand spanking new of course!For a while now I have become increasingly frustrated at the price of fruit and vegetables. It really irks me that we, as consumers, seem to pay more and more for these products while the quality of them declines. I have been reading about the idea of self sufficiency for a while now, but lets face it - it takes dedication and determination to make a family fully self sufficient and I am not sure I have enough of either of those things at this point in time.
While self sufficiency seems out of my reach at the moment, it doesn't mean that I can't take small steps to work towards the goal. While I was holidaying in Murray Bridge over the Christmas period I read a book called 'Choosing Eden'. This book tells the story of a couple in their 50's who moved to outer New South Wales to begin a life of self sufficiency to ensure that their family would have a refuge in the event of a Peak Oil crisis.
I am not going to delve too much into Peak Oil here (because it's pretty scary stuff), but basically it is believed that at some point the World's oil resources will be depleted and as a result the 300,000 every day items that rely on oil to be produced, will either not be available or will cost too much for every day people to be able to afford, so life as we know it will change dramatically. I told you it was scary!
So, today our journey into small-scale self sufficiency begins with the setting up of a vegetable garden! Here is a picture of the plot I will be using to grow our vegetables - erk...it's horrible hey!
The soil around our house is TERRIBLE. In fact, you can't even call it 'soil' because it's not. It's clay. Copious amounts of clay. But that isn't going to deter me. See those two wooden boxes on the top level of the retaining wall? Well that's where we are going to do our vegetable planting.
The boxes were made by my dad out of reclaimed packing crates, so they were FREE (rather than the $60 each Bunnings were asking!). They are roughly 1 mtr in length and about 80 cms wide, which is just perfect for our family of two, soon to be three!
The next step in setting up the vegetable garden is to fill the crates with suitable material to grow the vegetables in and order the seeds. It took me quite a bit of reading to understand the best way to make a raised vegetable garden, so I am going to blog the process for you so that you too can join in the journey of small-scale self sufficiency! Stay tuned for more!
Hammering it in this way will leave marks (like in the picture below), so if you don't want the marks you are best to use a rubber mallet instead and wrap your spoon in a piece of cloth (which is how I flattened the spoons for the coat rack)
You will need to turn your spoon over periodically to flatten it out successfully. I sometimes need to turn the spoon over a good 8 or 9 times, so don't give up too early! Eventually it will be flat, like this:
