gardening Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Our Homestead Adventures

Gardening is Possible Anywhere

How we learned about urban, small space and desert gardening. When we moved from Iowa to Arizona, I gave all of my canning jars away to friends. I certainly wouldn’t need them in the desert! When we moved into our Mesa, AZ home, it was love at first site. Finally, a yard we didn’t have…

Pumpkin Planting Experiment

Few things make me smile the way a pumpkin makes me smile. I know, it sounds weird, but I just love pumpkins and have this dream of someday growing a state fair champion pumpkin. In the meantime, we’re doing our best to have a real pumpkin patch this year and are experimenting with a way…

Natural Japanese Beetle Control

It’s a beauty of a beetle but bad news for plants. Shiny, metallic colored insects hanging out on orchard leaves and vegetable plants. They are beautiful, but when they consume what we are trying to grow and leave behind skeleton leaves, they become a menace. It seems that this beetle, known as a Japanese beetle, are…

Learning How to Grow Potatoes

They say potatoes are easy to grow, they’re right. They say that potatoes are about as easy a crop to grow as anything you might try to plant. If our first harvest is any proof, they’re right. We hauled in a total of nearly 10 lbs. In our first effort! It was an exciting experience…

Summer Squash Pickles Recipe

Summer squash is plentiful, how ’bout some pickles? We have never had much luck growing squash. It seems we’d get in 3-5 and then the leaves of the plant would start looking diseased, shrivel, and die. Year after year. We could have said, “We just can’t grow squash,” or we could just keep trying to…

Unearthing Farm Artifacts in the Garden

An evening planting digs up questions and farm artifacts. This evening over an hour was spent digging two holes to place a couple of melon plants. Breaking ground was easy. It was when the earth was turned over that remnants, artifacts of moments long forgotten where discovered buried several inches to a foot deep into…

Cherry! Cherry! Cherry! Kind of a jackpot!

Today was a big day for us and our orchard! While out for a walk on the property, Amy strolled into the orchard. We planted our trees a year ago and actually harvested about a half dozen small apples from one of the apple trees. Last year’s apples were a big surprise because we figured…

Meet Amy + Chris

We are Amy and Chris, parents of 4 children, learning by living, taking a homestead adventure that many of our friends and family think is crazy… even if they secretly envy us. We do not shy away from adventure & trying new things but even this is not what we would have imagined just a…