Clean Up...

8:40 am - 61 degrees - cloudy...

During the past couple of months, when the weather has cooperated and he has been home during day light hours, Tony has been falling trees.  When he comes home from his day job, he then goes to work on one of the many projects here on the property.  The past week however was spent doing a little bit of clean up. 

Tony has cleared and leveled a “staging area”, where he’s been putting all the trees that he’s felled and limbed.  Off to the side he has been stacking all the debris into huge piles that are ready to burn.  We have to wait until the cooler and rainy weather hit, which the weather report says is coming tomorrow, so burning may start as early as this coming week. 

Ollie likes to roll around in the cool dirt and supervise.

While Tony has been busy outside, I have been busy inside with Girl Scouts, school, working on my third book, and getting seed starts ready for our garden this year.  For seed starts I have tried planting the seeds in egg shells, peat pots, rolled up newspaper, toilet paper rolls, and plastic pudding cups – which are what I keep going back to. 

The plastic pudding cups are the only one that I cannot put straight into the ground, but they are also the least messiest to keep in the house with two extremely active children.  I line up all the seed starts in the window sills (which are two feet off the ground), and for whatever reason the kids have accidently knock every single one off the window sills...except for plastic pudding cup seed starts.  This is probably because they don’t take up as much room on the window sill, where as the others took up the whole window sill.  At any rate, this is how I am starting my seeds for this year. 

Even though I’m not starting my seeds in egg shells this time, I’m still saving them.  Egg shells can be used in a variety of ways to enrich your garden.  They provide a valuable source of calcium for growing plants and also deter certain pests without the need for chemicals.  Egg shells consist of 93% calcium carbonate and other trace elements that make them a practical fertilizer.  In the garden, for fertilization purposes, crushing egg shells (or put them in the blender to turn them into powder) helps them break down so that they may readily supply calcium to your plants.  Powdered or crushed egg shells are best placed around fruit trees, tomatoes, roses and in potted plants, though it will be of benefit anywhere in the garden.