One thing that I dislike about Facebook, is all of the status updates that show from Farmville, Mafia Wars, and other games. When people ask me if I play Farmville, I tell them, “No. But if you want to come to my house and help me on a real farm, you’re more than welcome to.”
Last year, after Michelle and I moved back to Hiawassee, we planted a small vegetable garden. We didn’t have much, mostly tomatoes and some herbs. This year, we decided to do a little more. Michelle’s uncle plowed a small plot below our house near the creek. The garden is about 10 feet by 30 feet. So far, we’ve planted tomatoes, broccoli, watermelon, red and green bell peppers, lettuce, and cucumbers. We still need to plant beans, zucchini, sweet corn, and anything else we can think of.
Our vegetable garden.
There’s a lot of wildlife around our house that would like to eat our garden, so we had to build a fence around it. Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, we had two goat pens on our property. Michelle and I tore down one of the fences and reconstructed it around the garden. Hopefully that will keep the rabbits, deer, groundhogs, and bears away from our veggies.
Michelle’s grandfather planted several blueberry bushes many many years ago. They produce some of the sweetest berries I’ve ever had. They hadn’t been taken care of in recent years, and were being overtaken by honeysuckle. While I love the smell of honeysuckle, I don’t want kill my blueberries. The vines had grown to the tops of the bushes, and were not sharing the sunlight with our berries. We spent many hours one day clearing the honeysuckle vines from the bushes. Some of the vines were two inches in diameter, and until we started working, we thought that they were part of the blueberry bushes.
Working on the blueberry bushes.
When we moved into our house last spring, the only source of heat was a small gas heater that barely provided enough heat for the room that it was in. When the house was originally built, a chimney was placed in the middle of the house. After much consideration, we purchased a Quadra-Fire Castile pellet stove. The stove burns wood pellets, which are made from compressed sawdust. The stove is a very energy efficient, and it’s environmentally friendly since the sawdust used for the pellets is waste material from sawmills. The stove is controlled by a thermostat that can be moved from room to room. You set the temperature, and when it gets cold, pellets automatically drop into the pot and start burning. The only thing we have to do is keep the pellet hopper full, and the ash tray clean.
A Quadra-Fire Castile pellet stove.
It performed very well over the winter. With temperatures in the single digits, our house stayed nice and warm. Now that we have new energy efficient windows, the stove should do even better this winter. One other neat feature of the stove, is that it can also burn corn. This summer we’ll plant a field of corn to heat our house with this winter. We’ll still have to use wood pellets, as it can only burn a 50% mixture of corn and pellets, but it will greatly reduce the amount of pellets we’ll have to buy.
Our future corn field, and my Gator. The blueberry bushes are at the far end of the field.
As I do like to play farmville, mafia wars, and such, I am sure my tells are clogging up the space…..but that aside, we also have a small garden, growing in pots on my deck in the back, I have tomatoes, yellow banana pepper plant (which produces like crazy), green pepper, red pepper, bazil (lots of them), pasley, rosemary, and I have started watermelon … See Moreand wax beans. I hope the fence does keep the critters out of your garden, as you have way more of them up there than we do. Bigger ones too I might add.