My First Garden

Through the years I have tried little growing projects, most of which never work out. This will be my first actual garden if I get going soon.

I found this great site through Pinterest that can plan your garden for you. So I punched in my info, "built" my garden beds, picked out my plants and set it to work. It alerted me about plants that wouldn't work for the season or my climate so I could attempt to make location appropriate decisions. It wants to sell you it's fancy plants, but I'll just be subbing the seeds I can buy locally. I didn't love it's actual plant arrangement, so I rearranged all that myself.

My Grow Season - Tailored to the crazy hot desert!

Picking out plants

A warning about a grow season and plant selected conflict

All the plants in my garden

A breakdown of recommended plant time and estimated harvest time, as well as other info for each plant in my garden

My designed and planned garden plot (this is just for my winter garden, the empty beds will be planted starting in January)

It creates a to-do list on a timeline for you so you can just follow along. I'm going to do succession planting for a lot of my veggies and see how it all turns out!

This weeks to-do

Next on the list is to build some raised garden beds from leftover pallet wood...

GREAT! Chicken Lice...

So my chickens have lice.

I noticed this funny spot under the chin of one of my BLRW boys, took some pictures, and posted it on my go-to chicken forum. Oddly enough I couldn't find lice egg pictures that I thought looked like mine on google, so my friends at BYC helped me out.

Chicken lice - confirmed. Crap.

I am going to bet it came from the THOUSANDS of stupid doves and pigeons invading my backyard. We are hoping to double the size of the coop/run soon so we won't have to let them out. That will help keep the wild birds away, but I'm having the almost daily problem of sparrows getting stuck in the Serama coop... hmm. I need my BB gun back... Imma kill all y'all...

There are always a million different ways people online will tell you to use.
Because mine only have the eggs on their chins I think I'm going to try vaseline on the eggs to try to remove the eggs from the feathers, and then bathe in wood ash (like the plain old stuff from burning wood). This sounds like the cheapest first attempt to rid my feathery friends of their lice.

Lice geared coop cleaning seems to be a topic of debate as well. Half say the lice aren't really a coop problem as they can't live off the chicken, others are hardcore cleaning and disposing of everything in their coops. I actually *just* cleaned my coop yesterday - swept the poop of the top of the house and the crates they perch on and raked all the chicken poop out, so I'll just leave that alone for now.

Master Bedroom!

Looking at our finances (or rather Randy's teacher salary) we've realized that moving out isn't really doable all on our own right now. So after a lot planning and negotiations we have decided to stay at MIL for a while... probably until Ana moves leaving us the house, or she sells and the 3 of us buy a larger place for an expanding family with a live-in in-law.
Anywho, part of the plan is for me and Randy to move into the master suite. It has a walk in closet and an attached bath which make more sense because we are the only ones using the "main" bath so Jose is always going back and forth through his mom's room to get to the bathroom.

The dog has also been trained to do his business on a puppy pad that resides RIGHT in front of the main bath. His misses cover the tile floor blocking me inside my current room, and causing seriously icky odors in our bedroom and bathroom. This is probably my least favorite thing about the ENTIRE living-with-my-in-law situation. So switching rooms will make one super happy camper!

The main house and most of the kitchen have tile floors. The three bedrooms and end of the kitchen were never tiled - but were meant to be. So Ana has hired a guy to finish the kitchen with all of it's funky curves and corners, and in my time off from school I will probably be taking on the majority of tiling the bedrooms. We haven't picked out bedroom floor tiles yet, but Randy and I are leaning towards something black/dark...

While all the bedroom furniture is out and before the nice new floors are installed, we are also going to repaint the bedrooms! This is probably my favorite part. We picked out two shades of purple to repaint Ana's new room (her fav color is purple) and a pink and gray for ours. Our current room is painted blue on two sides and the roof, and tan with dark brown trim on the other two sides. Actually a cute idea for a little boy, but definitely time for a change. We're not sure how the walls were painted, but the general consensus is that it looks like spray paint, so we are testing our new colors to see if we will need to do some damage control before painting.

I'm afraid our original pink is TOO pink, and would REALLY like to do gray and yellow instead, but Randy was much quicker sold on the pink thank on the yellow - go figure. Trying to convince him but he's afraid it will make the room too bright, but I'd much rather have a gender neutral bright and happy room. I will keep working on him.

This is the idea I'm going for but with the gray on top and the pink (soon to be yellow?) on the walls with the white stripe and white trim. I'm planning on the same design in Ana's room with dark purple on top and light purple on bottom.

I know this is a nursery, but I just love gray and a color. Our bedding is a pretty gray and I just love that it goes with everything! We don't have trim around the windows so that will limit the white, but eventually I would love to make the baseboards bigger like the ones in the nursery picture.