This Year's Winter Squash Harvest

I tried a new variety of winter squash this year. The blue ones - called 'Silver Bell' - are supposed to be very good keepers with very sweet, dry flesh. I won't know if this is true for several more months since they have to cure before they are ready to eat. Because most winter squash varieties improve after having some time in storage, I always grow some Delicatas. They are the small striped ones. They are wonderful and ready to eat immediately after harvest, but they will only store until mid January. Butternut (the tan ones) will keep for up to a year; they are not quite as sweet as delicata, but still very good, and I always grow them because they store so well. Australian Butter, the orangeish pink ones at the back, also keep quite well, but not as well as butternut. This is only my second season growing them, but I was very happy with them last year. The halloween pumpkins are called 'Cargo'. I was very pleased with how they did, and I will be carving them for halloween.

Colorful Carrots

I grew five varieties of different colored carrots this year. Both the purple, a variety called 'purple 68', and the red, a variety called 'Red Samurai', are prone to bolting, so not as practical as regular varieties. I think they were still worth growing, considering their amazing color. The yellow and white both performed as well as the orange, which is the variety that I usually grow, called 'Scarlet Nantes'.

The Wonders of Beans

When wanting to add creative flair to your vegetable garden what do you do? In general I observe people channeling their creativity into tomatoes. With hundreds of beautiful varieties, plus the fact that tomatoes can be very productive, I can see why.  But I prefer to channel my creativity into beans.

Very few people grow dry beans in their home gardens at all, and the few who do don't seem to grow many interesting varieties. In fact, many gardening stores, don't carry more that one or two kinds of beans. But if you order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds or from the Vermont Bean Seed Company you can find some great varieties. This season I am growing 15 different kinds of beans.

The 15 kinds of beans that I just planted for this year.

I have one Variety called 'Bahimba' which are from Rwanda. I have never grown them before, since I just traded some other seeds for them this year. I am also experimenting with breeding a few of my own varieties.

Bahimba Beans

5 reasons to grow dry beans

1. They are high in protein.

Unlike many garden vegetables, beans are high in protein. They are more of a staple than many common garden crops.

2. They keep well.
As long as they are properly dried, beans can keep for years if kept in proper conditions in an airtight container. Unlike many garden crops, dry beans take very little work to preserve. They have to be shelled, and left to be fully dried, but they don't need to be cooked, frozen or canned to be preserved.

3. They are easy to grow.

As long as they are kept weeded and watered, beans take minimal maintenance work throughout the growing season. They don't need to be started in pots before being planted outdoors, they don't require a trellis (as long as you stick with bush type beans) and they don't need pruning.

4. They are beautiful.

I don't think that there are any vegetables more beautiful. Perhaps some tomatoes, potatoes, or flour corn come close, but beans, with their many patterns and colors, have a beauty all their own.

5. You can save your own seed.

For the most part, beans won't cross with each other, so to save your own seed, all you need to do is set aside a few matured dried beans in an airtight container.


One of my favorite simple bean recipes

1 cup dry beans
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
herbs- I like to use parsley, summer savory, and bay leaf

Soak beans overnight in 1 quart of room temperature water with 3/4 tbs of salt dissolved in it.

Rinse the beans and add fresh water. transfer them to a medium saucepan and gently boil them with the garlic and herbs until they are fully cooked. This usually takes about an hour, but can range greatly depending on the size and freshness of the beans.

Chop the onions and sauté them until they are translucent.

Drain the water off of the beans and mix them with the onions in a baking dish.

Mix in the onions and grate cheese over the top.

Broil on high until the cheese is melted.


So do I have you convinced, are you going to grow dry beans this year? If you need some seeds, I can certainly give you some. I have gallons of beans on hand, and I would love to see more home gardeners growing them.

Getting the Garden Ready

I've spent this beautiful week getting ready to plant the rest of my garden. I have already planted potatoes, peas, onions, leeks, and shallots. Next week everything else can go in. This means that I need to have the garden ready to be planted. I have been weeding and spreading compost. Does anybody remember that mound of sod that I dug out when claiming more garden space two years ago? Well, having been mixed with some chicken manure and then sitting for two years it is now beautiful compost that I have been using to fertilize the garden. 

From a nuisance to a treasure: Sod that I dug out two years ago has been composting
with some chicken manure and is now ready to be used to fertilize the garden.

The garden, ready for planting.

Garlic, onions, leeks, and shallots

Strawberries in bloom. I expect that some berries will be ripe in time for my birthday (June 28th)

We Have a Roof

The final window is installed, the door is painted, and siding is done on two sides!

Big Progress!

Windows Installed

 Three out of four windows on the tiny house are installed. The last one was back-ordered, and just arrived this morning. Hopefully we can get it installed this week.

In other news, the garlic is up and the grass is starting to turn green. So after four inches of snow earlier this week, spring is (maybe) finally here.

Good evening blog readers, here is a video of one on my original songs called 'Best Left Broken' I hope you enjoy!

On another note, more progress has been made on the tiny house in the past few days. I will hopefully update the blog about that tomorrow.

The House Has a Door!

I have been using this warmer weather to put up more siding and install the door. I expect the windows to arrive later this week, so next on the list is to install them.

Tiny House Update

It has been very cold here this past week, which has slowed progress on the tiny house. Right now, I am starting to put the wood siding up, but this is difficult in the cold because it involves standing out in the wind, and requires using your fingers to pick up nails. But I have gotten enough siding done that I can tell what it is going to look like when I'm done. I am very happy with the color that I chose.

I have put enough siding up that I can imagine what the house will look like when it is covered.

The siding that I am using is ship lap pine, which I am using partly because I like the look and partly because I was able to source it locally from Bethel Mills. Because I am using pine siding, it is important that it is able to dry out after a rain storm, to prevent it from rotting. For this purpose, I have am using cedar breather (the black mesh-looking stuff that is stapled to the house in the previous picture). This creates some space between the wood and the side of the house for air to circulate.

Stapling cedar breather onto the house.

I plan to order a door this week, and order windows soon after. I can keep working on the siding until the windows arrive, but I need to leave space without siding around the window openings until I have installed the windows.

The House Has Arrived!

Tiny House Assembly Time-lapse

 The YouTube link in case the video won't load: https://youtu.be/So7cWAknkvw

Tiny House Assembly

The finished tiny house shell!

I am in North Carolina as I write this, because yesterday I was watching and photographing as the SIPs panels were assembled onto the trailer. The trailer has been ready for a few weeks, and the panels were manufactured during the past week. The process of assembling the panels and trailer into a house took only about 5 hours and 30 minutes.

            For a while I had been hoping to do the assembly myself, and I was thinking that I could have done it until the construction team got to putting the roof on. This took two forklifts and six people to accomplish.

            So if materials for the walls are more expensive than they would be in a stick built house and I had to pay someone to assemble it for me, why did I decide to use SIPs? Simply because the SIPs will create a better insulated home, so in the long run, I expect to save money on heating costs.

 Because stick built houses have studs every few feet, a lot of heat can be lost by being transmitted through the wooden studs. This is called thermal bridging. Even if the insulation material in a stick built house has a high R-value, the house can still loose a lot of heat through the wall studs, since wood has a much lower R-value than materials that are designed for insulation.

      Eco-panels makes their SIPs with a polyurethane foam. This is one of the things that first caught my attention about the company. Unlike polystyrene, which is the material most often used for SIPs panels, polyurethane does not outgas any harmful chemicals.

      Eco- panels also makes corner panels at 90° angles and 135° angles. Having one piece corner panels is stronger and better insulating than attaching two flat panels to make a corner. My house uses four of the 90° panels at the corners and two 135° panels at the peak of the roof.

During the assembly, I was given free range of the shop, so I was able to photograph everything. Here is the first round of photos. Check back tomorrow to see a time-lapse video of the assembly.

When I arrived, The floor panels had already been attached to the trailer.

The walls are partly finished in this shot.

One of the 90° corner panels.

Inside of the house. All of that bracing in the middle is just temporary to support the roof. I will put the permanent bracing up in a way that does not take up much space.

In the home stretch!

Its 12°F this morning, a good day to get some work done indoors. I put in a few hours painting siding for the tiny house. I can only work on that for about an hour and a half before I run out of space to put freshly painted boards to dry. I am hoping to finish painting this afternoon.
In the meantime, my dad and I are scrambling to get the last details finalized and sent off to Eco-Panels. Before the SIPs panels can be made, we need to know where all of the windows and doors will be as well as where every light, electrical outlet, and light switch will be. The panels will be made with openings for the windows and doors and electrical conduit already built in, all we have to do is run wires through it.

We have had all of the windows and the door mapped out for a while. And we have had a general idea of where lights and outlets would be, but at this stage of the project, we need to finalize every detail. Every bad decision made now will cause a lot of trouble down the road. Every detail needs to be carefully thought through.
As we are finalizing all of these details though, a light has appeared at the end of the tunnel. We got the news that the floor panels are being manufactured right now. And as soon as we get the electrical diagrams to Eco-panels, they can work on the walls too.
The hardest part about this stage of the project is that I have been putting in a huge amount of energy and time and have very little to show for it. When the panels are finished, there will finally be something to show for the time and money that I have spent.