Thanks, everyone, for the various posts.

I think it has finally dawned upon me that you reply to a blog by simply posting another one yourself - duh! So maybe I'll reply a bit more now

Well, (almost) all the veggies are doing fine! We've had such a mild winter, I have set just about everything out. Still lack the cucumbers, squash and a couple others. I've been a bit surprized at how quickly seeds germinate when started in pure vermiculite - just a few days for almost all of them! Of course, starting them indoors, even under what seems like very intense flourscent lighting leaves much to be desired in terms of sufficient light, so they all get very leggy. I just buried them all the deeper, being mindful of not burying the crown of the plant.

One plant that has been tough since day 1 is Black-seeded Simpson lettuce. Only about 30% germinate, and by the time they have put out the first set of true leaves (not the seed leaves), they are so weakly-looking. I'm not sure if I need to try something other than the vermiculite for sprouting, or if I just got a bad batch; everything else from the two mail-order vendors was top-notch.

I'll post a photo or two here in a couple of days. Oh, our backyard now puts Fort Knox to shame for all the four-legged pest security. Lots of wire all over the place! You should see all the deer tracks around the fenced garden, including so many pokes into the ground with their hooves that it has about messed up the grass! I had a roll of bird netting; I got stuck in it so much, I have just left it out on the ground in hopes that the deer will also get tired of getting stuck in it.

I sure seem to write alot about things I build! Honestly, I don't spend all my time just creating new stuff; I just happen to have several projects recently that might interest folks on this blog.

Anyway, here's my seedling stand I built as part of our Square Foot Garden. We needed a place that would help to sprout seeds and grow transplants until the danger of frost is past.

I used three strips of 11" x 48" plywood for the shelves. Use 1/2" thick plywood, instead of something thinner like I did, and it will be more stable.

I cut four 45" lengths of 1x3. At first, I though I would place the four legs at the very ends of the stand, but that looked like the shelves would sag a great deal in the middle.

Eyelet hooks hold the chains that lower the lights. This is very convienent right now, as the sprouted seeds need the lights to be lowered close down to them. I have two flourescent plant/aquarium lights per shelf for a total of four lights.

I put a couple of diagonal reinforcing strips of thin wood on the backs and side. Be careful not to put the reinforcing strips on until you see exactly where you seed flats, lights, ect are going to go so as not to interfere with them.

With these dimensions, you can place two seed flats on each shelf, and two shelves. I bought a couple of seedling heater pads from Park Seeds, the kind that keep the bottom temp 10 - 20 degrees about the air temp and they have helped a great deal with germinating.

In the photo, I've got one seed flat, plus several of my houseplants that seem more picky about the cold weather. The middle shelf has the heating pads, and the bottom is just the lights without extra heat. I was surprised how quickly I got the first round of Broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower started with bottom heat!

Here's an inexpensive toy I made for my 2 1/2 year old son Josh a couple of weeks ago: a wooden crane. It only took a couple of hours to put together. Like a lot of such mechanical toys, you can put a whole lot more time and creativity into making it better, but this version is just a plain one. Here's what I did.

1) get a 1x8 board and cut a piece about 7X10 inches. Doesn't have to be precise. Sand it well. If you look carefully at the photo, you'll notice two things different from what I describe. One, I have two boards, one atop the other. And two, they are 7" square. I put a lazy susan between them so it would swivel, but on hindsight, that probably isn't very useful, as I also have four casters on the bottom, and they handle turns better than using a lazy susan. Keep that out also makes it a good bit simpler. Also, mine being 7 inches square makes it more unstable (front to back) than if I had made it about 7x10 inches.

2) Cut two 6 inch lengths of 2x4, sand well. Clamp them together temporarily and drill three 1/2 inch holes as seen in the photo. In hindsight (again!) I would place both of the holes towards the back up closer to the top of the 2x4 blocks, rather than just one. YOu'll notice that one is further down; I keep having to reattach the string to that one (wouldn't you know), and it is quite difficult to get to it, being so far down inside the blocks.

3) Get some 1/2 inch dowel and cut two lengths of 7 inches and one of 4 inches. The four inch one will be the front dowel (I left it 7 inches in the photo, but it should be shorter). Drill a small hole through the 7 inch ones near the middle of the length big enough for the string to be passed through. Sand well. Also sand the parts of the 7 inch dowels that will be inside the blocks a bit more so they will turn easier.

4) Cut two lengths of 1x2. One is for the boom of about 20 - 24 inches. Mine is about 23" and is a little top-heavy when the boom is all the way out. Cut the other length of about 11 - 12 inches to be the back vertical support. Drill a 1/2 inch hole near the bottom of the boom so the dowel will pass through.

5) Now assemble the various blocks and find something to hold them together while you permanantly fasten them together. You can use either wood screws, using a small drill press to predrill the holes, or you can just use nails. You'll need to fasten the two 2x4 blocks to the bottom piece and fasten the two 2x4s to themselves and the back vertical support. The boom will swing on the dowel that passes through it.

6) Add some small eyelet hooks as in the photo. There are two different strings; one to raise and lower the boom and the other other string to raise and lower the hook on the end of the boom.

7) Add four small casters to the bottom of the bottom board. I didn't add any varnish or paint, but just left it as sanded wood. Add strings and a hook (I made one out of a short piece of coat hanger and smoothed the ends) and you're through!

My compost pile had gotten up to about 120 degrees a few weeks ago; I was pretty thrilled that it was working just as planned! It had gone down to about 90 degrees, so I though it was time to turn it. I've since reread my info and found that you turn it when it either gets up to 160 degrees, or when it starts needing more oxygen. Perhaps this wasn't the time to turn, as the temperature dropped to 5 - 10 degrees about ambient temperature over the next few days and then gradually tapered down. Hmmm... what went wrong here... I had watered it a little as I turned it all over; maybe I watered too much, I though. By process of elimination, that looked to be the most probable cause of the temp not going back up again.

Today, I turned it all again. No harm done since it isn't hot now anyway, and it probably needs oxygen. In looking at it, it isn't overly wet, so I'm not sure why it isn't getting hot now. Actually, I thought it might need a little more water! It doesn't smell bad; on the contrary, it has that great composty-smell to it, even though I continue to add kitchen veggie scraps to it. I probably have enough and will start another pile soon. Oh well; I'll watch it and see what happens.

A hint for making temperature readings easy: I got a small indoor/outdoor digital thermometer down at Harbor Freight and I keep the probe end of it stuck in the very middle of the compost pile and the readout under a small lid (to keep out rain) on top of the pile. This makes reading the temp a cinch.

It's been a little while since I blogged anything here. We've been awfully busy organizing, throwing away, deciding what to give away, what to sell on eBay, what to sell in a garage sale this spring. Someone wrote a book on it and called it putting your house on a diet.

What else? Let's see... I built Josh a wooden crane; I built Michiko a washtub bass. The compost pile is finally doing its thing, too - heating up rather nicely.

It occured to me a few weeks ago that all our veggies are coing in to us as seeds. That includes the traditionally difficult seeds such as tomatoes, and peppers. I think I have solved the problem without too much expense - I built a seed stand. I'll take a couple of photos and put them up here shortly. Basically, it is a 4-foot wide set of shelves. There are two flourscent fixtures, each with two plant lights, and some of those seed heating pads you can get from Park Seeds. Two stardard-sized seed flats (about 9" by 20") will fit nicely on each shelf, so I can get four flats there.

I had almost all the wood, stain and hardware down in the garage already, but I had to buy the lights, fixtures and the heating pads. Like most everything I build, I see on hindsight what I would change if I were to do it again. Perhaps I could do a complete set of instructions, complete with "lessons learned"!

Better go...it's late!

I'd known about the concept of Square Foot Gardening, or SFG as I'll shorten it here, for a good many years. My wife had gotten me a copy of Mel BartholomewÂ’s book "Square Foot Gardening" a few years ago, but I'd not read it until this winter.

His concept is really pretty simple and it makes time-saving sense if you think about it:

1) Everything is set up in square sections of 1 foot by 1 foot.

2) Theses squares are then put together in rows and columns, making a 4 by 4 foot block.

3) Each square contains a different type of plant; maybe one broccoli, or 4 spinach or 16 onions, etc.

4) The soil is the best you can manage to obtain. He gives great advice on improving soil.

5) DonÂ’t plant anymore than you need and donÂ’t plant anymore than one or two seeds. In other words, no thinning-out should be done as the plants start to sprout.

To learn more details about the SFG method, you can start with Mel's website at www.squarefootgardening.com

I determined to set up two blocks starting this coming spring. I noticed that he also uses a timeline. The techie in me leaped for joy – “Hey, heÂ’s using a Gantt chart – on vegetables; thatÂ’s the same concept we use for tracking projects at work!”. This timeline shows when to sow seeds, when to transplant (if applicable) when to start harvesting, etc, etc, all tied to the first and last frosts of the season. Great, I though! All I need to do is check this timeline and see exactly when to do what. Of course, watering must continue so frequently that it wouldn't make sense to put that on a timeline. Weeding is a strong point of the SFG method; since the area is so small, there is so much less time spent in such routine chores, thus packing the maximum yield into each square foot of garden.

I spent about 4 - 5 hours on each of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday digging up a plot in our back lawn, building two simple frames, obtaining the ingredients and mixing them.

The ingredients Mel recommends are:

1) Compost

2) Peat Moss

3) Coarse Vermiculite (although my brother, the curator at the local botanical gardens, recommended something new called permatill, which I used)

4) Sand

5) MelÂ’s own organic fertilizer blend, using blood meal, bone meal, wood ash, etc)

The only mistake I see IÂ’ve made so far is using mulch from our local city mulch pile that isnÂ’t really fully composted yet. ItÂ’s rather hard to turn if itÂ’s not completely composted! It looks bad, too. I believe that that will not be a problem by the time spring gets here, though. I hope.

So, in the space of two 4 foot by 4 foot blocks, or 32 squares, we will be planting:

2 tomatoes

2 cucumbers

2 kale

9 spinach

4 swiss chard

1 broccoli

2 collards

1 cabbage

2 squares of marigolds

1 square of nasturtium

1 hot pepper

1 bell pepper

1 cauliflower

2 summer squash

8 lettuce

16 beets

16 carrots

1 square of cilantro

16 spring (green) onions

16 radishes

plus two other squares that we havenÂ’t decided on yet.

Did you notice that I included two flowers in there? Mel recommends planting flowers in the garden as well, and these two are especially useful in repelling pests. I plan on having one bunch of marigolds in each of the two blocks. Here, at the foot of Green Mountain, we are bothered by a variety of pests, including but not limited to deer, raccoons, opossums, groundhogs, rabbits and even the occasional coyote, skunk and bobcat. Well, IÂ’ll go ahead soon and put up a 3 foot tall fence of rabbit wire. If I see that that doesnÂ’t keep out everyone, IÂ’ll add on an extension to the posts and make it 6 feet. If birds seem to be interested in the seeds, IÂ’ll simply put some netting over it. ThatÂ’s the beauty of having everything in a compact space; solutions to these unexpected problems become a good deal smaller.

Vines crops also do well with SFG; just dig a trench a bit deeper and remember to allow two or three squares, depending on what it is.

After resting my aching bones today, tomorrow IÂ’ll need to clean up the yard, finish transplanting the grass chunks I dug up into bare spots elsewhere in the yard and do some initial watering. Later, I'll start sowing seeds indoors, where applicable.

IÂ’m hoping this will indeed save us money over paying for organic veggies that we are now buying. Unless we make some extra efforts, there will more eating of things in season, but I donÂ’t think thatÂ’s a big problem.

This is the first of (hopefully) many details on homesteading.

It's also my first blog - anywhere!

If you're reading this, I probably don't need to go over the 'why' of homesteading; I assume you also desire a plot of land to manage, till, and enjoy. So, here are some details here to get started with.

We already have a small parcel of land; a little over an acre not far from the bluff on Green Mountain looking to the east. Unfortunately, the road over the mountain goes just in front of that bluff so it isn't as private a view as I wish it were sometimes.

The land is part of my family's original tract. Some of it has never been cleared; more has not been cleared in about 10 years. Only about 20 percent was already a cleared lawn. It has a slight northen slope to it.

So, starting this summer, I began clearing the land. It was full of briars, poison ivy (I got slight cases of it - around 6 or 7 times, even with Tecnu!) and three big piles of brush (with their possible attendant rattlesnakes) to be picked up. Actually, so far I've found not a single snake.

Speaking of Tecnu; that stuff really works GREAT! I found by trial and error that if you gently scratch it in instead of just rubbing it in to cleanse your skin, it is much more effective. After that discovery, I didn't have any more episodes with poison ivy.

Now that winter has arrived, I've completed clearing around 75 percent of the total land, including one of the three piles of brush and killing most of the poison ivy. I'll leave the back 50 feet so my brother will have a bit more privacy from the road. I used one of my other brother's DR mower to clear the thickest brush. Not the DR Trimer Mower - this is the big DR mower and will cut right through a 2 inch diameter tree and keep on going. But be careful - it kicks up poison ivy "particles" if you cut over it, so you need to scrub up to your elbows and knees.

Ofttimes, as I'm working I have to keep reminding myself of something. I start thinking "Why don't I just hire a skilled bulldozer operator; he could clear the rest of this in a day". When it comes time to actually build a house, I'm sure some bulldozing will be in order, but in the meantime, I try to see it as:
1) Exercise, and a good alternate to paying 60 or 80 dollars per month to go to the gym. Pilates? Try digging a ditch instead.
2) Understanding the land itself much better. Even now, I can go over virtually every square foot of that acre. I am beginning to see exactly what is going to fit where one day, such as sheds, paths, pens, ponds and gardens.
3) It's a great source of mulch. Another blog soon will detail our Square Foot Garden.
4) As a former biologist and avid birdwatcher, I am endlessly fascinated by all the flora and fauna thats is revealed simply by being there.

I'm in no hurry to finish, so it may take a few years before we're through with it all. "The goal is not as important as the person I become in the process of reaching the goal." - James B. Richards. But I am looking forward to that day.