Can You Say Rain Barrel?

We can.  Or we soon will be.  Since we found some food grade barrels on Craigslist.  A few folks on Twitter had told us they found barrels on Craigslist and it took a little manuevering… but now we have two barrels for roughly $34 bucks.  Not bad, concidering one 55 gal. barrel online (shipped) will run you 80-100 bucks.  And if you haven’t priced actual ready-to-go rain barrels… you might pay 100-200 smackers. 

Here is a quick pick of the two barrels…

Future Rain Barrel

Yeah… so, not all that much to say about them at the moment, but expect to see a “How To Make A Rain Barrel Video” or something of that nature.  There are a million how-to(s) and walk-thru(s) on making a rain barrel… but not a million with us in it right?  Right.  You don’t come here for the pretty pictures, you come here for us!  haha… no really.  Kinda.  No.  Nevermind.

So stay tuned.  Do any of you have rain barrels?  And did you make them yourself?

Okra is Sprouting

Okra is a warm weather veggie and is usually planted in late May or early June, but with the weather we have been having we decided to start some a little early.  The seeds germinated in a reasonable amount of time and I’m thinking that the early planting will do just fine.

Okra Sprout Picture

I planted two seeds per hole to make sure that we had one in each spot and every seed germinated.  I’m going to give them a couple of days then thin out the smaller seedling.  This will leave us with three okra plants which I’m thinking won’t be enough so there will probably be some container okra showing up soon!

After last night’s planting we thought that we were done, but we aren’t.  I’m thinking that we will always find one more thing to plant and one more pot that needs something in it.  How about you?

Putting The Peppers To Bed

Our first raised bed is now full!! 

Actually is has been for a couple of weeks, but due to life we are a bit behind on posting.  James is so busy at work that it is overflowing into gardening and blogging time (and wife time!) and well my excuse is that I’m awful at blogging.  I’m going to try to be a lot better and keep you all updated on things going on now instead of things that happened two weeks ago.  Don’t hold your breath, like I said… I’m trying.

Annnnd now back to the peppers.

This bed was reserved for and is now full of sweet peppers.  We eat a lot of peppers, like, A LOT.  Raw on sandwiches, salads and cooked in just about anything that you can cook them in.  We had a few plants last year but they just didn’t give us the amount of peppers we were looking for, so this year we planted quite a few plants.

Sweet Pepper Gardening Bed 

In this bed we have California Wonder Bells, Sweet Bananas and Summer Salads.  Five plants of each type and so far they are all doing great.

A few of the plants were a little small when we planted them, but we have been protecting them from the harsh winds with the awesome row cover that James built along with the bed and they seem to be doing just fine.  Also we got the irrigation set up a while back – so after a few modifications… it is doing it’s job!

There have been many plants going into beds, barrels and other various containers and I will do my best to get us all caught up this week.