If you don't love play dough you don't know how to love!

Here is my recipe for gluten free play dough. While play dough is not something that should be eaten it can still be be a concern for kids with celiacs as a single "crumb" of gluten can be a concern.

3 cups flour (see for the flour blend I use)
1/3 cup salt
1/4 cup oil
1 1/4 cups hot water
If your blend does not already have xanthan gum then add 1.5 teaspoons

Time for me to figure out how to make pickles, I have never done that before so this will be a new adventure!

I was able to get the bales for next years bale gardens!

This morning my son asked why some plants, like trees, are so tall while other plants are so small. I explained to him nature’s balance and related it to the Three Sisters Gardening that I do. How both the popcorn and pumpkins consume nitrogen from the ground while beans put it back in. How the beans also climb up the corn plant to reach the sun. The pumpkin vines and leaves will shade the ground which both retains moisture and shades out the weeds. It is a technique long used by Native Americas long before my ancestors arrived on this continent.

We were able to have our first servings of cauliflower!

Three and a half years ago I started to experiment with making my own gluten free flour. Obviously you can go down to any large grocery store and buy it but I just prefer to experiment and to be able to do things on my own.

I tried several different blends that I found online and then made my own tweaks. What I have learned/discovered is that no one flour or starch will allow you to bake food that approximates wheat flour but creating a blend can get you close.

I have been using the following.

This is the garden where I grow my large pumpkins! With the spring's cool soil it took a bit longer for the pumpkins to emerge but they came up and are doing very well. In a couple weeks there will be no need to weed as the vines will form a living mulch that shades out any weeds that try to grow. The pop corn and beans (can't see the beans in this picture) are now tall enough that they will be able to see the sun!

The plants are super healthy when many flowers! The beans definitely loved the cattle panel I put up for them to crawl up! Soon, very soon, I will be able to eat them!

I just went out and harvested some and there are plenty more on the way!

A garden tended
Is a life being rebuilt
With hope now restored

There are plenty of fruit set and the plants are doing well! Time to start looking for recopies!

Hello everyone! It has been a long time since I have done an update. Between gardening and camping I have not been in front of the computer that much except for work!

Sugar beets are doing super well! I am quite happy as this is the first year I have tried growing them and I am hopeful that I can make some of my own sugar this year!

Cucumbers are also producing and have been adding them to my "daily five"!

It rained for a good part of the day here so was not able to get much planting done. Although the "purple bean" garden is ready to be planted (two rows of bales just line the peas) and I was able to get soaker hoses over all the bales. However, I was really excited to see the first pea emerge!

This is the second year with this garden and while it produced an okay crop I wanted to take the extra time to improve the soil! This is a long and narrow garden! My plan this year is to plant grain sorghum (for making gluten free flour), chick peas (also for making gluten free flour), sun flowers, and sugar beets (I thought it would be fun to try to make my own sugar).

Above is what it looked like before I started.

The town I live in has a compost pile so I made two trips!

A challenge with planting in bales, you do not want to plant your seeds or plants until the conditioning process is done! If you plant too early and the bale heats back up then your plants will almost certainly die. Keeping them damp is key. If they dry out then the decomposition process stops and starts again once they get wet again. Using a compost thermometer is a good way to monitor their temperature and you do not want to plant until the bales are consistently below 80 degrees F. However, another way to know, without the use of a thermometer is to wait until mushrooms grows.

The peas are finally planted in the bales! In earlier articles I covered the steps to conditioning the bales but now that they are ready planting has commenced!

Peas are one of the first crops I plant with potatoes being first. Both are cooler weather plants and both are somewhat frost tolerant.

Peas need something to crawl up and I use what I have on hand from a prior life, t-posts and cattle panels. Wanting to save myself some work I have a rows of bales right next to each other, that way I can have one panel that the plants can grow up from either side.

In three of my gardens I use a Native American technique known as the three sisters. It was a form of companion gardening and crop rotation where corn, squash, and beans are planted together. The beans add nitrogen to the soil while the corn and pumpkins use nitrogen. The idea is to use pole beans which will use the corn plant as a pole, the beans can also help anchor the corn down! The pumpkins grow and their leaves form a natural mulch that both shades out weeds and the ground from the hot sun thereby helping with soil retention.

I was hoping to actually plant peas today but mother nature sent us some rain. Not going to complain as the ground was getting a bit dry. However, I was able to get the panels up for the peas to climb! That is definitely the most labor intensive part of the project!

Today's project was to get Garden #1 cleaned up (it was a bale garden last year) and tilled. So I gathered up what was left of last years bales and put them on the pile (added some nitrogen) so they could compost for a couple of weeks and then went a head and got them tilled. I will post later what a "Three Sisters Garden" means but this will be the garden that I plant my pop corn, "big" pumpkins, and beans in!

In 2017 the neighbor cut down a grove of trees to make room for a new garage, the company he hired to do the job ran all the trees through a chipping machine. Since I can never seem to get my hands on enough organic material I walked over and asked if they would mind dumping some on my land. They asked me how much I wanted and I told them as much as I could get my grubby little hands on! It was somewhat humorous (at least I thought it was) that they would ask after every five loads or so if I was still okay with them bringing more and I assured them that I was quite happy!