It’s spring in Iowa but it still feels like winter.

Greetings! I’m Sue, I am 53 years old and I live in the country with my husband Steve. Steve and I have two wonderful children, Ian and Em. Em lives on the east coast and Ian and his wife, Nicole, live on the west coast. We have two dogs, Clara and Ivy, 12 hens and one rooster.  We also have other assorted critters running around; weasels, raccoons, mice, skunk, etc. .

I love to garden and I used to write some, so I hope by writing again I can learn more about gardening and utilizing the resources we have out here.  I’ll use this page in lieu of Facebook.  FB took up too much of my time and I decided I don’t need to be on it as much as I had been.  I need to figure out how this layout works and I’ll start adding pictures soon.  My guess is I’ll be back on Facebook at some point – not holding my breath, after almost two days away from it I’m doing OK 😉

My goal is to become more self sufficient.  We have a little piece of land, a beautiful home, two barns and the potential to have more animals and larger gardens as time goes on.  I dehydrate foods, can foods, and freeze some too.  I also do a lot of cooking, so along with gardening, this blog may include some recipes and food ideas (especially over the winter months).  Another goal is to do a day of cooking each week or so and freeze things into one portion containers for Steve and myself so as not to waste food.  I’ll let you know how that goes!

Gardening really is a passion for me and this year I thought I’d try my tomatoes from seed.  In March I did start some tomatoes – we’re still experiencing ‘winter’ here and my seedlings aren’t doing well as they’ve not had a chance to get outdoors to toughen up – I’ll probably have to buy tomato plants.  I had my garden tilled last year on April 10th … I have no clue when we’ll be tilling this year. It was too bleak of a day to put a picture of what things look like outdoors right now so I decided on a picture of canned tomatoes for my cover photo.  We’ve been enjoying our canned tomatoes this winter in chili, spaghetti and whatever else I can throw them into.

Today (April 22, 2013) was a gloomy day to start, it warmed up to 62* but I didn’t get out to enjoy the afternoon because I was out shopping late morning and once home I hooked up my new stove.  I accomplished that despite the fact one of the wires didn’t want to fit into place. I have never been in our basement and those stairs are terrifying for me (there is no railing, it’s an open staircase and set up like nothing I’ve ever seen before … Did I mention I’ve never been in our basement?? Almost four years have passed, so this was quite the feat for me!). I’m really afraid of heights so I sort of scaled the west wall, turned around half way down and made it to the basement to flip the power back on for the stove.  I managed to test a couple of things on the stove and in the oven before Steve got home from work and will be cooking and baking more tomorrow.

As I get ready to settle in for the night the temperature has dropped to 42* and it has been raining and is very windy, as usual.  It is supposed to drop to about 34* overnight with a high tomorrow of 40*.  It is supposed to snow lightly tomorrow morning and after that it looks as though we may see spring here in Iowa by the weekend. I’m pretty sure we’re going to wake up one of these days and it is going to hit 90* and stay that way through September.

Join me as I garden, cook and write. I want to learn and hopefully help others learn too.

April 22, 2013, 11:58 p.m.