Monthly Archives: January 2015

Freezing in Georgia: What to do for Your Garden?

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Arctic blast could damage your plants!

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Frost fabric for the win!

How cold is it going to get?

Temperatures are plummeting into the low teens here in Georgia this week! Wednesday and Thursday are looking to be some pretty cold days for us southerners. Wind chill could be as cold as 4 degrees Thursday morning! For more information on the forecast visit these two links. I always look at both myself!

Weather Channel: http://www.weather.com/weather/5day/l/USGA0028:1:US

National Weather Service: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ffc/

What should we do for our plants?

Long periods of cold  and extreme low temperatures can damage even our heartiest winter crops! In Georgia we are privileged with being able to grow year round if we protect our plants from these extremes. Hopefully you have already mulched well if you don’t have raised beds. Raised beds naturally retain more heat and mulch protects the root zone from cold damage and also generates some heat.

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Posted in Nature and Environment, Organic Gardening and Farming

Want to Know About My Homesteading Childhood?

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My childhood has influenced me in many ways…

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My childhood homestead in print.

 

I grew up in a small coastal New England town in a dairy-farming community, in quite a different manner than most of my peers. While everyone else I went to school with had cable and video games, I had gardens and animals. We had a small self-sustaining farmette that provided most of our food. My parents were very passionate about raising their five children off of the land.

 

Picking the ripe raspberries and cherry tomatoes was a summer-long chore that I remember fondly. We had gardens everywhere and preserved or fermented what we didn’t eat fresh. My mother encouraged diversity in the garden to keep the insect population happy and well-balanced. She had an eye for attractive chaos in her layout and still does to this day on the same land. You can visit her Humble Jungle at Grammy’s Potager on Facebook. Everything was grown organically, of course. My parents wouldn’t have it any other way!

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Posted in Canning and Preserving, Chicken and Other Poultry, Cooking from Scratch, Fermenting, Homemade, Homesteading, Nature and Environment, Organic Gardening and Farming