Been doing some work in the garden

My garden harvests this season weren't very good, due in large part to every critter in the area deciding it was an all you can eat buffet.  At ground level I've got mice and voles, midway up I've got a very large groundhog, which had babies this year, and at the top level I've got deer.  My pitiful, patched together 3 1/2 foot high fence was not doing the trick.  So I decided to take down the old fence, renovate the garden a bit, and put up a 7' tall deer fence for next season. 
It took most of the day, since some parts  had several layers of fencing to peel away.  This is what the animals have been doing to my veggies!

I 'm still in the process of making a path around the outer perimeter of the garden.  I've discovered that it would make life much easier if I can get at both sides of the garden rows.  Hopefully the new fence won't be too hard to put up.  I'll probably wait until I can put the garden to bed (take all the dead plants out, add compost, leaves, and grass clippings) before putting the fence up.  I'm thinking things out a bit more this time, and planning based on the problems and issues I've had in the past.  I'm planning my planting chart this Fall as well.  Last year I didn't do that, and just sort of planted things all over.  So, the tomatoes ended up blocking the sun for the zucchini and squash, and the lettuce got too much sun and set seed faster than it should have.  I've been doing some pruning as well, making sure the garden gets as much light as possible.  The evergreens behind the garden have really gotten out of hand, and the Snowball bush seems to creep closer each year.  I'll try to keep you up to date on the yard and garden.  Hopefully if I do a little extra work now, it will pay off in a bigger harvest next season.
Happy gardening!
-Michelle of CreativeCritters

This Praying Mantis chose MY Garden for his Home!

This large, beautiful Praying Mantis seems to have decided to make a home in my garden.  This is totally awesome!  I haven't seen Paying Mantises in this area since I was a kid.  They're fascinating insects and do a great job hunting and eating the bad bugs in the garden.  And they seem to enjoy getting their picture taken- LOL!  I swear this guy was posing for me.  I'm very happy that he chose my garden as his hunting grounds.  That tells me I'm doing something right.  My garden is completely organic- no chemicals or pesticides, only natural fertilizers and insect control.  And what could be more natural than one insect eating another?  Hopefully this is a female and she'll lay eggs.  I'd love to see a healthy Praying Mantis population around here again.  It seems like I discover new creatures in my garden every year- it's like an entirely different world in there!  This is what happens when you let nature take over a bit. ;-)
-Michelle of CreativeCritters

Introducing Organic Home Grown Catnip from the Gardens of Creative Critters

I'm now offering my home grown dried catnip for sale. I wanted to wait until I had a large enough harvest to share. I should get at least a few more harvests this season, so I'll have plenty to share! I grow my catnip organically and never use chemicals or pesticides. Like most herbs, catnip benefits from regular pruning by producing even more leaves and flowers, so I am able to get several harvests a season. I slowly air dry the plants in my garage to ensure no loss of potency. And this stuff is potent! Just ask Calcifer, my 6 month old kitten, or Cedric my 12 year old cat. They get to sample fresh catnip branches from each cutting, just to be sure the catnip meets their high standards. This is the same catnip I use to stuff my handmade catnip toys with. My toys and the catnip have been thoroughly tested over the years, not only by my cats, but by the cats of friends, family, and customers. Young or old, cats love this catnip!

This is the dried and packaged catnip. I'm selling 1/2 ounce bags for US $4.00 a piece. That's my kitten Calcifer on the label.

These are the potent and delectable catnip flowers. I make sure to include as many as possible with each harvest.

This is my 6 month old kitten, Calcifer, doing a little product testing with a branch of catnip fresh from the garden.


Even 12 year old Cedric enjoys his catnip flowers!

So why not give your furry feline a special treat straight from the garden of CreativeCritters?
-Michelle of CreativeCritters

Adventures in Catnip!

The picture above shows what happens when my Ozzy gets his catnip!  I've been making catnip toys for many years, for my own cats, as well as my friends and relative's cats.  I grow the catnip in my garden and use no chemicals or pesticides.  Catnip is a pretty tough plant and is in the mint family.  It benefits from frequent harvesting.  Bees and other beneficial insects flock to the tiny white flowers in the summer.  Bright yellow finches and other birds love the tiny seeds, and help to spread the plant around.  I had a good season this year and just brought in my final harvest for the season.  I should be able to create quite a few toys with what I've harvested since summer.  Many people have told me I should sell my catnip toys, so I finally decided to do so.  I have plenty of proof that cats love these toys!  My best friend says her cats are still playing with the toys I gave them 4 years ago.  My boys still play with their toys as well.  My cousin's cats actually ripped through the rest of the Christmas presents to get at theirs!  I told her to give them the toys when she got home, but she forgot and left them with the rest of the presents.  When she went downstairs the next morning, the place was trashed and each cat had one of the toys (luckily nothing got broken).  So cats definitely like these toys!  The knit ones are usually made holding 2 strands of yarn together and are knit in a tight garter stitch, then stuffed with at least 1/3 of the body filled with catnip and the rest filled with fleece scraps.  These toys are very tough and durable, and can take a serious thrashing.  My Cedric is especially vicious, but his toys are still in one piece.  I also make felt toys which are securely sewn together and filled in the same manner.  Many of the toys have braided yarn tails, or knit tentacles, like the octopus.  I've had many years to figure out just what different cats like, and I design these toys with that in mind.  All of these are created with my own patterns.  I'll make as many as I can until I run out of catnip.  I'll only use my own catnip because I know that it was organically grown and I also know it's very potent!  Below are some of the toys available right now, but I'll be adding more as I complete them, so be sure to check back often!

-Michelle of CreativeCritters

FayeFarms offers natural handcrafted soaps

Heather Faye of Udall, Kansas, opened FayeFarms on Artfire.com 2-2-09.  Her Studio Announcement reads: "Welcome to the Faye Farms Soap shop! Every bar of Faye Farms soap is made with wholesome milk from our dairy herd of Ayrshire cows as well as lard or tallow from our naturally raised livestock. All of our soaps are made from scratch using only the highest quality ingredients. We also like to use a variety of vegetable oils and butters to make a beautifully balanced bar of soap with lots of lather. If you would like to learn more about Faye Farms, please visit our website at www.fayefarms.com".  I love the fact that she makes her soaps from the milk from her own animals.  She has a delighfully interesting blog at fayefarms.com/farm-life.  I would love to have a small farm one day, so I find her writing very interesting.

Artisan Biography for FayeFarms:

"Hi, I'm Heather Faye. I am the mother of 3 young boys and I am the owner/operator of a small family farm located in south central Kansas. With a desire not to waste any resource from my farm and to lessen the amount of chemicals my family is exposed to I started making natural soaps. As the years went by my love of soap making grew as did the requests for my skin loving soaps. Thanks for stopping by my shop!"

The soaps in her shop are so pretty, and apparantly smell as good as they look.  Some of her customers have said, "Fantastic! Such a wonderful aroma of all of them! Leaves my skin soft and clean feeling! Outstanding Seller, Great communication, very nicely packaged and fast shipping too!", "Thanks Heather! This soap is wonderful. I love tallow in soap. It makes such a nice hard and smooth soap, doesn't it? And thank you for the eucalyptus lime soap, too. I've never tried that blend and it's great.", "Every Scent is Heavenly!! I love these soaps! The six bars for one price is a Great deal too!! If you have never tried homemade, all Natural soap - you really should try a bar - you will be hooked!", and "Always wonderful scents and excellent soap! Perfect every time!"  High praise indeed!  FayeFarms can also be found on Facebook, Flickr, www.fayefarms.com.  The farm life alone is enough to draw me in!  But once you see these gorgeous soaps, you'll have to try some for yourself!  This is just a small sample of what FayeFarms has available in her shop.

-Michelle of CreativeCritters

Garden progress

Well, my garden is a wild jungle! A very productive wild jungle. I don't even have that many weeds, because they simply don't have room to grow! I'm still harvesting lettuce, yellow beans, green beans that sprouted from last year's fallen seeds, zucchini, yellow squash, and garlic. The tomatoes are still green, but there are a lot of them. I think once the nights warm up (it's been unseasonably cool lately) they'll start to ripen pretty fast. I have flowers on my bell peppers, and tiny baby eggplants coming. I just love my garden! Here are some pictures I just took last week.
These are my zucchini and beans, although there's a lot more where these came from. I've been picking beans and zucchini almost every day.
This is my wild tomato patch. The plants are taller than I am now, and I'm 5'8"! All I've really done is add some compost and a little organic fertilizer.
This is my garlic, with parsley and Borage mixed in. I planted the bulbs last fall, and they're getting ready to be harvested now. I dug up a few nice bulbs yesterday (I don't have pics of those yet). Let me tell you-this garlic is DELICIOUS! I've already used some of it on some baked chicken- YUM!
This is one of the garlic plants that formed a really cool flower at the top. Sometimes I just like to let plants go and see what they do. you can get some interesting results. I usually let at least some of my lettuce go to seed as well. I end up with lettuce popping up all over the garden next season.
This is the view down one of the garden rows. The pink and white flowers are Dianthus I planted last year. In the fall I'll plant them in the flower bed.
And this is some of the catnip I just harvested really quickly the other day. The stuff grows like mad! There's a lot more that I can get if I take a little time. I dry it on screens in the garage, then use it to stuff catnip toys for my own cats and my friends cats. Of course I always have to bring in some of the fresh stuff for Ozzy and Cedric- then I've got a couple of loopy cats for the next several hours.
This is a shot of my zucchini row. I have dill scattered all over the garden as well. It reseeds quite freely, which is fine with me. Not only is it a useful herb, but beneficial insects love the flowers.
And speaking of beneficial insects, if you want to make your honeybees happy, Borage is the plant for you. This pretty flower has attracted more honeybees than anything else in any of my gardens. Plus it's native to NE Ohio, so it does really well here. this is the first year I planted it, but it's supposed to be a self sowing plant, so I should have Borage for years to come.
This is a shot down my eggplant row. An absolute jungle!
And this is an eggplant flower- isn't it gorgeous! You could grow these for the flowers alone. I should be able to harvest eggplants by the end of the month. I used no chemicals or pesticides on any of this, and to be honest, I haven't had the chance to spend a whole lot of time in the garden this year (Gramma's kept me pretty busy). It's amazing what nature is able to do pretty much on it's own. I did have to spread some vole repellent yesterday. They're cute, but boy are they dumb! I was picking some lettuce and saw a vole, and actually pulled a leaf out of his mouth! I yelled at him to scat and he just looked at me. I could have picked the silly critter up, had I wanted to. Not that I ever would. Handling wild animals of any sort is not a good idea. I just got my vole repellent and spread it throughout the garden. It won't harm them, it'll just make them look elsewhere for dinner. So that's the latest happenings in my garden. Thanks for stopping by!
-Michelle of CreativeCritters

How does my garden grow?

So far, pretty darn good. I started all my vegetables indoors under fluorescent lights early this spring. I got tomato, sweet bell pepper, zucchini, summer squash, yellow beans, cucumber, winter squash, leaf lettuce, and eggplant seeds from Johnny's Select Seeds, and used seed starting mix from them as well. I discovered that the cardboard egg cartons make good seed starting pots, and transplant quite well into a larger pot or the garden. Here's a picture of my "babies" during their hardening off period (slowly increasing the plant's time outdoors to acclimate it to the weather).
I also used paper bathroom cups for some of the seeds, then moved up to plastic yogurt containers as the plants grew. If their roots get too cramped it can stunt their growth.
I'm a totally organic gardener, so I don't use any chemical fertilizers or pesticides. I make my own compost from kitchen and yard waste, as well as newspapers (worms LOVE newspapers). I will apply an organic vegetable fertilizer 2 or 3 times a season, as well as organic slug control. I've had slugs wipe out an entire bed of lettuce in no time. Now I use Escar Go and Sluggo Supreme. They've improved their formulas to include slugs, snails, pill, bugs, and several other pests that would eat up your harvest. The nice thing is that it's completely safe and won't hurt anything but the intended insects.
My veggies have grown by leaps and bounds in the last few weeks. It's finally warmed up a bit and we've gotten rain when we needed it. Here's a picture of my summer squash and my zucchini plants. I've got a few that are about an inch or so long now. And a close up of one of my baby zucchinis.


And then there's my tomato plants. So far, they're looking really good. When I transplanted them into the garden I stripped off the lowest set of leaves, then buried the stem up to the next set of leaves. This way they develop a really strong root system all along the buried stem. I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but these plants have really thick stems as well. I planted them inside Wall 'O Waters to keep them warmer and more protected. You fill the plastic sleeves with water, then the sun heats the water during the day and releases the heat to the plants when it cools off. It's a very effective system.

My yellow bush beans are doing well too. I had my couple of beans yesterday, and they were very good. I plant "patches" of beans in different spots around the garden in order to confuse bean beetles. They can really devastate a crop of beans. This way, even if the bugs find one "patch" of beans, there are still several undiscovered (and unmolested) "patches" left for me. I've learned that "bug confusion" really does work. I do a lot of interplanting of vegetables, as well as adding flowers amongst the veggies. I usually have marigolds throughout the garden, as well as a few other varieties of flowers. Here's a picture of my beans. I also have catnip growing in front of them. (The cats really love me!)

Then I have my eggplants. This year I decided to try mini eggplants. Of course a day or 2 after I took these pictures the eggplant's beautiful purple flowers opened up. I'll have to get pictures of those after it stops raining. The flowers are so pretty you could grow them for decoration alone. The whole plant is really very attractive and has soft, velvety leaves. You have to watch out for the thorns around the flower though. I learned that the hard way when I first planted eggplants. I can't wait to see what the veggies look like, not mention how they'll taste.

Now I'm hearing thunder, so it's time to shut the computer off. I'll be sure to take more pictures and keep you up to date on the garden's progress. Hopefully I'll have a nice big harvest. I've been eating my lettuce for months now and it's still doing great. Happy gardening to all!
-Michelle

Composting

I've been composting for about 10 years now and it's become second nature to me. The other day my neighbor finally purchased the Compost Tumbler she'd been talking about for more than a year. I'm proud to say that I'm the one who inspired her to start composting after she saw my Compost Tumbler. Anyway, she was asking me questions about getting started with composting and I realized I've accumulated a good bit of knowledge over the years. Composting is a beneficial practice for many reasons: it keeps tons of organic material out of landfills, it's a great environmental practice, and a cheap way to add nutrients back into soil. Applying compost to your gardens or flowerbeds improves soil's texture, structure, aeration ability, and water holding capacity. When using compost there's less need for other fertilizers and plants grow stronger and healthier. Worms love compost as well, and worms are very good for the soil.

I live in the suburbs and open piles aren't allowed, so I had to purchase a compost bin. There are now many varieties available. Most garden supply sites carry at least one or two types of compost bins or tumblers. Otherwise, if you're in a more rural area, piles can be contained in chicken wire, bricks, or wood pallets. Or you can just create an open pile. You have to have a large enough pile for effective composting. The best size is from 3'x3'x3' to 5'x5'x5'. You want a purchased bin to contain the same amount of compost. As far as placement of your pile or bin, you want a level, well drained area that is accessible from all sides. A sunny location is also helpful, as the heat from the sun will speed decomposition. If you live in the suburbs it's best to find a spot away from other neighbors. I have mine int he very back corner of the yard. It's a little wet in spring, but since I'm using a bin, the compost isn't affected (just my boots!).

To start a compost pile place 4"- 6" of chopped brush, wood chips, or twigs on the ground. This allows for good air circulation. You can skip this part if you're using a bin or tumbler. Alternate 2"- 4" layer of green organic material containing nitrogen and 4"- 6" of brown organic material containing carbon. Green materials would include things like vegetables, fruits, flowers, plant clippings, grass clippings, and coffee grounds. Brown material would include things like dead leaves, straw, sawdust, wood chips, shredded newspaper, cornstalks, cotton rags, nut shells, and pine needles. Maintain a ratio of 1 part green and 2- 3 parts brown. Garden soil, manure, or bone meal can be added between layers to introduce microorganisms (the little guys who do all the hard work of breaking the pile down). Finally, water the pile so it's moist, but not wet. You'll want to turn the pile at least once a week in order to introduce oxygen. With a tumbler you can turn it every few days. I actually do a combination of fluffing and turning the compost with a pitchfork, as well as turning the entire tumbler. It takes about 6 months or so, depending on conditions to produce finished compost. When optimal conditions are kept the center of the pile may reach between 90*F and 140*F. Use a soil thermometer to measure the temperature. I added a bunch of fresh grass clipping to my tumbler yesterday and the pile heated up to 155*F today! I think it's sort of cool to watch the steam coming off a hot pile- I know the process is working.
These are things that are safe to put in compost: leaves, grass clippings, plants, nut shells, straw and hay, fruits, vegetables, grains, egg shells, coffee grounds or tea leaves, sawdust and wood chips, dryer lint, shredded paper and newspaper, dead flowers, and certain manures.

These are things you DON'T want to put in compost: meats, fish, dairy products, oil or fatty foods, bones, cat and dog droppings, cat litter, diseased or insect ridden plants, invasive or poisonous weeds, ashes from coal or charcoal, branches or limbs, and yard trimmings treated with chemical pesticides.

Finished compost can be used as a mulch or a top dressing in your garden. In the fall I'll usually dig a big batch of compost into the vegetable garden, even if it's not completely finished. By spring the soil will be easier to work with and very "alive" with microorganisms, worms, and other "good guy" bugs.

Composting is a wonderful practice for so many reasons. It reduces your ecological footprint by reducing the garbage entering a landfill. I barely throw out any garbage- only things that can't be reused or composted. Of course I recycle all my metal, glass, and plastic.
Composting is an inexpensive way to amend the soil and reduce the need for fertilizers. I only use a small amount of organic fertilizer in my vegetable garden, and none for my flowers. Composting conserves natural resources such as water, organic matter, and nutrients. It's an environmentally friendly way to improve the health of the soil and the plants growing in it. And it's easy. If you don't feel like turning a pile, just leave it sit. It will take more than a year to fully decompose, but nature will take it's course.