As any regular reader might guess, growing fruits and vegetables and herbs tend to be my forte. Now that we raise honeybees I do my best to add extra bits of color with hanging baskets. Most of these are filled with plants that attract pollinators so I have constant pollination for all of our plants. Unfortunately, we live in an area nowadays where many people spray for mosquitoes. This can
Have you ever wondered just how we grow things up here in Interior Alaska? Many think it’s always cold but believe it or not we DO get into the 80’s, 90’s and sometimes even 100’s in mid-summer. Our challenge actually is extending our season simply because our growing season does not start “officially” until June 1st and it ends on August 31st. If you have ever grown much, you’ll know
Yes, Murphy has as of late made himself, or itself at home at our property. Do you know Murphy’s law? It’s more or less based on the idea that a series of unfortunate events will always happen at the worst times. I’ve previously lived by another version of it. One that Military Wives and I called “Military Murphy’s Law”. That one was “what can go wrong, will go wrong…during a
Have you ever wondered just how rendering beeswax from hives is done? At Bells of the North Homestead, we’re pretty small scale so we don’t have fancy tools to render ours. Instead, like many of our other processes, we go with a bit more old school, traditional ways. As we work on projects around our property, we tend to use current technology along with historical ways of doing things. In
Ever since we lived in Maryland, in that small military house, with the small yard, that started out as a smelly, gooey mess we knew we wanted something. Something. But we just couldn’t quite figure out just what that SOMETHING was. We knew when we were getting closer because things just seemed to, amazingly, always work out. Always when we moved towards certain ideas and feelings. We knew we had
Many feel a bit daunted by the idea of pressure canning anything. They worry about safety from botulism, or that the pressure canner will blow up. Throughout my 30 minute tutorial, you’ll see that pressure canning doesn’t have to be scary. The rules are typically the same for pressure canning meat or pressure canning vegetables. The only difference is the end product as vegetables tend to turn out rather mushy,
When we first purchased our home in North Pole Alaska, there were only a couple of things that we found ourselves dissatisfied by. The kitchen was a bit on the small side, the master bath had a shower only, and the hall bathroom had a tub that our realtor called “an old person tub”. The bathtub was extremely shallow. It was useful for taking a bath only if your intent
We’ve now had a portion of our seeds started since early March and considering that many of these seeds were over 5-7 years old, we’ve had great results on our seed starting! Unfortunately, seeds lose their viability as they age. This means their ability to germinate will reduce. Just like in previous years, we went through our entire seed catalog of stored seeds (which includes over 245 different varieties of
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