They sure weren’t kidding when they said mint sort of takes over an area. Right now we have mint growing everywhere. Whoever lived here must have loved to garden, the dirt is so rich, it reminds me of North Dakota dirt. I remember as a little girl digging up the best worms in North Dakota dirt. Anyway, at the old property there’s some good healthy soil.

We are prepping the areas where we will be putting our gardens. This year we have decided to plant a garden at the old property as well, even though we are still working on it. There is still no kitchen or bathrooms. Everything has been stripped and prepared for new walls and bigger bathrooms and an updated kitchen. We are taking some time off from that to prepare gardens. I don’t know about you but have you seen how expensive food has gotten? If it even is food that is. Melons are almost $9…that’s crazy. Tomatoes are crazy expensive too. I have pasta sauce to can. I fear things are going to get a little harder coming into next year it’s best to start preparing now. Even if you live in a city, find some pots and plant a little garden on your porch or balcony.

It always taste better when you grow your own veggies, so hopefully we will have a garden this year. The mulberry trees are starting to grow some fruit. Maybe we will have enough for some jam.

And our sugar gum tree is producing the little green balls that I will try to make some flu medicine with this year. Someone online told me that they don’t produce every year, that they will skip a year. I have to look into that some more. I am still learning about the plants here.

I am harvesting all the wild plants we have coming up naturally right now, and we are allowing our wild onions to go to seed so we can collect seeds this year. We don’t spray our gardens and never have. The chickens are great for natural pest control.

I started preparing salves to make for medicine. And I have been foraging, and drying natural supplies to make baskets. The baskets are just for fun as I am still experimenting with different techniques in weaving. I have worked with morning glory vines. Now I’m using all kinds of natural plants to dry and use to weave with. There is so much here for weaving baskets. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

I’m also trying to grow a little herb garden too, so we will see how that turns out as well. At the Dollar tree they had some hanging pots. I believe they were $1.25 each but you still need to pay attention to the pricing at those dollar stores now, they are going up daily with most items averaging out at $3-$5 now. It hasn’t doubled, things have more like tripled.

We will be planting grapes around all the fence post. That’s going to be one of the biggest projects yet.

I didn’t have time to work on any garden DIY’s. I have an old door that I want to stencil and paint, add some shelves to use in the outside work shed as a garden storage area. That’s my next garden DIY, and an old firewood storage box that I want to seal and maybe stencil on, fix the lid, just touch it up a bit.

That’s about it in garden news this month. We have a lot of mint and a lot of Plantain that I will be drying and harvesting later this week. Hopefully we will have at least some sort of lay out of the garden design. These are all before photos. Happy gardening adventures everyone.