Sunday, January 31, 2016

Garlic! The First Glimpse of Our 2016 Garden

Chief Farmhand Chris planted 50 cloves of garlic on December 28, 2015


By January 8, 2016, the garlic had sprouted!


January 14 shows the garlic taller and fuller. We've been trimming the garlic scapes (the green stem) to use in cooking. They're like a scallion only more garlicky than onion flavored, yet a very mild, fresh garlic flavor to use in salad dressings, sprinkle on salads, toss into a casserole or soup, roast with other herbs on pork or chicken. Plus by trimming the stem, it allows the garlic plant to focus on the bulb production rather than the stem.

Hoping for a good crop of 50 heads of garlic later this year! Garlic harvest generally is late August to November. I cure the bulbs so they store nicely for use for the whole next year!

Nothin' tastes finer than somethin' you grew yourself! 

Spring is in 48 days! What are you doing in preparation? How do you celebrate Spring? It's in the 70's today outside, so that's how I'm enjoying the anticipation of my favorite season!

Thursday, January 21, 2016

59 Days Until Spring

The winter cover crop is lush and green in the garden. The last food crop, beets, has all been picked, pickled and put up. The garlic is in the ground and we’re already eating scapes (the little green scallion-like stem). My dried herb supply is dwindling. I’m hoarding jars of homegrown pickles like they have special medicinal properties in them! The seed catalogs have been arriving – it’s way better than the toy catalogs when I was kid! Chief Farmhand Chris tilled and built my new raised bed herb garden. I squeezed three quarts of fresh Florida grapefruit juice. A 50-pound burlap sack of tators is sitting in a chair at my kitchen table. The finishing touches are being made on the garden plans. Tomorrow we’ll cut up the seed potatoes. Sunday and Monday we’ll plant the Pontiac Reds. Next week we’ll send off our soil samples for analysis.  I need to design the layout for my herb garden and order some “special” herb seeds.  My nose is cold and the sun is too far away! Spring is in 59 days. 

“Anyone who thinks gardening begins in the spring and ends in the fall is missing the best part of the whole year; for gardening begins in January with the dream.” -Josephine Nuese

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Top Blog Posts from 2015!


2015 was a great year for our family and our first full year here on our farm in Georgia. So many new things we’ve seen, done, experienced, tasted, learned. And much more to come in the years ahead. Thank y’all for being a part of it. I hope to spend a little more time in 2016 writing and posting articles for this blog. What do you want to see? More food recipes? DIY bath and body products? More photos? Personal articles? It’s tough for me to decide what to share, it’s my regular ol’ ordinary life – what in the world is of interest to the readers? I’d love to hear from you. Please share your comments on this article about what you’d like to see more of on the blog in ’16. Comment on the other articles as well so I know what’s interesting to you.

Since it’s inception in late 2013, this little blog has had more than 3,100 visitors! At least 800 just in 2015 alone. That’s crazy amazing and I thank y’all so much for stopping by! I hope you find something of interest on here. The majority of our website visitors are in the USA, however, we’ve had a great many guests from Russia, Malaysia, France, and Germany and a few from other places around the globe as well.

So without further adieu, below are your top five blog posts of 2015:


#5…Herb Beginnings posted April 6, 2015 – this was just a simple quick post showing a few pics of my herb seedlings. It makes me a little hungry and a lot ready for planting seeds! Though I’m not sure why it was so popular to be honest. It beat out Muscadine Jelly by one visitor! J Could be those awesome, recycled items I used for planters? Who knows.



#4…Summer at Ramsey Farms posted August 28
this article covered our busy summer season here at the farm updating you, our readers, on the late summer plantings, the muscadines jelly processing, the solar clothes dryer, a photo of some pretty roma tomatoes and a profound quote from yours truly about life and your perception of your own skill.



#3…My Favorite Biscuits posted March 11
this didn’t even contain the recipe! But I guess including the words “biscuits” and “Grammaw” in the post title was the trick to this post’s popularity. The third most visited post of 2015 shows some pics of delicious, homemade, mouth-watering biscuits and gives a prelude to our fave biscuit recipe. There is a link to that biscuit recipe that I added later. More people read this “teaser” than the actual recipe so go check out this #3 post here and be sure to follow the link at the end for the actual biscuit recipe! 

#2…The Top Posts of 2014 published on February 3, 2015 – Tons of people during the course of the year have read this summary of my 2014 blog posts! Go check out the links to those articles. I think 2014 was a good year for my blog, a lot of posts, pictures and more heart-felt personal writing. We had high-speed cable internet that worked 99.99% of the time and no data limits, I had more internet time for blogging in 2014 when we lived in the city! J I do hope to post more in 2016 and look forward to hearing your – the readers’ – feedback as to what you want to see more of on this site. There is even a link to the 2013 top articles! I love a good review!
And the top-read, most visited article on the Simple Life blog spot for 2015 was….

#1…Teamwork posted August 21 – I loved writing this article. It’s one of the few “in-depth / personal” works published on the blog in 2015. Teamwork is a top quality to achieve goals and dreams. Even loners have teams, so remember that next time you accomplish anything that there was probably someone else on your team. Are you a team player or do you hinder the attainment of objectives? This was one of my favorite writings that even summarizes some of our teamwork of buying a farm and moving to another state. This post reminds me that regardless of how we feel, we’re really never in it alone. This article has links to similar articles,  more of my favorites on the blog.

Since the blog has been around more than two full years now, I decided to also show you the top 3 blog posts of all time, just for fun! Be sure you check ‘em out if you didn’t when it was new or just to read them again. 

 #3…This Week at Ramsey Farms March 16, 2014 – I miss writing these weekly posts that outlined our days of digging through worms, cleaning up messes, making salsa, seed exchanges, homemade lotion, ranch dressing, ketchup, baking, cooking, eating, tilling, harvesting, and celebrating our daughter’s birthday and life!

#2…is a tie between two articles, Last Week at Ramsey Farms from May 2014 and Teamwork from August 2015. The Last Week article from 2014 was truly one of my favorite articles to write (and revisit to read from time to time). It was a stressful time in our lives as our NC home was on the market without any real interest and we had found the farm we wanted to purchase down in Georgia. We were stuck in a stressful time of waiting and I needed to help myself take a deep breath, slow it down, watch the sun set and intentionally set boundaries and time for reflection & rejuvenation. 

And our top visited, most read article of all time….

The Cold Frame! This was a continually updated, time-lapse photo album of the building, installation, planting, growing and eventual harvesting of our cold frame at the NC house. Photos show the progress of this planting project from January until July 2014. Then, we moved! There were blog updates every week and it is an awesome project. We loved our cold frame but have no plans to build one here in South Georgia, our growing season is longer than in the Piedmont of North Carolina.

Thanks for reading! Keep on reading and let us know what to post!

Make the most of the time you are given...laugh as much as you breathe and remember that only YOU have the power to make the changes you want in your life. 
~Ramsey


Check out the top posts of 2014 and 2013 here.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

New Page to Find All the DIY Bath & Body Recipes


Now you can get all the DIY recipes for my bath and body products in one place! CLICK HERE