What's Happening at Ramsey Farms

I love it when a brand new tiny seedling unfolds and pops forth from the soil! THAT is exciting! This is my baby broccoli seedling that popped up just four days after seeding it. The next picture is just three or four days later! We’re using our own potting soil mix of sandy soil, compost, manure, and mushroom compost to start some seeds indoors this year to get a head start on the garden.

Spring is in just 25 days and there is a lot of new growth to celebrate!

Beefsteak Tomato Seedlings Unfolding from the Soil

The ginger continues to grow and appears to be quite healthy. The photos below show it over a ten-day period. I hope to transplant this ginger to the new herb garden next to the Satchi tea plant.

The garlic and potatoes were planted in late December and late January respectively. (Click the links below to see my earlier posts on these!)

• http://ramseyfarms.blogspot.com/2016/01/59-days-until-spring.html
• http://ramseyfarms.blogspot.com/2016/01/garlic-first-glimpse-of-our-2016-garden.html
• http://ramseyfarms.blogspot.com/2016/02/whats-happening-at-ramsey-farms-37-days.html

The English garden peas have been planted along with their trellis system. Farmer Chris supplemented the field garden with dolomitic limestone in addition to the compost and manure to decrease the acidity of the soil in the upper field and boost magnesium.

We made a super bowl feast (even though we didn’t watch the big game)! Homemade crescent rolls made perfect pigs-n-a-blanket, artichoke cheese dip, and fried chicken topped that weekend’s menu of junk food!

Spring symbolizes birth, life, renewal and hope. All things have been scrubbed clean by the cold bareness of winter and now are reborn and fresh and happy. Forget about new year's resolutions! What are your Spring promises to yourself? How do you give yourself a Spring cleaning or a reboot? As we enter this time of renewal, consider your life. Are you living the life you dream of or stuck in somebody else's dream? 

Cheers,
Ramsey

Cacti & Aloe (30 Days & Counting!)

There are only 30 more shopping days until Spring!

During the first week – likely the first day – of Spring, I plan to do a little cactus and aloe repotting and surgeries! There will be a bunch of cacti and aloe babies available come Spring! My cactuses are older cuttings from cacti my mom grew that were cuttings from her mother’s cactuses and she even recalls this same type of cactus in pots at her grandmother’s house (my GREAT grandmother – who would have been 126 years old on February 9!) It thrills me that there is that kind of legacy connected to these plants, isn’t that amazing?! 

My three cacti are all approximately 3 to 4 feet tall and all need some of their extra arms removed for stability – those are the babies! Those cure for 7 days then you plant the arms and voila! Baby cacti. It is a cactus miracle. In addition, I want to get the primary cactuses into larger more permanent pots. In NC and GA these favored plants go outside in the spring and summer and are moved indoors before the first frost. 

Without going to count them all, I think I have 20 pots of aloe vera. (Is that excessive?) I love them. (Is it wrong to love a plant?) They, like the cactuses to which they are related, are like members of my family! Most of my aloes are descendants of my mom’s original aloe collection plus I inherited most of her aloe plants (and super cool pots) when she moved. When we moved from NC to GA, I was saddened to realize we left a slew of plants and pots on the back porch. Some of which I was able to adopt out by cajoling my friends go by the old house and “steal” the forgotten plants from the porch.

All the aloes need attention this spring. The big three plants that I lovingly refer to as the mama,  grandmamma, and big mama plants need to have the older longer stem severed and their younger inner portion of the plant repotted. Most of the aloe pots have several pup plants that grew from the root buds under the soil. These can be gently removed and potted by themselves for a brand new little aloe plant! 

We use aloe straight from the leaf to heal burns, scrapes, minor boo boos. Fillet open a leaf and lay the gel side onto your face under your eyes and you can almost instantly see and feel it tighten up the bags and other skin on your face. It gives you a younger fresher glow! I also peel the leaf (including the yellow layer inside the skin of the leaf – it has a stinky bitter odor and taste and is reported to have laxative qualities. I stay away from that.) Anyway pare the green leaf off the clear gel and run it through the blender to liquefy the aloe gel. We use it in our homemade body wash and soaps for added natural moisturizing and skin healing properties. Read here for more information on aloe vera.

Check out other articles on this blog on aloe:

• DIY Bath & Body Products
• Aloe Surgeries 2014

Are you living your best life? This is YOUR life and the only person in charge of it is YOU. The only person who can make changes to your life is YOU. Take charge of your life today!

Cheers,
Ramsey

What's Happening at Ramsey Farms?! (37 Days & Counting)

You know that I am absolutely wildly in love with Spring. (The season, not a person!) Spring is only 37 days away and there is a lot to do in preparation!

The pieces I cut from my grocery store ginger that I purchased before Thanksgiving sprouted and has grown a beautiful 12” tall plant. I cannot wait to transplant this perennial into my new herb garden and harvest fresh ginger root when I need it! You harvest pieces of the rhizome when you need it, and leave the rest of the plant to continue growing! It will be a nonstop supply of fresh ginger! YUM! I use it in cooking and hot teas. Ginger is one of my all time favorite aromatic herbs.

Below is an image of our design for the herb garden I did using our garden planning software. At the very end of January, I started parsley, chamomile, lavender and lemon balm seeds indoors. These will all (hopefully) grow big, strong and beautiful and get transplanted into the herb garden later this spring and growing season. 

We also started the beefsteak and roma tomatoes, several varieties of mild and hot peppers and broccoli in our homemade potting soil mixture in our greenhouse. Well the greenhouse is a rack next to the kitchen windows, but you know – same thing. Our six-year-old son also decided to plant a peach pit he had washed, dried and saved several months ago. (You know what they say about the peach not falling far from the tree? This kid so wants to be a farmer when he grows up!)

Outside in the garden, Farmer Chris is prepping and working hard. He added eight new rows to the front garden. He planted the garlic at the end of December then the early potatoes went to ground on the last day of January.

We also got our soil analysis results this week! (Woooo! Such exciting times are these!!!! Did I mention that Spring is 37 days away?!? YES I AM YELLING!) I love the science behind farming. I’ve been doing calculations and organic fertilizer research. The field garden soil show a moderate acidity which it did not in 2015. Overall, phosphorus, Calcium, Magnesium and pH levels all dropped while potassium and zinc increased. 

The soil needs amending to produce a healthy yield. Farmer Chris has been enriching the soil all along with compost, mulched leaves, ground egg shells, fish emulsion and our “green manure” cover crop, crimson clover is still growing. We’ve also incorporated organic fertilizer to this old weathered soil. This year we still need to bolster the potassium and magnesium. These nutrients along with nitrogen leach very quickly from sandy soil and need more frequent replacement. We will also incorporate dolomitic limestone into the field garden to neutralize the acidity and boost magnesium. We will use Epsom salts in the front garden for a little spritz of magnesium needed there.

Did I mention I am so ready for spring?!?! What’s your favorite part of spring? How do you celebrate this glorious new season? What are you going to grow this year? Leave your comments.

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!

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

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.

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