Monday, April 29, 2013

Vertical Gardening For THIS Beginner

So I've decided to do a vertical garden this year. Just for a hobby. I'm getting some laying hens too, but that's for another post. I've done tons of picture and idea searching for what kind I can afford and would enjoy doing. Well, first I took a look at doing raised beds or slanted vertical beds with the use of wooden pallets. I plan to paint them all a bunch of fun colors, the set them up individually, depending on how much space each plants needs. Right now as you can see it is just holding up baskets. The next idea I wanted to do was use the cotton pocket "shoe" holder , the kind you hang on the back of a door. What I have done with these so far is fill them with dirt and write in permanent marker which pocket has what plant seeds. Now I am currently waiting on more pallets and scrap wood to build a hanging stand for it. Finally, what else I am working on when it comes to a vertical garden is the awesome use of recyclable materials such as plastic bottles, milk jugs, cans and I plan to hang them all on a piece of plywood that I painted. Well, until next time. Have fun!

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Home

The grass can be greener on the other side. Peace can be found, but are you willing to make that choice and keep that promise? The promise of letting God take control of everything that happens all around you. Just rolling with the punches, accepting that things can happen or not happen as you planned. The beauty of just realizing that if something has to wait until another day because it is out of your hands, then its okay. It's set up to be taken care of as soon as possible. I've also learned that it mostly comes around at the last minute. Experiencing different peace-in-action scenarios, I've learned how to bring peace around me. Having Bipolar Disorder, I have recently learned to let things that bother me go if there is nothing I can do about it. I just pray to God to take care of it and He always comes through. Not always how I imagine it would, or think it should, but it always works out. And most of the time it works out better than I had initially planned. My husband and I thought we were going to buy our very first house. We paid off debt and waited for our credit to get better. Well, we never had rent the previous 5 years and with my health issues I couldn't work. Either way, we never owned a credit card, and didn't think we would need one in order to make our credit better. Well, we were wrong. About a month before I was planning on using our tax check towards a decent house payment, we tried getting a pre-approval for a mortgage. We failed by 3 points. Just under what we had planned. We had found the perfect house in the perfect location. Our dreams and plans were crushed. Okay Heather, just brush it off. Plan B:Rent and better your credit over the duration of a year. My husband and children were severely bummed we weren't getting into "our" own home. It was hard controlling my emotions to just keep looking forward and deal the hand that was dealt. I found a place off of craigslist, in my area and price range, size was good too. Well, the day before my husband and I were suppose to look inside the home with the owners who were wanting to rent the place, he drove by the home. No siding, it was by a trashy trailer and from the outside the place looked like a wreck. He was almost entirely decided it was not the place for us. I told him we were going to look inside and speak with them, then make a decision. I immediately fell in love with the woman. She reminded me of my late mother-in-law. Creative and excited about life and strong in her faith. When we walked inside, the place was still under construction, but it was all brand new in there. We walked through and immediately fell in love with the place. It took us awhile to get in there. A lot longer than both us and the landlords planned, but we tried to wait patiently. Unfortunately, every time we got bad news about it taking longer for us to move in, we got hit with other bad news. We needed to spend a lot of our move in money towards fixing our car. Let's just say, it was always something stressful going on and we were struggling with it. How I would deal with it, was stamp out an expletive and sigh, then try to figure out if there is another solution or if we just have to be patient. It is very difficult being patient with 9 people in a small house :) Finally, the day we have all been waiting for comes. A day I haven't seen coming in a very long time, finally was here. We moved a lot of the furniture, just placed the mattresses down and fell asleep once the house was functional enough to survive the next morning. After a week of unpacking and settling into our new home, we can finally breathe easier. Honestly, this home has better qualities in a home and land, I could see us living here for a long time :)