We started gardening earlier this year. Nancy and I both enjoy working the soil and love watching things grow. We also wanted to eat better food that are free from pesticides and worker exploitation. Saving money would also be great.

Here we have our seedling that we planted a couple of weeks ago. There are five trays poised, I hope, to capture the winter sun at Spock Laboratories.

I sketched out what the book, "How To Grow More Vegetables", (here is a link to the February 2012 edition) stated would be good winter vegetable and were one that we wanted to eat. Then I made this little map.
The graph paper was made from regular inkjet paper and a template from incompetech.com which has a bunch of cool stuff beside free graph paper templates. I made notes on our transplanting timelines, and what went where. I made little hash marks on the boxes every two inches to mark off where to place the seeds and numbered the boxes. The numbers correspond to the map.
I guess these guys will be ready to transplant at the end of January and be ready some time between April and June. Meanwhile, we still have a lot of our fall plants doing well in the ground, as well as the seedlings that we started about two months ago.
I am amazed at all this life around us!

_We have a lot of leaves in our yard from all of our great trees. These leaves make great compost. Here we have two out of the three compost chambers filled with leaves. The compost chamber in the background is filled with household green waste. But, we cannot put the walnut tree's leaves in the compost due to some crazy enzyme. So, we have all these leaves all over and I really don't want to throw them into the green waste bucket if I can help it; I'd prefer to be able to use them somehow.

_So, I thought maybe I can make leaf tamales as tinder for our fireplace. I asked the Google about this and it seems other people are doing it a little too. I started by just rolling leaves in newspaper. Then, I laid the newspaper on a large Tyvek bag and scrunched up the leaves before rolling them and the newspaper into a tamale. Have you ever done this? does it work for you? I'll let you know how it works!
-Jason

_We've just launched our website, ArdethGear.com, and I know that there isn't much here. We launched the site to allow the people that have asked us about our gear to have a place to find us and learn about what we are working on.

We actually have dozens of trip reports and blog posts, but we've been focusing of building gear and getting this little business up and running. We hope that in the next month or so we'll have that part of our sit up and running.

Please take a look around and let us know what you think of our little site.
thanx!
-Jason