Hot Cha Cha, What Manly Taters

 Tortuga Thursday

In 2012, on the plains of Northern Arizona, two families joined forces and began the trials and tribulations of building a small family farm with nothing in the bank but love.

October sunset over the greenhouse

Mid October and the days are still hot on Tortuga Flats Farm. Nights are cooling off and in fact we've had two nights that hit the light freeze mark. But at least the sweet potatoes made it through. Last year, an unexpected freeze before the potatoes were ready for harvest left us with some less than pretty produce. Sweet potatoes are very sensitive

Good sized sweet potatoes

to cold weather. Happily, no freeze damage this year. They're now in their two week cure period which means spread out in the garage, kept warm and dry. Then they'll be wrapped individually in paper and packed in boxes for storage.

Garlic compost

We're waiting for the soil temperature to reach 50 degrees before we plant the garlic. This morning it was still at fifty eight. In a few days we'll begin breaking apart about 480 pounds of garlic for planting.

Over the years I've covered ways to live and have fun with slim funds. We're continuing our exploration.
Frank and I did some scouting in the Tonto Basin area for RV parks. What a beautiful part of Arizona. What we found were inexpensive parks with two lakes close by for Frank to fish. Roosevelt and Apache Lakes have bass which is Frank's favorite catch. Once there, I'll get down to serious business on finishing book three in my Love and Murder series. Right now we're helping Lance with end of season chores, but once the garlic is in the ground and some various end of year clean up is done, we'll try out the area for a few weeks. This may be a tight budget retirement solution (for those who actually retire!) I'll cover that once we get there.

Christie has been canning lots of salsa, chili sauce (really hot cha cha) and spaghetti sauce. She didn't can any straight tomatoes this year. Tomatoes were disappointingly sparse but no worry. We're still working on last years jarred tomatoes that should get us through until next season.

Sadi likes the RV too - especially the bed. For some reason it's her favorite place to play. She drags a stool over to climb up by herself. By the way, she's yet to call me Grandma. Christie is Mom or Mom Mom. Lance is Dada and Frank is Papa which for some reason she always whispers. We've heard her say grandma but not directly to me. But I get lots of hugs and kisses so I can't complain.