So excited to see the Cilantro has finally sprouted! These poor plants have had a rough start as my fur friends like to jump up on the garden tables and knock them over. But this herb looks like it's going to make it! Hopefully when it get stronger and bigger we will be able to make some salsa!

Time to turn these tomatoes they are reaching for the artificial sun that we provide for them. So happy to see the growth, they are just about ready to go into their own little pots! Our goal is to plant a garden outdoors with just the plants we have started indoors! You can see that the little fur friends did get one of the seedling pods but we keep trying and after these get transplanted we will start a whole new crop!

Quick update on the doll, after breaking two more needles she is half way done with rooting. I would have liked to use a smaller needle but considering I have already broken so many I will just stick with what I have and continue to work on filling in the open spots later.

I picked Melaleuca for the month of February and so I wanted to share a quick little recipe for homemade hand sanitizer. I used half cup of Aloe Vera, one teaspoon of witch-hazel, twenty-five drops of Melaleuca and twenty-five drops of Lemon.

Melaleuca is known to have the following properties, antibacterial, antiseptic, antiviral, antimicrobial, expectorant, fungicide, insecticide, and stimulant. information from Shareoils.com  

Aloe Vera has been on my mind as I had mentioned in an earlier post we had a really large plant that was in need of getting cut back. Today I did the cutting back and transplanting in to other pots to share and then decided I should harvest some of the gel from the plant so nothing went to waste.  This proved to be very interesting. I started by just cutting the leaves, and scooping out the gel, I was a sticky mess and only had two drops in the bottle. I then used a vegetable peeler which worked much better but still proved to be tricky trying to get the gel into the bottle. I think buying aloe may just continue as I don't think I am very good at this harvesting yet. Any suggestions?

On a much happier note the indoor garden is comping along most splendid! Things are really starting to pop up. The little pea pods were very busy over the weekend and almost all of them are as tall as the cover.

I was also able to replant some of the little greens that my son Toby started and took out those that were not growing. That left me some valuable real-estate to put in  more tomatoes, cucumbers, and 2 different types of flowers. Very excited to see if these  take off as well.  I also started a brand new self-watering seed starter kit by Burpee. Nothing planted in that one as of yet due to trying to follow the directions and let the little pods soak in the water first. Hopefully they will be ready to go tomorrow and I will be able to fill them up as well.  

Today our Christmas Cactus received a brand new home. She started looking a little sad so I thought maybe she was trying to say "I need a bigger pot for my roots" and sure enough those poor little roots were wrapped very tightly all the way around, so now she will have room to grow! Its been a fun filled planting day! 

I am so excited, went to water the indoor garden and what to my wondering eyes should appear? That's right...SPROUTS! What a glorious sight on this very cold February afternoon! I have been doing some reading for upcoming blogs and was tossing up the idea of free range chickens for the garden the pros and cons. Maybe you could leave a comment on what you think about adding chickens to the backyard garden.

Just love having an Aloe plant, however this big guy really needs to be replanted and spaced out a bit, What a lovely gift a little Aloe plant would make for loved ones on Valentines Day, I better get started and also get some small planters for them. Dollar Tree here I come!

I wanted to give myself a treat today after having physical therapy and still trying to heal I decided to use my diffusser and add a couple drops of Frankincense. I usually would never use the King of oils in such a fashion but today I thought I needed a little bit of pampering!  In reality my whole family will actually benefit from this, because the whole room has the wonderful aroma of Frankincense!