Apr
2009
Planted peas, spinach and chives today
April 30th, 2009 at 07:44 pm by Shari Thomas in Weather, gardenUnder the watchful eyes of our long-eared owl family, I planted the very first of our crops today.
Earlier we built another set of garden boxes in our front lawn. That doubles the boxes to four 4×6 and two 2×5. Eventually, we’ll add four more 4×6 boxes and that will complete one half of our front yard.
I know, it’s hard to visualize, so I’ll get some pictures tomorrow. Gotta do it then, or wait until Monday, as there’s a storm headed our way. I expect that by tomorrow noon, we’ll be back into high wind advisories, and then thunderstorms and rain on Saturday into Sunday.
We have to be very careful about planting things here as our last frost doesn’t come until the middle of June… yep, we could have frost the night before we have summer!
We’ve got the garden plots prepped, and the first of the drip irrigation systems is laid out waiting to be drilled. I’ve been pretty insistent about waiting until our seeds arrive, and we’ve bought the necessary plants to actually drill the drip holes into the PVC.
Hopefully, we’ll have a quiet day next week so we can put the new cover on the greenhouse. This is our third cover in as many years. Sure glad we bought a greenhouse with a long guarantee on the covers.
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Apr
2009
Summer, winter, spring in just 3 days!
April 27th, 2009 at 07:22 pm by Shari Thomas in Around the Farm, Chickens, WeatherThat’s the way it’s been here for the past couple of weeks. We’ve seen highs in the low 80’s followed by snow/sleet and lows below freezing. We’ve even had over an inch of rain this past week.
Oh, and you can’t forget the winds. Generally the wind begins about noon, but lately it’s been blowing nearly 24/7 thanks to the way the storms are passing to the north of us.
We’ve had to nail plywood back onto the stable, and rebuild a corner on the sheep shelter, as well as come up with another tarp to cover the cow manger. Thankfully, we’ve removed the tarps from the alfalfa stacks as they were completely shredded.
On the summer day, we quickly built three new raised boxes, and then waited for another time with little to no wind to fill them with sand and compost. We’ll plant peas and various lettuces in those boxes.
We’ve also added extra compost to the corn patch, and laid out the new drip irrigation system for our big garden.
Our garlic is doing very well in two of the three locations, something we were told would be the case. The rhubarb is growing nicely, and even Cindy’s strawberries are showing life. We’ll leave the berries alone until mid June.
The very last thing we’ve done was to remove the bird netting from the top of the chicken coop. A late, heavy, wet snow took it down and really made a mess of it. We also raked all the old bones, corn cobs, and other garbage the chickens have scratched up in their pen. We have a few young hens who like to fly out of the pen, so every once in a while we’re surprised by a hen going on walkabout.
Hopefully, we’ll get the new addition to the coop roughed out this weekend. Remember, we took a barn down for the wood, and part of that will become the new coop addition.
Buy me a beer and I'll write more posts more often.
