I'm Ba-ack!

Well, after a long break, I'm back to torturing you with the mundane goings-on at our little farm here in Washington. Spring stirs great feelings of productivity in me, and not much inspires a gardener like me more than the following picture:


I am just itching to get my hands in there and tomorrow will be the day! One thing we can grow for sure is potatoes, so I've got reds that we wintered over from last year, and I was able to find some yukon gold starts that were so ellusive last year. We also had good success with bulb onions and I bought two kinds of starts of those today at the feed store, plus some new rosemary and oregano to replace those herbs that didn't winter over. I also bought two artichoke starts. What the heck, why not? In the house, more than a month ago, I started swiss chard, broccoli, bok choi and parsley. Directly into the garden I'll sow peas, lettuce, corn, beans, beets, carrots and anything else interesting I find in my seed collection left over from last year. Whoo hoo!


If you are a long time reader of this blog, you might remember me talking about how I was having trouble getting our rhubarb to thrive, mostly because the first year Frank kept mowing it, and the second year the chickens were merciless. But I think I finally outsmarted them all. It's not pretty, but it works, and a side benefit is that I'm getting nice long stems on these leaves, which is the part you use. I don't think, however, I'm going to harvest any this year, as I want it to finally be healthy and really get strong.


Last year a student of Frank's gave him a bunch of strawberry plants that they thinned out of their garden. I got them late and didn't have a place to put them, so I just put them in a bunch of planters and wasn't really able to deal with them until this spring, when I made this bed. I had previously taken a blue, food-grade barrel and cut it in half, drilling some drain holes in the now bottom, putting a 2x12 on each open end and used them as hay feeders in my winter pasture. Frankly, they didn't work really well for that, so I ended up buying a free-standing hay rack and now had these things laying around. You can see that I got a couple of more boards and now they're my strawberry bed! The plants are just coming up now, so they're hard to see, but I think this will work well. I placed it on the south-facing wall of my barn where it's nice and warm. You'll also see that I had to put up some netting to protect it from the usual suspects of pillaging and destruction here on the farm (the peckers!!).


Our blueberry bushes are a few years old now and they seem to be taking off pretty well this year. I was concerned about them, as we had a very hot and dry summer last year and they suffered, as they need our more typical cool and showery weather. Maybe this year we'll even get enough to put some in the freezer for pancakes over the winter!


This is not a very complimentary picture of Sandy, but she is still going strong at the age of 14 1/2. She still needs her morning walks and then she sleeps most of the day, either on our bed or outside on the porch or in the grass. It's a good life for this old farm dog. I mainly was taking a picture of another one of my favorite things here on the farm: our apple trees. The blooms are so lovely and impossible to capture the totality of them on the tree. While I was standing in the middle of the tree trying to get some pictures, I could here the comforting buzz of the bees doing their job so that we will have lots of lovely apples in the late summer for us to share with the horses and the chickens. I made and canned applesauce for the first time ever last year and am embarrassed to admit that it took me all these years to do that. It is so much better than anything you can buy in the store and practically free when you have so many of your own apples. I only made 8 or 10 pints last year...this year it'll be quarts, and hopefully 20 of them.

Well, I'm glad to be back. I hope I don't bore you, but I guess this is our life and I'm glad to share it, as simple as it may be. Happy Spring!!