The garden's hardest workers

I know I talked about this last year, but I LOVE bees and what they do for us. Because they are so busy, they are very hard to get a picture of. I stood out by this apple tree for probably 10 minutes and got maybe one bee in every 10 shots. These guys move around quickly! Not easy to catch with a digital camera, but this one will do:


These little guys have had a tough few days with fairly chilly temperatures and a stiff wind, but they persisted and were diligently working to make little baby apples for us to enjoy in the fall. They were also working over the blueberry bushes quite well, too, but pictures of that were impossible to catch. Thank you bees!


As you can see, the peas have sprouted in the garden. Also up are the red potatoes (the yukon golds are still sleeping, apparently), radishes, lettuce and the green beans are just poking their little round heads to see if they want to come up yet. I am having trouble with something eating my tender green transplants of bok choy, basil and cilantro, but don't see any footprints of our resident deer in the garden (plus it's netted) so I'm thinking it's slugs, so I put out some pet-safe Sluggo to see if that would help. The good news is that I planted so early, that I still have plenty of time to replant things that don't make it. The herb garden up next to the house is complete now with a couple kinds of thyme, rosemary, oregano, catnip, and peppermint. I also had enough room to plant two small tomato plants up against the warmth of the house and a couple of artichoke plants just to see if they'd work here. I'll get a picture of that for next time.

A Gardener's Dilemma

Well, everything I had here that needed to be planted, either starts or seeds, is now in the ground. Here's the dilemma: I still have space!! What to do? What to do? I'm actually having quite a bit of fun thinking of what I've not grown before that might be fun to try. The space in the veggie garden is about 6' x 8' (the rectangle on the right in the picture above), so plenty of room to try a few things. There is even some room in the side flower garden and the herb garden as well.


I mostly took and included this picture so I would have a 'before' picture to refer to when things got to looking nice. It looks pretty bleak here now, frankly! The little white fence is one we got to keep the chickens out of the side flower garden, but, needless to say, it didn't work, so now it's the trellis for my peas, which actually I can see poking up above the ground today. Nice.


Here's the side garden with my new little annuals planted. You can see there is room for more. As I was planting, I noticed that, except for 6 little alyssum, there is not enough white. It is mostly pinks and purples, so I think I'll have to get some more white and probably something yellow as well. Oh darn, more things to get for the garden!


Here is the first of what I am sure will be many chicken pictures this year. I just love these dumb peckers, and they've been quite productive lately as well, with 8 or 9 eggs a day. I want to point out the little hen on the left. That's Sylvia, the one we adopted last year from the Braly's. In case they check this blog once in a while, I wanted them to know that their sweet girl is doing fine, doesn't crow or be mean to anyone else (why she needed a new home) and lays a little egg every other day or so. She has been a fun addition to our goofy, mixed flock.


This is Vasco. That is short for Vasco De Gama. She has that name because she is always curious and exploring. I'll go out to the barn and find her WAY up in the rafters just checking out every nook and cranny. Just the other day she got into our shop somehow and I found her on top of our upright freezer. She gets along well with the other chickens, but she is just as happy on her own. Today, I was sitting on the bench on our new porch, sorting through my seed packets, and she had to make sure I was doing it right. I know it sounds dorky, but I think chickens make pretty entertaining pets.


Lastly, it's embarrassing to have THIS out in our pasture, but everyone who drives by gets to see her, so I thought you should enjoy the sight as well. Daisy will be four this July (where does time go) and she is still just as sweet and willing as she's ever been. I had a harness on her several times last fall, and hope to continue with her training and maybe have her in the cart this summer some time. Of course I'll get pictures of that too!

Thanks for sticking with me during the break I took from writing this blog over the winter. I'll do my best to keep it as interesting as possible, but sometimes that's hard because, frankly, we're not that interesting! I am always open to requests as well, so feel free to write if you want to see anything. :)

Just a couple of things...

I just wanted to try and catch a picture of all the blooms on one of our apple trees. It's the same tree I have a close-up picture of above. It is so pretty and luckily the bees have been visiting, so hopefully we'll get a good crop. You can see I gave the minis a few minutes of grass. Yakki, of course, doesn't need it, but Maddie is doing really well after a hard winter and was able to enjoy some grass as well. We actually have Maddie on some human diabetes medicine (Metformin...and it's $4 a month!) and that seems to have leveled out her blood sugar enough so her feet aren't sore. Yeah!


I still have about 1/2 of the vegetable garden to plant (probably today) but I don't want to neglect the flower gardens either. Our neighbor has a big compost pile and he shares the dirt freely, so here's our side garden after putting in about two yards more dirt. I have no idea where all the old dirt went, as it was full last year, too! I'm going to stick some annuals in there today. I have to do it before I let the dumb peckers out, or I will have all kinds of 'help' before I can get the little protective fence back up.


I wanted to show you the amazing green color of this spirea in the side garden. It's too bad that the camera can never capture anything the same as your eye sees it, but I think you can get the idea here. This is one of those plants that you have just for it's color and not necessarily the blooms, although this one will have some clusters of small pink flowers later in the season.

So I'm off to the feed store later today to get some chicken scratch, oyster shell and see what else they have in the garden department that I can get in trouble with. Good thing I'm not going to the Stanwood feed store, because they have baby chicks there!!

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!!