Happy Harvest Blog
Seems like I've learned some things.
How to grow sunflowers and corn...Ugh, I've had little luck with either the last few years. And lettuce, yay! Uhoh, these heads are starting to protrude in the middle - going to seed. I'm good now for a salad a day for the rest of the season, I think. I really like this Merlot red lettuce.
Poppies and peanuts close at night
I've got some varmint taking out my beans. It's really annoying. I suspected a vole, but, would a vole cut down the beans and then drag them under the overhanging thyme and sage in the next bed? I've got something like a tiny beaver, felling beanstalks, and then hauling them to the adjacent garden bed to hide under herbs. These stalks are freshly wilted! I thought I already had scapes. These are the second round of late or postponed scapery.
Garden chicken
I have accidentally domesticated a chicken. Well, she's a very unusually wired, different chicken, to start with, and since I am a softie, she is now a pet chicken, and I carry her around between work sites. Apples my companion chicken and I have been making garden rounds. I'm hammering all the remaining warm weather seeds in now that I really believe the frost is over (June 10!). My hands are sore and I got the backs of my hands painfully sunburned. That's a new one. In the greenhouse, five rows of six are in.
Strawberry snack
I've got a chipmunk helping him/herself in the strawberry beds.Every so often I hear a surprised "Eeep!" when I'm working in the garden, but I rarely see the culprit.However, I see the meal interrupted on his table, which is the cutest part.
From toads to hens
I love toads. I've always been crazy about them. For some reason. I used to build elaborate toad mansions under the back porch when I was young, hoping to entice the toads that got trapped in the window wells to stay. Occasionally, they obliged.Grown up, I'm happy to learn that toads eat slugs and are therefore a gardener's best friend. This is good, because I'm already friends with them. I like their simple, clumsy toad ways. And the grumpy faces. I have to reprise some mansion-building in the garden to make it more comfortable there for them.
Woodpile snake
We have so many snakes! So many different colours and sizes; I see several every day.I think I may have seen a ribbon snake the other day in the garden.
Strawberry season
2015-06-29 15.27.12Strawberry season is starting to slow down - oh how we will miss the daily quart of luscious juicy sunshine in a berry.
First potato
I was digging with my hands hoping for enough young potatoes for a meal, and this big one came up! A little bit on the creative side, but a nice healthy potato.The potatoes, beans, strawberries, and cucumbers are all thriving this year on the unamended soil we dug in the spring.
Chickens Make Mulch
All I have to do is feed them twice in the same place, by scattering their breakfast grain in a grassy place. They are so vigorously committed to finding every last crumb that they tear up the grass, it dries, and I collect it with a rake. Clean, soft, dry garden-ready mulch.
Garden done.
Garden done. Just a little overtime, but got 20 beds dug for this year, just as we were aiming for. H.W.'s ready to hang up the sodbreaker for this year.
The garden is growing.
The garden is growing. In size, at least. Not so much in plant growth.
Garden beginnings
We have our labor-saving, painless technique down pat now, with this wicked sod-breaker from Lee Valley. Makes a picture perfect, sod and root-free bed of soil that you’d never guess was just broken from ground unworked for 15 years.
Instagram.
I may not make a blog post every day, but at least I Insta.
Bite size.
