Spent all of last week working on our empire… the online one!  Just needed to and it was so nice to finish up late Saturday night with a big redo.  (More about that later…)  Suffice it to say, today was a rest your eyes days and all I wanted to accomplish was some good hard work in my garden!

I had 10 more bags of garden soil mix to spread on the top of a few of the raised beds.  They are filled with good farm compost and leftover straw and such, but there’s something about having a nice couple inches of good garden soil on each that makes me say, complete.  Maybe it’s weird, but hey, it’s just what I like.  And so I’ve been picking up 10 bags at a time when the budget allows and topping off a few beds and then planting them.   It’s actually kind of nice.  I started all my colder weather seed crops first and they are starting to burst forward and now I’m working on a few of the less hardy varieties.  I’m hoping by the first of June, I’ll be done planting and will be just into tending.  Of course, I had HUGE plans of expansion this year but I think that if I can just get all 20 or so beds planted, it will be a delightful success for us.  And hey, I can keep planting more and more if the time and weather allows.  We had nice weather all the way into the heart of October… that means 60 day crops can be planted as late as August!  (Beans and radish and peas and such…)

I’ve been calling my garden, the Experimental Raised Bed Laboratory… It rather feels like it!  I got these old shutters at a garage sale for $5…  actually 6 of them…  and they just screamed out raised bed!  So, there you go.  Maggie screwed them together for me with a little bit of 2 x 2 in the corners for support.  Now I just have to line it with a bit of plastic so all the good stuff doesn’t just leach out the sides and fill this bad boy with something.  It’s going to be a bit of a reach for the middle, so I think I’m going to plant flowers in the middle and then veggies all around!

I dragged this old piece of cattle panel out of the big barn and used a couple of the cheap posts to anchor it firmly in the middle of this bed.  It’s going to be my pea trellis!  I’ve heard it’s perfect and will support quite a few plants.  Which is good, because I just love fresh sugar snap peas from the garden!  I hope to have a BUNCH this year… want to freeze them for dishes all year long.

Of course, my mint is doing just fine… it’s totally taken over the box that I planted it in.  I thought I would try this year to make my own mint extract.  I adore mint…

The fall onion and garlic plants are going nuts and even the spring bulbs of each we planted are really going to town.  I have chives in that first green half barrel and they survived nicely and are trying to get nice and prolific in there.  (Thanks Trini!!!)  I think I want to plant mostly herbs in my 6 half barrels, and perennial ones to boot.  That would be neat and easy to have coming up each year.

Today we planted carrots, radish, cucumbers.   And a bunch of flowers too!  Zinnias and daisy and a pack of sunflowers.  Those got planted here and there through the beds.  It’s from a bunch of cheap seeds that I got last year for 9 cents a pack…  so far the germination has been lackluster, but hey, still, something.  If I had to guess, about 50% or so.  Still, for 9 cents?  I just over seed the areas and hope for the best!   I have some nice, good quality seeds for a bunch of my seeds and they have really been doing a lot better.  I hate to say, but we could really use a little rain!  I know everything looks beautiful and green, but it hasn’t really rained for about a week or so.  Just a day or two of some spring showers would really bust my seeds open and get them growing nice.  I thought about watering today, but it’s supposed to be hot with some afternoon storms tomorrow, so I just held out.

Speaking of water… on Thursday, our water went out!   Oh no!   But we didn’t panic.  Called our handyman buddy Mark, who does plumbing and heating and cooling and he said he could be out on Saturday to take a look.  Thank goodness!  It turned out to be the pressure switch on the water air tank in the basement.  A half hour and a $15 dollar part and it was all fixed and flowing nicely.  Whew!  I don’t mind a day or so without water because of the wonderful artesian spring just a few miles down the road.  But vision of super expensive pump repairs made for an anxious night of sleep!   So happy to turn that tap on and see nice lovely well water spew out!  Yeah!!!

Well, that’s about the bulk of news around the homestead!  A little on the slow and quiet side.  Not that I mind, it’s nice to get a chance to recharge and get your focus back on track!!!