Another long day filled with working outside, and attending to all the other details of life. D.'s job today was to sort out the two big boxes of irrigation equipment and figure out how the giant puzzle all fits together. He got a good start on it!
In the morning I planted zucchini, yellow squash, lemon squash, and Japanese pickling eggplant in the bed D. finished a few days ago. When that bed is done with squash and eggplant, we think we might turn it into 85 square feet of strawberries in the fall. We'll see!
Then I dug up an area of equal size next to it for our oat bed. The package I had was just enough for that. We could have built a raised bed for it, but we're running low on compost; probably only four more wheelbarrow loads are left. I used a hoe to loosen it all up. Underneath the surface of sticks and leaves, there were several inches of well-composted wood chips (they've been there for 7 months now). After loosening it up, I flipped the sand to the top, with the bits of less composted wood chips going underneath and mixed it around a bit. I found many earthworms in the process, which is especially nice since there were NONE when we first started working in the front yard last year.
I broadcasted the oats in the bed, then used an upside down metal rake to smooth out the bed while also getting the oats to be a bit under the earth. That worked surprisingly well! Watered down that bed and it was good to go. I'm planting oats there for two experimental reasons: to see what it's like to grow grain and process it, and to use as a cover crop to enrich the soil for next year. We can add a bed then and have what should be a GREAT bed after that. I'd like to do a similar cover crop in rotating beds each year for the soil benefit (and the reaping benefit!). Hoping the oats will grow fine in the adequate but not fantastic soil. We'll see. Another experiment!
My last morning job was to plant the Indian cream cobra melons. I think when these ripen, the skin peels back a bit and looks kind of like the head of a cobra. Those are planted in the same bed as the Japanese sakata melons by the chicken coop.
In the afternoon I took many of the tomato starts out of their cups and planted twenty-two in the bed. They're still pretty small - maybe 3-4 inches tall. (Had our first ones survived, they'd probably be a good 1-2 feet tall now!) We have nine different varieties of heirloom tomatoes, in lots of different colors - brown, red, green, yellow, pink. There are still at least another 22 in cups. I'll save those until we know the ones in the bed are taking off nicely, then someone else will inherit some good starts! I also planted three purple tomatillos. The peppers were still really small (about an inch), and only had their first two true leaves. We'll wait a bit longer for those!
The tomato bed is five feet wide. Last week, I planted cilantro and Thai basil along the short ends, basil along one long end and the tomatillos and peppers will go along the other long side. All the tomatoes go down the middle, 3 feet apart but staggered instead of a straight row so I could squeeze in a few more.
And last of all, we got seven eggs this week from our chickens (our first week of eggs!). I think we have two that are laying. Hopefully, the other three will follow suit soon. We also did a blind taste test. I had three kinds of eggs (plain scrambled with no salt) - ours, free-range organic eggs from the store, and regular eggs. Pretty much no one could detect any difference in taste. Two of us preferred ours and the organic to the regular, but it wasn't a strong preference at all! Maybe their flavor will distinguish themselves as the chickens mature. And at $4.79/dozen for organic, I don't normally buy them, but the store had them for sale this week for $0.11/egg instead of the regular at $0.15/egg, so I bought 8 dozen (all they had). So, there you have it. We sure are having fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment