Spring!

Incredibly warm this weekend!  Part of the weekend was dedicated to maintenance of the natural bug and rodent contol.  I cleaned out all the birdhouses and began the epic war on the wasps who also like to build their nests in the boxes.  The bluebirds and tree swallows have expressed interest; the wrens haven't arrived yet.  And we are a little worried about the hummingbirds, who are quite late.
The baby great horn owls are up and showing their fluffiness.  The barn owls on the other hand are in some sort of crisis.  Three babies have jumped out of their box.  Two have died.  We're working on a variety of theories, most of which we can't do anything about.
We've fertilized the garlic and greenhouse items.  We also worked on mulching the garlic.  You may say to yoruselves, "why, I think I would have mulched in the fall, right after I planted the garlic.  Then they would have been protected from frost heaves and the pesky leaves wouldn't be in the way."  I would say to you, we here at Arrowleaf Farms generally know when and what we should be doing, but that does not seem to mean it gets done.  For example, yes, we should have planted the potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, and likely other things by now.
Also worked on installing the irrigation for the garlic, who were quite thirsty.  But since we had a good thunderstorm last night, we didn't need to finalize or implement the system.

The peas are up!  Also some of the unlabled stuff we planted is progressing.  I remember planting radishes, chard, and lettuce.  I see what look like radishes and something that tastes like arugula.  Apparently I planted that as well!

Everything in the greenhouse and in the house on heat mats is moving along.  The soapy water spraying for aphids has begun--before we even saw an aphid.  Here is an instance where we actually did what we were supposed to before it was too late!  Below are the update photos.

Clean up and Transplant

This weekend was dedicated to removing last year's garden and getting some transplanting done.  Teri was a great help with all of it, and now the main garden is devoid of almost all of the dead vegetation and ready to be planted for this year.
Friday the focus was on basil; we plan to sell seedlings this year.  They are doing pretty well.  Also cleaned up the flower garden.  Looks like it will again be dominated by rudbekia and some other flower whose name I can't remember but it self-sows like crazy.

Saturday was miserably windy, but with Teri's inspiration we actually cleaned up all of the old tomato plants (yes, we reuse the twist ties), took down the support structures, picked up all the old gourds, and extracted the corn stalks.  I was pooped.  I thought we had finished to whole thing, but today it occurred to me that I still haven't dealt with the artichokes and a few of the zucchini. 

Today we transplanted about 140 pepper plants.  They moved up to the greenhouse from Teri's basement, where they had been living under lights and over a heat map.  They were a little overwhelmed by the actual sun, not to mention being put into big pots.  But as the sun went down they started to perk up (too dark for pictures by the time I got out there though).

 

Shawn and Teri also installed the irrigation for the garlic and put on some mulch.  Often we don't get the water in until the garlic are quite tall and it is a bit of a challenge.

 

Calling Mr. McGregor

I got down to the actual garden this week.  The first thing I saw was a little cottontail.  Luckily (for it if not for our vegetables) Andy did not see it.

I checked on the lettuce, chard, peas, and radishes we planted.  The chard and either the lettuce or radishes (problem with not labeling) are up and likely regretting it as it hasn't been much out of the 30s for quite a while and it's been snowing every day.

Someday I'll figure out how to move photos around on this thing!  The garlic is looking great, and was glad to finally get some precipitation.

Teri planted 136 peppers on March 14. Here's the list of what she planted (in the nice handwriting) and how they look. LY stands for last year and indicates the number we had last year.  The information below was the plan for numbers to plant, but was amended in the actual planting.

 

On Friday we planted the eggplant.  On Saturday the tomatoes and the remainder of the peppers went in.  See below for the schematic (which we usually lose by transplant time, so this year I scanned them) and numbers of varieties planted.  Hopefully they'll be up soon!