Finally!

I'll start with admitting that it has taken a week to find time to post this little missive. 

We finished the fence dividing off the eastern 40 feet of the North pasture and started putting in the garden which is a series of framed beds. The soil in our area is heavy clay which would probably be great for throwing black pottery, and is no doubt why ACME brick is located in this region, but is absolutely not great for growing a garden. 

We have been putting together the frames for our little garden, and hauling in composted soil.  We put the compost heap (bed?) into a small section of the barnyard that only the chickens can get into, adding kitchen vegetable scraps as well as barnyard and barn droppings, then simply let the chickens do their job and break down the additions and help create the most fantastic soil you'll find! The result is rich, loose, and full of earthworms that help keep it healthy and add their own healthy waste along with that of the chickens. 
 

Lots of happy earthworms doing their job!

We hauled load after load after load of the composted soil, dumped the loads into the beds and worked the soil around. Then, we planted seeds. The first round was green bean, rainbow chard and carrots.

 

Planting lovely green bean seeds.

 

See? :)

 



Cover gently and water thoroughly.

And in the meantime, the potatoes are growing like mad!  The garlic is getting huge!   The rosemary is surviving!  The basil - well, there's always one dud, right? 

A short week later and the seeds we planted last weekend are sprouting up quickly! 

Green bean plant

 

Tiny baby carrot tops :)

 

Baby rainbow chard peeking through! 

 

This weekend we *finally* got the tomatoes in the ground, as well as habanero peppers and green peppers and one little yellow pepper plant and a sweet mint for my sweet daughter, and cucumber seeds for pickling cucumbers. Hopefully, these we will vine up an old gate that we have and isn't in use.  Oh, and a row of basil seeds.  We are all just crossing our fingers on the basil since we haven't had the best of luck getting it to take off. 

 

Hubby working on the second round of planting with me!  You can see that we still have some beds that need filled and planted. 

One of four tomato plants.

 

After all of that was done, hubby went and tilled down the compost heap making it easier for us to haul the next rounds, and my younger daughter and I made two more tiny beds and planted my rhubarb starts.  One of the tiny beds is for the sweet mint, which lives in the garden area, and the other is a little flower bed out front of the house.  It has my older daughter's geranium potted and on a stump in the center, then we planted flax and true lavender to grow up and surround the stump.  We are crossing our fingers it all works out like we think it should! 

 



And now... I'm beat.  Time for some much earned rest! 

Is it just me or does anyone else think I was born in the wrong century? :-)