1.
Plant something
– Starts of cabbage and broccoli, and a few cauliflower plants. Seeded lettuce, radishes, mustard greens, spinach, peas. Finished planting potatoes. Cilantro, thyme, garlic chives and sage plants in pots. Experimented with half a dozen tomato plants: plant early, down in a hole so you can lay something over it if it frosts. Fill the hole gradually as the plant grows, and you end up with a good root system that will keep the plant healthy without so much watering, and tomatoes two or three weeks early—or so says the guy from Tennessee that John got this from. We shall see.
2. Harvest something - Weeds for the chickens, and [chicken] eggs for us. The turkeys are laying, but we have a hen setting, so those are under here. We shall see whether anything hatches.
3. Preserve something – Nothing this week.
4. Waste Not– The usual recycling and feeding scraps
to the chickens. Using bits and pieces of leftover wire to patch goat fence where Rosita gets out . . . Sawed up two large dead locusts that fell into garden over the winter, and I am in the process of moving the pile (now outside the garden fence) up to the woodsplitter or onto the woodpile, depending on size. Did the annual spring hose inventory: one too broken for any more repair, holes in two others; John patched them. Also, leak in plastic in-ground pond we use down in the goat lot (caused, I suspect, be repeated freezing/thawing this winter, which was worse than normal); that was patched, after some experimentation, with roofing tar and silicone caulking and appears to be holding up nicely.
5. Want Not – Restocked corn and feed; filled birdseed can with a mixture of sunflower seeds and the last bag of scratch feed, which was getting elderly. Successfully made yogurt for my breakfasts, buttermilk for biscuit-making, and ricotta for the weekly dill-and-onion bread. (Whey goes either into other bread, or is cooked up with beans/rice/potatoes for chickens.) Bought four quarts of maple syrup, which should do us until next year. Made a batch of homemade biscuit mix (2 c flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp soda, 3 1/4 tsp baking powder, all mixed in a quart freezer bag); just dump it in a bowl and add 1/3 c shortening and buttermilk to make a batch of dough. Restocked whatever meds were up for refills. Picked up a couple of Garden Way Publishing booklets for $1 each at the used bookstore—Making Whole-Grain Breads and Making Butter and Cheese. John ordered (and received) a case of his favorite brand of sardines, which our local grocery store no longer carries—they are stashed in the pantry, to be eaten on special occasions.
6. Build Community Food Systems – Nothing much this week.
7. Eat the Food – Mostly odds and ends this week—leftover grilled chicken, leftover papaya relish with noodles (it's better with rice). A big bowl of white beans with garlic, onions, shallots, parsley and salt/pepper (original recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone; I usually triple the onion and shallots, and add lots of garlic). Lots of eggs. Local sausage with homemade biscuits. Sourdough bread.
Notes —
Thyme is coming up in my seed trays; also marigolds, a couple of thunbergia plants, some basil. Went to Henn's and bought cabbage/broccoli/cauliflower plants as well as a flat of violas, two red poppies and two yellow ones, a couple of spotted dead nettle plants and some cilantro, sage, catnip and two thymes—one lemon and one silver. Some are planted (in pots) and others are waiting patiently for me to get to them . . . The valerian has survived cat-wallowing and is up fairly good-sized. I see beebalm coming up, and lemon balm and mint, and costmary. The thrift has survived, also, but it has retreated to its original patch; apparently it didn't like all last year's rain. It will spread out again, though. I see baptisia poking up, and the st. john's wort is leafing out. All the daylilies are burgeoning, and the angelica plant I put in last year is up and thriving. The cowslips are beginning to bloom, as is the lungwort down in the rock garden (I had more plants last year; I'm not sure whether the others have died over the winter, or are just tardy coming up. I shall wait and see.). My mother divided a patch of some sort of spring irises (neither of us knows quite what they are, but we took them anyway) and those are in. I've done some weeding and clipping of wayward briars. However, I am moving slowly this spring. I'm badly out of shape, due to much staying inside this winter (caused by both the weather and my own reluctance to leave the warm fireside); I spent an hour yesterday spading up teasel plants (which, BTW, are highly invasive—I think they're worth it, but be warned, you will spend much time removing the excess) and this morning my knees and those large muscles down my thighs are complaining, as is my back . . . I have also developed what I'm pretty sure is arthritis in my right shoulder and that, added to the bone spur on my right little finger and either arthritis or incipient bone spur on my right index finger, makes holding tools problematic sometimes. And the five pounds that I'd managed to lose before Christmas has made a reapparance and, I think, brought some of its sisters.
::sigh::
This, too, shall pass, or at least I hope so. Just don't let me run out of aspirin before I get everything planted!
On the other hand (where there is, mercifully, neither bone spur nor arthritis—not yet, anyway), the chicks are here and are a week old today. They are in the brooder box under a heat lamp, since it's still chilly at night (though we missed having any frost this weekend), and are growing by leaps and bounds. We have Araucanas, Black Australorps, Buff Orpingtons, Anconas (my favorites), and maybe something else I've forgotten? I had hoped to get some more Speckled Suffolks (I admit, I am a sucker for spotted chickens.), but McMurray was out by the time we got our order in. Next year, perhaps. The big chickens and the turkeys have been relegated to the chicken lot and a stretch of wooded ground behind the garden (and the bush cherries), and seen to be enjoying themselves. In a few weeks, depending on the weather, the little chickens can move into the fenced-off area of the chicken lot and everyone can get used to each other until they get large enough not to be able to slip through the wire into the neighbor's yard and get eaten by their dogs.
Everything is green, green . . . it's hard to believe how fast everything came out this year. Things have fairly leapt from the ground and burst into bloom—and finished nearly as quickly! The daffodils are mostly gone, and the forsythias and cherries, but the tulips are beginning now, and the dogwoods, and there are good-sized leaves on nearly all the trees. We have gone from having a clear view of the cow pasture down the hill and across the road below us to being barely able to catch a glimpse of it. When the sun shines through the new leaves, we are in the center of a magical green world. I need to get down to the river; we haven't been in a month or so.
And I need to get out in the yard with the camera!
(Also, I have another blog now—Mother Bluejay's Commonplace Book—link on the side. It's just a place for me to put recipes, quotes, notes on this and that.)
