Springing hard
Apr. 6th, 2021 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormThe snow is in full-on retreat. It's still out there on the fields but it's basically off the yard and garden, more-or-less, at least on anything with a southern exposure that didn't get covered in hay or straw.
I have mama goose nesting beside the door, and the embdens in the woodshed.
Things are springing up in the garden: chives and stinging nettles, lovage and angelica, and I think borage sprouts. Brussels sprouts (! Roodnerf) and mint and welsh onions (Franz) overwintered no problem. There is a very very fat crop of voles and a thorough network of tunnels through my soft soil.
I was given 8 of someone's cast-off egglayers, so I'll be canning them throughout the week. I seem to be able to do 3 in a reasonable evening. After that I have a bunch of my own roosters to work through.
I'm also working through potting up over 150 tomatoes into their bigger pots and trying to get all the plant shelves set up. I won't have room indoors for all my starts, but the hope is they can go outside on the deck during the day and come back in during the night. Unfortunately a windstorm slowed down my hardening-off process so we'll resume that this week.
I got maybe 7 boxes of expired half-and-half (10% milk fat cream) which the pigs are enjoying this week, and a couple cases of romaine lettuce which the geese are especially fond of. Sometimes that program where I pick up expired food for the farm is annoying and fiddly -- there's so much packaging, which means so much time, and so much weird stuff -- but weeks like this its worth it.
Doing a fairly serious shut-down on internet time over the weekend was pretty great. I spent a lot of that time with Tucker, and a lot of it outside doing farm stuff. I enjoy farm stuff.
On the complicating side, my electric fencers are dead and I need to get those pigs moved like yesterday.
I have mama goose nesting beside the door, and the embdens in the woodshed.
Things are springing up in the garden: chives and stinging nettles, lovage and angelica, and I think borage sprouts. Brussels sprouts (! Roodnerf) and mint and welsh onions (Franz) overwintered no problem. There is a very very fat crop of voles and a thorough network of tunnels through my soft soil.
I was given 8 of someone's cast-off egglayers, so I'll be canning them throughout the week. I seem to be able to do 3 in a reasonable evening. After that I have a bunch of my own roosters to work through.
I'm also working through potting up over 150 tomatoes into their bigger pots and trying to get all the plant shelves set up. I won't have room indoors for all my starts, but the hope is they can go outside on the deck during the day and come back in during the night. Unfortunately a windstorm slowed down my hardening-off process so we'll resume that this week.
I got maybe 7 boxes of expired half-and-half (10% milk fat cream) which the pigs are enjoying this week, and a couple cases of romaine lettuce which the geese are especially fond of. Sometimes that program where I pick up expired food for the farm is annoying and fiddly -- there's so much packaging, which means so much time, and so much weird stuff -- but weeks like this its worth it.
Doing a fairly serious shut-down on internet time over the weekend was pretty great. I spent a lot of that time with Tucker, and a lot of it outside doing farm stuff. I enjoy farm stuff.
On the complicating side, my electric fencers are dead and I need to get those pigs moved like yesterday.
