First hard working day of Spring

Today was my first hard-working day of spring. Unfortunately, I woke up with a slight hang-over, and was not excited to get up and get going, but in hindsight, I'm glad I just busted through. Now it's early in the afternoon (tea-time) and I have sore muscles and a sense of accomplishment.

Our main tasks today were to clean out the chicken/duck coop and to set up our deer-netted bed.

We clean the coop seasonally, and especially in the winter when the birds just want extra insulation, we just add more bedding as needed. We use pine shavings and straw. We shoveled and swept the debris out, scraped it out, scrubbed it clean, hosed it out and are now waiting for it do dry in the sun and wind. Will carried bins and bins of coop bedding down to the garden compost. I just had to crawl inside the ammonia smelling coop to scrape it clean and scrub it until my knuckles bruised. No big.

Last summer Will made a perimeter around one of the beds in the garden with deer netting that we got from my sister when she moved to Colorado. (The stuff is expensive but super useful!). This year, we wanted to expand it and do it early enough that we could plant all season in there. The perimeter of the bed is deer netting about 3 or 4 feet up, staked into the ground, and with boards holding it down on the outside to discourage tunneling under by our frenemies. We managed to salvage all the boards we needed from the property, especially along the riverbank. Will mentioned that it made him feel like the Nearings, gathering driftwood from the sea and building with it.

We saw an intact but dead vole and a mostly intact but dead garter snake. There must be another cat around, because we couldn't think of any animals that would kill them and then not eat them. We checked for ramps and fiddleheads on the island, but they aren't popping up yet. Still a few more weeks for those!

Before

After.  Of course, bedding was added next.

I've got an itch

The lack of typical winter weather this year has really got me anxious to get outside and play in the dirt. This time last year, there were still a few feet of snow on the ground, and I wasn't really in a rush to get going. That may have had something to do with why a lot of my timing was a little off with getting things started. We were also new to that plot of land last year.

This year, I've got PLENTY of plans for the big garden. One of the major plans has to do with putting up a few tunnels to get some stuff started outside in the sun, instead of under lights in my living room like we've been doing. It should also give some of the seedlings a leg-up in both being hardened off, and getting to a better size before getting chomped by a marauding woodchuck with a death wish. The only thing keeping me from putting up the tunnels now, is that I need to get all the materials. The ribcage-like hoops that will be the frame are coming from Naomi's sister, Jesse, who snagged them from a closing plant nursery or something like that. Then I need plastic. Probably for the first year, I'll use some cheap stuff, and see how I like using the tunnels before moving on to some greenhouse-grade stuff.

At the end of last summer, Naomi and I took a trip to Old Sturbridge Village (a living museum of 1830s colonial America) to take a look at their main garden behind the Freeman Farm house. We wanted to see what they had growing, and how they were doing it, and I really wanted to see the way they had their garden laid out. What I found was that they were using a wide-row planting layout, which I had tried to do myself last year, but with little actual planning or insight into how to do it. As you can see from the picture below, they have quite wide rows, with equally as wide paths between.

In addition, there was a border around the entire garden. The rows didn't go straight up to the fence. From the fence, there was about 8 feet of space before the rows began, but immediately abutted to the fence, were various herbs and things, which I imagine gave a protective barrier to the stuff in the middle of the garden from unwanted insects and small animals. I will try to do this myself this year, while also hoping to keep out the creeping mugwart that's always trying to make its way into my precious garden.

Our garden is approximately 4,923 square feet. Thanks to my brother Mike, we measured it this past weekend. (I told you I was anxious!) I've been trying to decide what would be the best row width, so that Naomi and I can reach into and over all of the row in order to save energy and our backs. Unfortunately, neither of us are very tall, nor do we have abnormally long arms, which means our rows might end up being rather narrow, at least when compared to the rows at Old Sturbridge Village. The other option is to make them twice as wide as we can reach, and we'd have to work the rows from both sides for weeding and such.

I've got loads more plans that I will divulge in the coming days and weeks in another post. Next time, I'll talk about some of the vegetables and varieties of things that I'd like to grow for the first time, and some past success stories that I'm excited to repeat.