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.

Happy Spring!

I really wanted to post last week on the first day of spring, but I spent all last week hustling to get my hoophouses finished, which they now are. The picture above was taken before I really fixed up the plastic to a more permanent state. I tucked the plastic under on all sides and then buried the frame because yesterday after work, I came home to find the plastic flapping in the 20mph wind gusts like a flag. Now it's all secure. Today after work, I put down black weedblock fabric inside both houses. It was 80 degrees inside around 4:00PM, when the outside temperature was about 50.

Later this week, I'm going to move some seedlings inside. I should also fill it with manure or compost, but I may just do that later, since everything inside will most likely be in trays for now. Once the plastic isn't needed for the summer, I'm going to put construction fence over the hoops and use it as a trellis.

Saturday saw a significant drop in temperatures to the nearly-80 degree highs we had last week. Last night it was in the low 20s, and tonight should be about the same, accompanied by the 20+mph winds again. The rest of the week will be cool, but not as low as yesterday and today.

It's probably a bit too early, but I'm getting anxious about putting out these onion seedlings that I started before the year even began. I may move the trays to the hoophouses, and put some in the ground to see how it goes.

This week, I started trays of spinach, broccoli, cabbage, collards, arugula, chard, basil, marigold, kohlrabi, and spearmint. Some are experiments, like the basil that I didn't even thresh out of the seed pods. I want to see what will happen. The marigolds are really early, but I want to see if I can get them a head start to an earlier bloom with the heat inside the hoophouse. The spearmint will go straight in the ground and I'll worry about it spreading later. I'd rather have something I like spreading than the mugwort and knotweed. I guess we'll have to see what happens. I'm going to start a few more trays of seeds tonight and put them into the hoophouse tomorrow. I still need to do a few things for the hoophouses, like get something to clip the plastic back when I go inside, and some boards to hold down the ends of the plastic so I don't have to cover/uncover out of the dirt every time.

There's also a mountain of manure to spread, and some tilling to do. I'm finally starting to get the no-till message, but the soil needs a lot of work. I'm going to work my way up with cover crops, green manures, and composted manure until I can start to see some progress past the compacted red mess that I have now. I should have planted a cover crop before winter, but it didn't work out. Now that the ground is workable, I've got LOTS to do. Hopefully I can get it all done in the next few weeks, and take a breather to get married.