Around the Farm

Really did not have much time to enjoy the fauna around my little patch of the earth. I did catch this little guy working for his meal just off of the back porch. Clever little fellow blends well with the tree.

It rained for several days last week and tornado’s slammed through middle Tennessee a ways north of here. Hate to see the damaged property and lives, some small solace in that it was not in my region of Tennessee (this time).

Once it dried a little I got out to the garden and began digging it out. Here is a view of what good dirt and moderate fertilizer will produce in an un-mulched bed.

The good news is that only 3 of the 27 beds were unmulched. I worked to get two beds into shape for an early planting of lettuce and carrots. I started by ‘harvesting’ the decomposed manure and hay that I laid out last spring. The source is from the photo below:

We have two hay rings out and each will have an area around them that is thick with manure and hay/straw mixed in together. I cleaned this up last year and laid the material out in a row that is roughly 3 ft wide, 300 ft long and 2 foot deep. Yesterday I began shoveling up the ‘stuff’ and placing it in containers on the back of the jeep.

After adding this to the beds I ended up with what you see below. The two closest beds are planted with 5 different types of lettuce, two types carrot and bunching onions. I added the screens over the lettuce to prevent rain from washing the seeds out of the planted area.

Amazingly, I had parsley that overwintered (the green splotch in the second bed).

I may have got the lettuce into the ground a little early, only one way to really find out (plant it !).

Blueberry’s are blooming and more and more buds are showing up on the trees. Looks like I’ll be gathering fruit off of the peach and plum two years early. This is one of the peach trees:

As Walter Cronkite would say: And that’s the way it is…..