potatoes and sweet potatoes

The sweet potatoes in the moist dirt are supposed to be starting to grow slips. This takes quite a while to get going and all the time I can't tell if it is working or not. BUT it all worked last year, so I'm hoping it will work this year! Eventually there will be green leaves just tumbling out of that plastic bucket. The potatoes are also "chitting" (I think it is the word). I'm trying to grow out some eyes before I plant them. By letting the eyes grow a bit (supposedly) you get a jump on the season.

rhubarb and strawberries

The rhubarb is poking up through the dirt. This is it's second year and we get to harvest some this year. YEAH! When I was a kid I thought rhubarb was free food. Both my grandparents lived in a rural community and people would willingly hand us rhubarb every spring. We took it willingly. (They were even more generous during zucchini season, but we weren't near so willing.) The strawberries aren't really doing anything yet, but they've obviously survived the winter.

wedding dress

DD#3 No she's not getting married. She's in a play and needed a wedding dress for her costume. We were out visiting thrift stores and found this at the third store we went to. I think it is lovely.

new compost bin

This is my new compost bin, not a concentration camp. A friend (thanks M~!) gave us a van load full of cinderblocks. Our wire compost bin was overflowing and I was thrilled to take the blocks off her hands. As you can see the chickens made themselves right at home. Eventually I will have three bins, the plastic bags are where the second bin, the dry materials bin, will be. The eventual goal is to have three bins. One active bin, one storage materials bin and one bin of finished compost. These three bins are rotated as needed (ie I throw compost into the first bin for an entire year then ignore it until it turns into compost, while I start a new active pile in another bin).

You can comment

OK, You can now comment on this blog easily. I'm really not very tech savvy and several people have told me they can't figure out how to make comments. I just needed to go and change some settings and now it should be easy (easier). THANKS for actually looking at the blog!

baby garden part 2

And this is what my garden looks like right now. Pretty dismal, huh? New compost is coming ASAP. We went to get compost yesterday. BTW we are very blessed. We live a few miles away from compost heaven. They make mountains and mountains of it. We can see the mountains from the highway, steaming all winter. It is a kind of surreal scene. They mainly sell to lawn companies buying semi- truck loads, but they're very good about selling to private individuals. You can either bring your little truck and have them use their bobcat to fill it or you can bring your shovel and plastic bags and scoop it up. It's good quality stuff and TONS cheaper than what they sell in the garden stores. ANYWAYS, we take out the seats from our minivan and load it full of plastic bags of compost. We get home and unload the plastic bags into the driveway. I say, "I'm tired, I'll take care of filling the garden squares with compost later." It wasn't a full hour before we got a citation from the local government to get all those bags of garbage out of our driveway. Sheesh! Were they waiting for us to come home? It was pretty funny. But I am more than willing to comply with my county govenment's request and dump all those bags of compost into my garden. I just wanted to lay down for a hour or two first!

baby garden

Here's my baby plants. Or maybe I should say 'here are my plants I'm babying along.' I have several trays that are under grow lights/in a sunny window (if the weather is cold outside) or (if the weather is gorgeous, like today) sitting in the sun out on my lawn. I've really struggled with starting plants from seeds. It has taken me years to get to the point where I feel like I have any idea what I'm doing. Like Thomas Jefferson said, "I'm a very old man but a very young gardener." You can see the plants are in either toilet paper tubes or in rolls of newspaper. I like to have them separated into individual plants. When they get too big for their britches I put them in a bigger pot.