Hello Everyone!
Effortless observation.
If only watching the farm were this easy.
Cayley was too tired from her trip to the vet yesterday to know that she is in good health for a 17 year old.
There is plenty to see. The crocus' Julia planted last fall are starting to appear. A few snowdrops came up. These are great early season flowers for our bees and other pollinators.
Plants like this help tide the bees over until the dandelions come out. Dandelions are an essential source of food for bees as they are among the first wildflowers to appear in large quantities, right when the hive is hatching its new generation of worker bees.
Your food is also starting to to emerge.
Here are the first garlics. The emergence rate appears to be about 98-99 per cent, typical for us.
Not as much green garlic for this season, though more than enough scapes to make up for that.
The priority task right now is to clean up beds that provided food late fall, and could not be cleaned as the ground was frozen.
Grass starts growing at 1 degree celcius, and the longer it grows, the more time clean up takes. It is essential to get ahead of it early, otherwise it slows down progress for the entire season.
Tilling is not an option with bluegrass or quackgrass, as the tines chop up the rhizomes and propogates the grass that much quicker.
From last autumns kale bed to ready for early summer green beans.
The old kale stems will be burried tohelp break down and add additonal organic matter to the soil. Any stems that are still not broken down by planting time will be tossed into the compost.
If I am cleaning up one bed, 59 others are sprouting their first weeds. To help stay ahead, I use a bit of plastic mulch to suppress some of that growth.
Once the messiest beds are cleaned, I start cleaning the beds I intend to plant early spring.
Beds that will not be used until mid summer for the late atumn crops will recieve a cover of peas and or buckwheat to suppress weeds and feed the soil.
The pulled rhizomes would continue to grow and sprout blugrass and quack grass if I were to put it in the compost, so these are diverted to the laneway to fill in wheel ruts.
Here's one reason to reduce tilling: At first I thought the wheel hoe had turned up a bright piece of legacy plastic, but when I picked it up and turned it over, I found it was a turtle. The shell of Painted Turtles are brightly colored.
At first I thought it was dead, but after a moment, it poked it's head out and started crawling around.
Which means there is some egg laying going on at the back of one of our vegetable beds.
There will not be any turtles in this years delivery, even if they emerge along with the spinach planned for that bed.