Spring On the Way!

 

In the past few days it has warmed up into the 70's in the afternoons.  The remaining hens that we have left after the marauding minks massacres, are laying.  We are collecting about 18-20 eggs each day.  That's enough to where we've put the For Sale sign out in front of the house again.  We sold 5 dozen today.  The sales help us with barnyard expenses and we eat PLENTY of eggs as well.  

As you can see in the photo above the hens lay primarily brown eggs but we do have some that lay beautiful eggs in various shades of blue and green.  The photo also evidences the white Dutch clover that is coming up all over the yard.  Neighbors are already mowing, but I'll put off mowing until maybe May.  We'll cycle the cows through the yard to clean up the clover and other winter grass.  We'll allow our honeybees to frequent the blooms in the yard as well.

This early spring has me itching to get in the garden.  Here's what we've done so far:

This is my first year to plant bare root strawberries.  I ordered about 40 Ozark Beauty plants and got them planted in the garden in two rows, planted about 12 inches apart.  It's only been three days and almost every plant has new leaves.  I'm anxious to see how these do.  I've planted strawberry plants in the garden before, but slugs and snails have given me fits.  I'll anticipate that problem this year and find a solution.

On a 16 foot long trellis, I planted 8 feet of Sugar Snap Peas with the remaining 8 feet split between Boston pickling cucumbers and Marketmore cucumbers.  On a separate 8 foot trellis, I planted some Suyo long cucumbers.  All from seed.  The growing calendar showed a March 1 plant date from seed for all of these, but I looked at the 10 day forecast and jumped the gun a little.

Tomorrow I plan on planting an 8 foot trellis of Blackeye Butter beans and a 15 foot row of snap beans.  We harvested the last row of Danvers carrots today, so that makes some room for additional planting that we'll be doing in the next week.  We'll put up the carrots tomorrow or this weekend.  I keep checking the progress on the Irish potatoes that we planted on February 14th.  So far nothing has popped up out of the ground.  I'm a little impatient, so I'll be walking out and checking every day.

Spring is such a lovely time.  We're looking forward to enjoying some spectacular weather!