In Balance With Nature....

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

First years lessons so far.....

Well, the last 3 months have been busy and full of learning "opportunities."
1) Everything takes longer than you think...
2) Always costs more than you think.....
3) Turns out a little differently than you think... but that is sometimes a good thing.
4) Don't dig holes for fence posts if your not ready to put up a fence. (your friend may step in the hole filled with muddy water... sorry Matt.....)

We tilled up two 1 acre areas and one of them was slightly down hill from the water collection pond and is ALWAYS wet. Lost all the cauliflower, had to start new patch of lettuce, and had to transplant the spinach and the brussels to the other tilled area on the other side of the pond and they seem to be doing better. Potatoes are loving the wetter area and sprouting like crazy. We have about 300 ft of potatoes doing really well.
"New" garden site, 200 ft rows.

Just got peas, beans, squash, lettuce, beets, radish, broccoli, herbs, cabbage, kale, and some grains planted last weekend and some of which are already sprouting. The rain was PERFECT timing. We also planted aprox 500 cloves of garlic with the lettuce.

Lots and lots of garlic!
This Saturday is a full moon so the corn, and oats are getting planted as well as melons, cucumber and some more beans. (Full moons energy helps sprout above ground plants, while root crops go in on a new moon.)

Adam getting the corn/oats spot plowed.
We also got the chicken coop built with the much needed help of Matt. What would we do without him? He has two hidden hatch doors for collecting eggs from the nesting boxes and one for sweeping out the coop. We had enough vinyl siding from the house to use on the coop. Hope to get the chickens in about 2 weeks. We also plan to get some Guinea foul to live in the garden and eat all the bugs for us.

Hatch to nesting boxes.
Want to be able to start at the market in lees Summit in a couple weeks but waiting for some growth! We will email again the week we plan to start.