Better Than I Thought

I turned earth for about two and a half hours this morning. The dirt was in much better condition than I expected. I expected it to be much more clay-like and too wet. It was still pretty darn wet, but I think the cover crop and frequent chicken visitations helped it along well. The chickens have decided that when I'm turning earth I'm really just being their worm and grub provider. They hover around my shovel impatiently waiting for the next turn of the shovel. I dig, turn and they immediately start pecking away at the worms as I try to break up the wet clods of dirt.



I have a regatta tomorrow up in Tacoma, so no working in the yard. But I'm hoping that we don't get too much of a soaking over the next day and a half. If that happens, I can turn some more earth on Sunday and maybe even plant some broccoli starts we bought from a Portland Public Schools program recently. I'd also like to try replanting lettuce seeds. We bought some cheap beer tonight which I intend to use as slug bait.

More Garden Prep Today

The iffy weather last weekend led me to do non-veggie garden yard work. I pruned my big bay leaf bush back down to a reasonable size and cleared out more of my evil bamboo. I swear if that bush did not have yummy bay leaves that we use for cooking, I'd whack it all the way down to the ground just like I did with my out of control laurel hedge ten years ago.

In the mean time, my radishes have continued to grow and my peas are coming along. My two rows of lettuce, however, have disappeared. I suspect slugs may have ate them as we have had some relatively wet weather lately. I'm not too concerned because this early planting was an experiment.

I'm taking today off from work to get some garden prep done in the morning and then some crew coaching in the afternoon. Lewis & Clark is on spring break, so practices have been during my working hours and I have not been able to take time away from work until today. As far as my garden prep goes, I'm going to get out the shovel and start turning soil where I planted cover crop last Fall. Depending on how much I get done, I'll either turn in some compost today or on Sunday.

Happy Equinox!!!

As of 4:44 am this Friday local time (and I'll actually be up at that time to head to crew practice) Spring officially begins in a solar sense.

And this evening when I got home, I found the beginnings of my peas sprouting! Yeah!! Spring is here.

Corned Beef, Bikes and Plant Sales

Yesterday was St. Paddy's Day and I decided to celebrate the old fashioned way (no, not by getting snot-dripping drunk) by cooking up some corned beef and cabbage. I was very nervous because I had never attempted this before. But with good corned beef from New Seasons and a pressure cooker, about 90 minutes later we had silky smooth and almost sweet cabbage with tender, falling apart, succulent beef and broth infused potatoes. We really want to do this next fall with our own potatoes, cabbage, carrots and onions.

I got up this morning and retrieved the newspaper from the front porch (yes, I am an old school dinosaur that reads the paper version of the daily newspaper). I noticed that it was comparatively balmy and dry with some blue sky peeking through. I then checked the weather forecast for the day and found it was going to be dry and even in the upper 50s this afternoon. So I made the snap decision to ride my bike into work. After scrambling to get something in my tummy and work clothes packed into the backpack, I took off for my 10 mile hilly commute. I am so glad I was able to do that.

And finally I wanted to give a plug to a Portland Public Schools program plant sale taking place this week. Here is the text of the email announcement:

"Hello plant lovers!

Join Portland Public School's Community Transition Center for our Early Spring Plant Sale. The sale runs from March 16th-20th from 8:30am-3:00pm daily. We are located at 6801 SE 60th Ave. in Greenhouse #1. We are a half of block south of Duke St. and across the street from Brentwood Park.

We have a wide variety of plants for sale including:
-organic vegetable starts in 6-pack trays: broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards, kohlrabi, cauliflower and more
-indoor house plants
-lupine, hostas, bamboo, violets, ornamental grasses
-and much much more

The Community Transition Center is a PPS program for young adults that emphasizes vocational experience and life skills. Students in the program are responsible for starting, caring for, and maintaining the plant stock in the greenhouse. Your purchases return to our greenhouse program to support student learning.

Hope to see you all at the plant sale!

Sarah

********************************
Sarah Goforth
Greenhouse Coordinator
CTC Greenhouse Enclave
sgoforth@pps.k12.or.us
503-916-5817 ext. 71124
*********************************"

I'm thinking about sending April over on Friday to pick up some inexpensive starts in the optimistic hope that I can get some into the ground this weekend or next week.

Hope Springs Eternal

I got home last night from work and because of the recent time switch it was still plenty light out for me to go outside and let the chickens run free for awhile. It was then that I inspected my beds that I planted with ever-optimistic hope back in February. Lo and behold, my Red Oak Lettuce seeds had sprouted. And I think I fooled myself into seeing teeny-weeny Buttercrunch Lettuce sprouts, too. No peas or radishes yet. But with temps up into the 50s today and tomorrow and with direct sunlight on the beds in the afternoon, I am now officially hopeful. It is always exciting to see your first crops of the year surfacing in the garden. We're just eight days from equinox.

It's Still Early March

I keep having to remind myself of that fact. Or at least the weather continues to remind me of that fact. Snow flurries during the previous couple of days pretty much means that my peas and early greens are not going to come up yet. And, I ended up sick last week with the winter cold/crud. This week after a couple of frosty mornings, we are supposed to head back up to the upper 50s.

With being sick and the weather being cold and wet, I have not accompished anything more in the yard other than moving the chicken coop to a new patch of cover crop for fertilizing that portion of the garden.

In the mean time I have started reading "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver. I have not read any of her other works but understand that she is a well respected author. This one is her non-fiction depiction of her family's move back to an Appalachian farm and an attempt by her family to eat as locally as possible throughout a whole year. Working full-time and living within the city makes that a tough proposition for April and I. However, we have been generally trending toward that idea and hope to do much more canning/preserving/freezing of our own stuff this year and are looking at buying some pig locally through a CSA. It has inspired me to consider Asparagus for net year's garden.

In the same vein of food literature, I strongly recommend reading Michael Pollan's various works. The trio of his books I have read are "Botany of Desire," "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food." The first one is more of a fun read. But the second and third catalyzed me to really consider my choices of where my meat comes from and inspired me to attempt to eliminate High Fructose Corn Syrup completely (that's actually kind of hard to do).

Quiet Weekend

Not much done in the yard this weekend. I had crew practice Saturday morning and the river conditions were atrocious with ripping current, wind-caused chop and a few imbecilic fisherman not minding the proper river traffic flow. And Sunday was taken up by working on my car to replace some burned out lights and getting a long deserved oil change. And then I discovered that my home computer went on the fritz. I took that over to my favorite little computer repair place on Belmont but forgot to bring my power adapter. Once they had the power adapter they were able to determine that the hard drive was kaput. I'll have a new hard drive with our precious data recovered from the old, hopefully this evening.

We did move the chicken coop over a new patch of cover crop and I turned the soil where the coop had been previously. The soil looks pretty good and I'm surprised at how loose it is at this point in our typically rainy late winter. I think the cover crop was a great idea. In a couple of days we'll move the coop again to the area where I grew potatoes and sunflowers last year. This partly due to a request from our neighbors to move the coop to where they and their 2-year-old son can watch the chickens during their last couple of weeks in their smaller digs of their converted large garage (they're remodeling their main house and it is almost done).

I got our tax refund last Friday. So, after catching up on paying bills, we can sit down and order all our goodies from Seeds of Change.