Fenced Off and Ready To Go

April fenced off the front bed with the rest of the chicken wire and a couple of pieces of metal screen to fill in the last few feet. After fencing off, I turned and planted some more peas. The chickens were just beside themselves pacing back and forth on the other side of the fencing when I was turning the dirt. But that is exactly why we put it up. Now I am ready to go with at least some of the tomato and pepper plant when they show up in the mail.

I turned the upper back corner and planted three rows of blue potatoes. I still have a little over half of the blue seed potatoes and all of the russet seed potatoes left. I'm going to plant them in the lower back corner bed. I haven't turned the lower back corner yet at all and plan on putting the coop over a big bunch of the cover crop still in that bed before turning and planting. I'll also plant our usual row of sunflowers along the Eastern edge of that bed.

On Sunday, April replanted some lettuce for us in the little bed I set up in February in which we have some radishes growing.

yesterday, I spread out a couple of bags of compost on the next bed over including spreading it around our very healthy looking garlic plants. I began the arduous task of turning the dirt that didn't get turned last year. It's still pretty wet and compacted, but a turn now will help uncompact it. This is going to take a couple of weeks of turning when I can until crew season is over. I intend to throw a lot of amendments at this area since it has seen nothing but lawn for a number of years. It is in this new portion close to our drive way where I am going to plant the rest of the tomatoes and peppers dues to its relatively good sun exposure even into the Fall.

April finished off the evening by planting flowers she got at Fred Meyer's and Portland Nursery yesterday afternoon. She stayed out planting until it was dark enough such that the chickens had put themselves to bed in the upper portion of the coop.

On an unrelated note, it took a little more determination this morning to get on the bike and ride into work. The accumulation of a regatta on Saturday, doing shovel work on Sunday, riding into and back from work on Monday and then more shovel work last night has left me a little fatigued. I redlined a little more quickly than usual during the steep portion of my first climb this morning, though the rest of the ride felt okay. And I still averaged over 12 mph for the ride which is right on my recent average if not a little fast. And my ride home on Monday included an unexpected and unpleasant surprise after I met up with some high school friends for a mini-25th year reunion. It seems that a honey bee made its way into my jersey during my ride home and decided it was a most uncomfortable place to be once I sat down for a beer. The sucker stung me before I was able to figure out what was going on. This morning, as I casually scratched an itch on my upper shoulder blade I discovered that he had stung me four times. Fortunately, some benadryl spray relieved the itching. Unfortunately the incident on Monday ended with one less honeybee in the world.