So today was spent back on the home front at my mom's, where we still have a lot to keep an eye on despite our new project up the road. We had to be around for a yard sale we were having in order to get rid of some of our extra stuff. But since there's no news on the house project, I thought I'd take the opportunity to update everyone on what we were working on all winter. These pics were taken a few weeks ago, and I'll post new ones soon so you can see how much everything has grown.
This is one of our several cold frames that Joe built. He used old windows, which worked perfectly and we packed mulch around the outside of them to keep them better insulated. One thing I did learn from this experience is that a little paint scraping before use never hurts, if you don't want old paint all over the place. But with these contraptions we were able to keep plants outside during the day in february and overnight in mid-late march.
These were the first plants we started - tomato, eggplant, and pepper plants! Everyone who has seen them has said "yeah, I tried that a few times and just realized that they never are as nice as the ones I can just pick up at the store in May." Yeah. We started out having sort of the same experience. These guys started out strong and then just stopped growing. But I realized that our big mistake is that since the cold frame was keeping temps above freezing, we were leaving these plants outside really early, just to save ourselves the work of bringing them in and out. But it was just plain not warm enough, so they stopped growing. They are starting to look a little bit better now that it's warmer and we're bringing them in more. But our second batch has done MUCH better. 
These are my beautiful broccoli plants! You know, there's really nothing more exciting than putting a bunch of seeds in some dirt and then waiting to see them push their little heads out. These were especially fun to watch come up and they continue to grow quite well with very little effort on my part. They went in the ground just yesterday, but pictures of that will come soon.
Now these little girls are Joe's babies. Seriously. We bought 12 of them around March 25th, and this is them at about 2 weeks. They are growing unbelievably fast - we had them outside full time way ahead of schedule, scratching around, eating bugs and greens. They're very sweet and every night Joe puts them up in a special box hanging in a tree to keep them away from any predators. It will be months before they give us any eggs, but for now they are our pets and we love them.
And then these are the big mamas. I came home one night from work and these ladies were clucking around the backyard. We have four of them and always get 3 or 4 eggs a day. Joe built them a very fancy chicken coup which we drag around the yard so that their 'fertilizer' gets spread around the yard and they have new greens and bugs to eat all the time, although now they mostly just run free around the yard during the day (there was a run-in with the dog yesterday that could have ended very very badly, but didn't).
And then here's us working in our garden. As you can see, we love it. It's been a crazy adventure so far and we are making lots of mistakes, but we're doing it together and we're learning tons and couldn't be happier to be here in NY digging in the dirt.
No comments:
Post a Comment