Welcome to the Jungle.

Our lawn mower broke last month. Weeks passed and the lawn turned into pasture land. As if everything else wasn't already overgrown, this just topped it off. Grass and gardens blended into one. There was a lot of pretty wildflowers, and the clover was nice, but enough is enough. Last week Tony finally managed to jerry rig the mower to get it to work.

Gardens are in desperate need of weeding and the edges of our woods are in need of thinning. The day lilies are blooming around the pond ( we have probably close to 50 of them out there) but you can only see about half of them. The rest are hidden in the banks, covered up by overgrown underbrush. I'd love to be out there pruning right now, but it is so hot out (over 90).

I took my first swim of the summer in the pond today. It was nice, and felt good getting this extra weight off of my feet and back for a bit. Tomorrow.....summer school starts :(

Finally!

Well it is finally spring around here. In fact the temperatures have been more like summer over the past week. We have had several days in the 70s and even a couple of day in the 80s. The gardens are still getting cleaned up and planted. Thanks to some help from my mom when she was up during April vacation the front flower garden is all weeded and has a few new additions in it.

Bloom

The crocus are up a full month earlier than last year.

Growing Seedlings

Within the last couples weeks I have begun planting some seeds (indoors still here). I am hopeful of our gardens this years, especially after last year's horrible season. The weather we had stunted everything and by August I had pretty much given up in defeat on our veggies.

This year I think we will go all out again. The colder weather crops will be planted in our garden by the garage and the warmer crops will go in the big garden by the pond.

First to go out will be leeks, onions, lettuces, spinach, bok choy, brocollli, cabbage, beets, radishes, carrots, swiss chard, beans, peas,cucumbers, and potatoes.

Then the herbs: rosemary, basil, dill, parsley, oregano, and thyme.

The rest will follow winter squash, summer squash, eggplant, pumpkins, corn, and tomatoes. Speaking of tomatoes, I'll have a few new heirlooms to try this year thanks to Danni at Critter Farm. She graciously offered up seeds to her readers and is sending me 3 varieties all the way from Oregon. The blogging world amazes me sometimes.

Pink

The gardens seem to be in a pink phase right now.

Soon......

I am an awful blogger, i know. I shall try harder now that things are a bit calmer around here. For now here's some of what in bloom.

BLOOM

=

Wish I had more time to post. Things are crazy around here. End of the year at school has the kids nuts....thank god we only have 2 weeks left. I will be teaching summer school this year so I have been busy designing my lesson plans. Also been writing lots of applications in hopes of getting a science teacher position for the fall. I hate the application process and some of the questions you are asked to write about.
Haven't had enough time at home to get all of the veggies planted yet. Tony did rototil the back garden, so it is ready. Flowers are starting to bloom..... the iris are almost ready. Need to do a lot of weeding and fill in the bare spots.
The Subaru is broken down once again, so I need to figure out what is next for it. The fox killed 7 of our chickens and one of my angoras died unexplainably last week. Bummers.
I need to get ready to head to work at the hospital.....wish I could play outside instead.

Yard work

Busy weekend between working in the yard and working on final papers for my class that ends tomorrow. I finally started tearing apart the front flower garden, which I have never been too fond of. It was too big and too flat. I decided to build a little stone wall so that I could make one section higher than the other. I also shrunk it to half of its size. Still need to plant grass seed around it, and work on smoothing out the lower part of the garden. Then it is time to fill it in with more plants.

Before:

Halfway:
After:

I am happy with it, it is certainly better than what was there before. I am sure it will look much better once it is filled with flowers too.

Yard Cleanup

It finally feels like spring around here. With that, THANK GOD, is April vacation. I didn't think I would make it this year. The kids have been off the wall.
Tony and I started some major cleanup in the yard yesterday. Tons of leaves still need to be raked and hauled over to the compost bins. There are several birch trees that were bent down by thee snow and ice this winter that aren't able to recover. So firewood is their destiny. Tony was gifted a chainsaw from his father for xmas, so he put it to work. A couple of the trees were looming over our back veggie garden.
Speaking of the gardens, we have just about gotten the raised beds on the side of the garage all cleaned up. The chickens have been happily helping us with this task. Today I am going to plant some peas and hopefully some spinach. I did start some seedlings inside this year....not as many as last year though.
Already sprouted seedlings include:
brocolli
kale
beets
swiss chard
eggplant
bachelor buttons
zinnea
black krim tomatoes
yellow jubliee tomatos
romas
rainbow cherry tomatos

Still to plant:
spinach
peas
beans
salad greens
pmpkins
sunflowers
peppers
ccumbers
morning glories

Then there were two

We have three roosters. Three is too many.......Three was too many.......
The Silver Laced Wyandotte was the roughest with our hens.....

Rooster before:

Rooster after:
I would have preferred finding him a new home, but Tony had other ideas. I came home from work yesterday to a giant pot of boiling water, and when I asked what it was for, his reply was 'you don't want to know'. You could say I was less than excited about eating my dinner last night, but I had to try it........I will be sticking with supermarket bought organic chicken. It was not bad, the texture was different, kind of soft/mushy. The dark meat was the darkest I have ever seen (gross) and Tony said it was a little tough.There was also a little bit of furry feather things sticking out........ I have read that you should let it sit in the fridge for a day or two to make it less tough. The leftovers should be good for soup, with negative temps tonight a warm bowl of soup should be good.
We have two roosters left, Tony talks about taking one more down. I refuse to go along with this plan.....