Oh the weather outside is frightful...

The weather has just been nasty all week long, so we really haven't been doing much of anything. For the most part our plants outside seem to be taking it in stride -- but the onions, I'm sad to say, did not make it through the cold and wind. A moment of silence for the onions.

The chickens, however, seem to be doing just fine.

They grow up so fast: Stringer, Marlow, Avon and Prop Joe (I think; they get harder to tell apart as they get more chickeny)

I was pretty worried about them the first few nights -- it was getting down into the low 40s and it seemed like the light really wasn't warming the place up much. But they seem unfazed; they just keep eating and crapping the same as ever. It'll still be several (possibly as many as 15-20) weeks before we see any eggs, so for now all we get is compost out of them. I've been in there a couple of times to add to their litter; they absolutely freak out if you toss it near them -- they can fly pretty high, maybe 4 feet. Hopefully as they get bigger and heavier they won't be quite so airborne.

We have cherry trees we really need to plant, but it's not possible to even get near where the fruit orchard is supposed to be through all the mud (at the moment there are two sticks that someday might be plum trees there, so it's a little presumptuous to call it an orchard). We also have lettuce and cabbage starts that really need to go out, and a ton of seeds that need planting. Hopefully it will stop raining and hailing and blowing 40 mph winds before, say, June.

Well, it's been rainy and windy for three, four days now -- not much to report. The chickens are settling into the coop fairly nicely and as far as I know our plants in the garden are doing okay -- it's been too muddy to look at them much. I am pleased to report that my cloches are all still where I left them. Our up-potted starts are happy. We won't be able to plant anything new until the ground dries up a little, so we're in a bit of a holding pattern for now. Might as well enjoy the sunset.

Good, cheap or easy -- you can have cheap.

I know that's not the exact quote, but close enough.

We are not shoppers. A has genetic, shading into pathological, cheapness (and a scarily complex understanding of the relative value of everything), whereas I'm more too lazy and have finally developed the realization that NOTHING is as exciting or interesting in your house as it is in the store. I also really enjoy creating makeshift solutions to problems using found materials and trash. Thus, our cloches:



I know making cloches (or hats as we call them here; "hats for plants -- keep plants warm") out of milk jugs is not revolutionary. And I guess in the rest of the world just sort of pushing them into the dirt is sufficient to anchor them down. But we have blowing-over-chicken-coop winds around here.

In our past gardens we had a more-or-less endless supply of bamboo poles about 1/2 an inch thick and four feet long. Those things were dead useful and I wish we still had them. To anchor cloches with them, you just cut a segment about a foot and a half long, pushed it into the ground next to your plant, and threaded the milk jug over it (without the cap). This worked perfectly, and if you have a supply of something similar, I highly recommend it.

Without bamboo stakes or anything similar to hand, I came up with the above solution which, while not nearly as elegant, cost a total of $.99 -- the cost of 208 feet of twine. Two foot-and-a-half lengths of twine are tied together at the ends in such a way to make two long ends with a loop in the middle that tightens when you pull the ends. This goes around the spout of the milk jug. The two long ends are held down with the scrap ends of two-by-fours, which we have an abundant supply of.

By the way, there's broccoli under there. We also set out 60 Spanish onions (the sad fellows from previous posts -- wish them luck) and eight Italian parsley plants, planted two plum trees, one rhubarb plant, some thyme, tarragon and a bunch of peas, and up-potted all the tomatoes, eggplants and peppers this weekend. There's a ton more we were hoping to do -- set out lettuce and cabbage starts, plant more potatoes, beets and spinach, plant some carrot seeds, and other stuff I'm not remembering. There is really a lot to do.

This blog post is boring.

As I said, we've also planted a lot of stuff outside. On April 11, we planted shelling peas (Maestro), snap peas (Super Sugar Snap), scallions, looseleaf lettuce (Italienescher), spinach (Whale), radishes (Cherry Belle), and sage. Lots of things are poking out of the ground, but so far they're not very interesting -- a couple of leaves. As best as I can tell, nothing is nibbling on them yet but I'm sure that's just a matter of time.

On April 18, we planted strawberries, Nevada looseleaf lettuce, potatoes (Russian Banana), and more peas, radishes, spinach and scallions.
Strawberries. We did not grow these from seed.

I'm pretty anxious to have something going on besides dirt and a few leaves here and there. I know this all takes time, it's only April, blah blah blah. But it's been winter for so long -- I'm ready to be moving on.

Rainy Day

Well, I was going to talk about the seeds we've started outside, but mud. So instead, I'll talk about nibbling away at the sea of mud, one tiny patch at a time.

I've basically picked an area that needs landscaping at random and begun a garden plan -- the front yard. It recommended itself to me because it's small and reasonably well defined by the house and driveway. Here's what I've got so far:
(click to enlarge)

I an plainly not a professional landscaper. But I think it's pretty good. The "W"s are to indicate plants with winter interest, since we basically have winter for more than half the year. The circles around the herb garden are pavers.

Of course, it's all well and good to draw a picture. Now I just need about $1500 worth of plants.

Do you ever wonder how great-grandmas made their fantastic gardens? Everyone I know has at least one great-grandma who had just a fantastic garden, like an acre of dahlias and hollyhocks and lilac, and the best tomatoes and sweet corn on earth. But these women grew up in the Depression -- there's no way they spent thousands of dollars on seeds and plants. I imagine that they must have shared seeds and divisions with their neighbors. That seems like a completely different universe from what we live in now.

Vegetable Starts: Update

Meanwhile, the vegetable starts just keep growing (sort of):


Left: sad lettuce, unthinned oregano, eggplants, peppers
Center Front: Onions
Center Back: Tomatoes
Right Front: Basil, Savory, Marjoram, Lettuce, Cabbage
Right Back: Parsley, Broccoli, Peanuts


Another angle (re-arranged and pre-onion trimming)

The peppers and eggplants are still going gangbusters; they really need to be put into bigger pots. The tomatoes are also doing pretty well, although they're a little leggy for my comfort. Maybe we should have pinched them. Maybe we should pinch them now. Heck if I know. I've heard that you should put a fan on them to develop thick stems; sadly we have no spare fans. Maybe next year.

The rest of our seedlings are in slightly more disarray. It's hard to say how much stems from neglect and how much from ignorance, but hopefully now that our external affairs are in a little more order, we'll have more time to focus on them. I think partly they're out of sight, out of mind on the ledge, but I don't know what we can do about that. The onions in particular look pathetic; I think sets are in our future.

Several starts really need to go outside: the various lettuces, cabbage, possibly broccoli. Hopefully we'll get to that later this week.

We've planted quite a few things outside, too -- details tomorrow.

Wildlife

So, when we were first scouting this site to build our house, A's dad mentioned in passing that he'd seen a moose about 2 miles down the road, near some trees and a permanent pond. 'Sure you did', I thought sagely to myself. Moose, while certainly present in the Palouse, are not so common that you just see them wandering around* -- and A's dad, while a fantastic person, is sometimes more of a storyteller than a scientist.

So, we're sitting on our deck enjoying the evening sun for the first time since we moved in, when who should come sauntering around the corner of our house?


Pictured: A nice lady moose. Like all wildlife photos, she was much closer before I ran to get the camera.

So, egg on my face, huh?

Wildlife has pretty sorely been lacking this winter, or at least right around our house. We've had mice in the woodpile (and -- sigh -- the garage), some Canada geese, some sparrows [? I'm terrible at identifying birds] that were building a nest in our gutter (I don't think it worked out), and various raptors including a bald eagle and some kind of giant hawk that was sitting in a tree not 5 feet from my car when I was driving to work one day. We saw deer almost every day when we were first building the house, but none for a while.

But the variety has really increased in the last couple weeks as the weather has gotten warmer. I hear tons of different bird songs (of course, I can barely tell a duck from a dodo, so I have to work on this). We've heard although not seen coyotes and owls, got a bit of an air show from some bats last night after the moose left, and some swallows [?] seem to be building a nest under our deck. I saw a wild turkey tom about half a mile from here earlier this week -- man, those things are HUGE!

Less delightfully, at least a dozen paper wasps were hanging out in the chicken coop last night, and we found an enormous blister beetle in the yard the other day -- seriously, it was at least an inch and a half long and when I smashed it (I'm generally live and let live with bugs but the internet says that they exude an oil that can cause blisters [hence the name] and their larvae are parasitic on bees) all this glistening orange goo came out... supergross.

Of course, all of these animals are delightful to see -- but every last one of them is potentially an enemy of the farm, out to eat our plants and kill our chickens. Well, maybe not the bats. Being citified, we're hoping that fence and various old-wifey controls will keep them enough at bay, but that isn't always how it works out.

Still, I don't think we'll shoot the moose.



*Actually, this is totally untrue -- they had to lock down the junior high in Moscow a few years ago because a moose was on the property.