Bess is back in business!
Eggs from top:
We had a bumper crop of hops this year and today we enlisted our beer-brewing friends to help us with our harvest. We only got about half of them off the vines before giving up, but we still managed to fill at least one whole 50-pound chicken feed bag full.
chicken eat hops? do you get beef flavored chicken?
nope. egg-flavored beer.
It turned into a beautiful day to be out in the yard planting seeds and cleaning up.
In the parking strip beds, I planted two rows of garlic with the overwintered leeks — Italian White and Silver Rose garlic. At the other end of the strip, where we transplanted the arugula and kale last fall, I added some leftover (and rather old) Sylvetta Arugula seeds, just to ensure the batch would get going. Last year’s parsley plant’s seeds have begun sprouting there too. Our neighborhood friends gave us curly-leafed kale, which I also added to the straggly old kale.
In the beds inside the front yard, I added chard plants to the bed of chard, broccoli, and cauliflower. The same friends gave us their extra plants, so we should have a good crop this spring. The cold frames were very dry and the cauliflower looked great, but the broccoli was straggly and slug-eaten. The lettuce and cabbage cold frame is fairly pathetic — I added some snow peas and we’ll see what comes of that.
I also spent a good deal of time cleaning up the herbs and the flower bed near the chicken coop, giving the chickens plenty of chaff to spread around their run and keep them excited.
The view hanging out our bedroom window — some things usually get edited out of photos.
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