Yay…the black raspberries are a comin’! You stop watching them long enough, boom! they start to turn.

Pretty sure these are the last of the strawberries

Even then blueberries are coming along

And last night we had a salad that consisted entirely of vegetables from the garden. Pak choi, peas, onions and broccoli.

Lots of things have been growing on (hee hee), but I guess I didn’t realize it had been that long. So lets play another round of catch up….

Last of the strawberries

Lettuce from the lower garden, then transplanted into the upper garden

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Peas

Errybody loves peas

I left a few leeks in the garden…not so much for seed, but just to see the giant flower

Black Tomato

Beans

Carrots

Clematis

Overwintered Leeks

Cilantro

Pick Axe works just as well as a Hoe

Cucumber

Cucumber

Strawberries – Day Nine

Blue Berry Blend Tomato

Garlic

Caprese Salad w/ First Tomato & Basil from Garden

Lower garden ready to be planted. Sagan picking Peas…whether they’re ready or not

Volunteer Heirloom Roma Tomato from last year

Visitor in the ‘water feature’

Potato Kitty

Anyone else see his heart?

Very busy and productive weekend in the gardens. Tomatoes finally getting transplanted. Beans, peas, onions and carrots going in…pictures tomorrow .
And speaking of carrots, the following picture is what it looks like after you plant your carrot seed, go inside the house and a bad chicken decides to take a dirt bath in the same carrot bed.

I replanted the carrots… after fixing the bed, but not before throwing a hanger out the window at chicken while yelling.
Yeah, I’m 12…

The first planting of carrots we did was much earlier this year when the hoop house was still up. We’re just now harvesting those carrots.

We also started the “gosh, it grows so well, you can’t kill, and it looks so cool” Swiss Chard.
Unfortunately, it tastes like dirt. I’m up for any new recipe anyone has for Swiss Chard. I wanna like. I can grow it in between the cracks of our rock wall, so we’ve got the growing part if it down.
I just transplanted half the crop to the front flower bed 1) for looks and 2) for neighbors to help themselves. (The chard is on the far left in the first picture.)

Yay for us!!! We finally get strawberries. Not like I got to eat one or two, but like “holy crap, go get me another container”. We all were able to snack as we, (I mean I) picked, had some for breakfast, and still have some left for strawberry rhubarb bars ( see below).
And don’t forget, We’ll have to pick again tomorrow. Yay!!

Day One

Day Three

Day Six

And…we finally have rhubarb. We probably had it last year, but the chickens kept getting in the bed and leveling it…so honestly, I just didn’t bother. But screw’em this year, fencing up, and plenty of rhubarb. Thought about making a pie, but my neighbor sent me her rhubarb crumb top bar recipe…much better idea

I’m not sure when it was, maybe late March, early April, but we were in Sam’s club and we were wondering around and I saw a bag of seed potatoes for sale. Probably one of the few times I’ve been swayed to purchased something due to packaging. Simple brown gift type bag with very clear images of what was inside….must…have…now. In the cart it went. Of course the Adirondack Blue variety of potato on the cover didn’t help.
Anywho (take a breath), we got them planted today…yay.
Most of the potatoes I cut up into quarters and set out for a few days. Some were fairly small so I just left them whole ( as the photo will show).

The strawberries, which for the first 2 years were basically food for the bleepn’ bleepn’ chipmunks. They’d wait for the strawberry to be almost ripe, take a big bite and then leave the rest of berry as one more middle finger to the stupid humans. So in the fall/winter of 2011, I said no more…well…I actually said many other things ( go ahead, take few guesses).
We moved all the the strawberries to a raised bed on the opposite side of the upper wall garden. We bought more plants as well as were given plants from our neighbors cool front yard strawberry patch ( thanks Natalie 🙂
And then….we put a lid on it! Boom! Climb, chew, crawl your way through that, you cheeky little bastards…stay out of my fracking strawberries.
Lets just say I got berries last year and we were able to eat and make jam.
The first picture is from last year.
The next picture is one of our 3 covered strawberry “patches”.

This is the first strawberry of the season!!

We have been working on our asparagus patch for the last six+ years. It was in the upper garden for the first 4-5 years. They were barely even producing enough to snack on…they were also planted right in the middle of the upper garden. So, we dug them up and transplanted them to the raised bed garden along the wall of the upper garden. (With the exception of one plant that got left behind…and it grows just fine).
It took two years for the transplants to settle in but they are now doing great and we are finally able to harvest enough to snack off, and have with dinner … Yay!

Earlier this year I cleared out the the other side of the bed and planted 20 new plants.

yes…it has been while.  the onslaught of seed catalogs has been fun for a bit, but then, like everything, it just turn to work.  but, i not only placed my order, i have received my seeds from Bakers Creek Heirloom Seeds.  I waited too long and of course, they were out of the Blue Berry Blend Tomato…check it out…

so much odds and ends have gone on since the end of fall, but for now, i would just like to share that we lost another chicken.  poor, Maple.  the red tailed hawk lurking around for days finally won.  only a large pile of her feathers were left.  she was so sweet.  she was the only americauna we had that laid blue eggs.

this is around the same time last year that we had to fortify the chickens and build them a run to the lower garden and enclose them for a month or two until the trees and shrubs began to green up. so, today we built them a run down the hill so the hawk cannot grab another girl.  the chickens are a little confused, but i’m thinking aren’t they aways …and this way i still get eggs, not feathers

the run end into a 18’X 18′ enclosure that can hang out in.

Flo picked a bad time to molt.  With night temps in the high 20’s/low 30’s, i felt like i should knit her a scarf.  all the ameriacanas are also molting, which currently means no eggs from them.  only light brown and dark speckled brown eggs.

i finally was able to get the garlic in the ground (last week).  i mostly planted “chesnok red”… probably because it was what i had left in storage, and it was starting to sprout.  i also planted “spanish roja”.  they are both hardneck types, but the only the “roja” is an heirloom.

if you look closely, you can see the tips of the garlic in their rows

i covered the planted garlic with finely shredded leaves, and then a covering of straw

of course, you can not forget the chicken protection.  a bale of straw is like chicken crack.  they go nuts scratching at the straw.  i put down plastic fencing on top of the straw and then use a few pieces of hard plastic tubing to hoop over and keep everything in place.  that way when, and it will happen, the girls venture to the upper garden, they do not destroy the planted garlic.

as you can see, more leaves found their way in to the garden and over the garlic (and everything).  i’ll remove the top layer of leaves in the spring, and some of the straw, leaving the plastic cover as long as possible.  basically, before the garlic grows up through it.

here’s most of the upper garden put to rest for the winter