Spring has come early to the homestead. This past winter seemed longer then normal…It was actually quite mild. But after the cold summer and cold wet fall we had last year, we are very ready for spring!
Saturday we spent some time getting the yard cleaned up. There is a raised bed in the front yard that had a yew tree planted by the last owners. I’ve never liked it much. I also don’t like having toxic plants around kids or pets. The tree had also sprolled out and taken over the garden bed. So it was time to get it out. Dh fired up his chain saw and got it out of there. Now I need to decide what to replace it with. I’m thinking about a mock orange shrub I love the smell of them.
I also dug up all the garlic from the garden. Last year it rained so much in the fall the garlic bulbs were very soft and mucky. The would have rotted if we harvested them. So we decided to let them over winter in the gardens. They did very nicely to. With the nice weather, they had grown up 3 to 4 inches. I dug them up and carefully pulled each clove apart, each had a nice set of roots growing already. The day was getting on so tucked them into buckets and into the greenhouse.
Making rows for the garlic.
Sunday we had a lot of rain so we had to wait until mid Monday to till the garden. Luckily the ground had been very dry so the rain didn’t turn the soil to muck. By the time we were finished planting we had done 17 rows, 35 feet long each. There is still a few handfuls of cloves left over. I’ll tuck them into the garden here and there. Maybe in the flower gardens as well.
In the next day or two I hope to get the onion sets in. Then start the seedlings in the greenhouse.
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[...] Our first crop to get in the gardens is garlic. We planted this last year but couldn’t harvest it. We had so much rain in the fall the bulbs were mushy. Left them to over winter and they came up nicely this spring. So we needed to transplant them. [...]