Garden Prep

In the week between Christmas and New Years (known in more enlightened civilizations as the Octave of Christmas) school teachers do not have to work. This is why Uncle Adam was off for the week, and was available to help out with recovering the garden from last year and beginning the process of prepping it for next year.

We definitely have our work cut out for us.

Oh look who decided to join the party. The purple broccoli finally got around to doing something.

Pullip apart the trellises.

Now that the ground is soaked and loosened up, Ellie can pull the posts out of the ground (mostly) by herself.

Heave!!!!

And she got it!

When you are short you have to come up with innovative ways to get in and out of the gates that the tall people keep latching. Like carrying the little step ladder around with you wherever you go.

I do not think we will ever use this green netting for trellises again. It is next to impossible to get the been vines disentangled from it, and it is not biodegradable, so it cannot just be composted like the twine trellises can. Instead, we found that if you roll the whole thing up in a bundle and smack it on the ground as hard as you can, repeatedly, it does an okay job of knocking the beans out of it.

As we mentioned in the last post, the weather around here does not facilitate drying things very well, so the bean vines are quite soggy, but it still managed to get a bunch of the beans out on the ground. The chickens can eat them over the next few weeks.

The only thing that seems to like this weather is the peas. Some of them are trying to sprout in this picture, and some of the vines that were still on the trellis were actually in flower. I guess if the temp is over fifty, it’s time to make new peas.

Taking the soaker hoses out to put in storage.

The heavy part of the operation was moving the old chicken tractor onto the garden. This thing was an early design, from back before we even bought the farm.

It is heavy, the wheels are wobbly and waterlogged, and there is not enough ground clearance. But, if at first you don’t succeed…

Just apply more muscle.

Sorry about the blurry pictures. Ellie doesn’t know how to hold the camera still while taking a picture.

Now the three Dorking chickens (one rooster and two hens, Dorky, Dory and Dotty) are living in it helping to prep the garden and also (we hope) starting a family. Ideally we will stop collecting eggs from them around Ash Wednesday, and have a little gaggle of chickes around Easter.

It’s a theory, anyways.