Out with the old, in with the new

written by Yvonne

Here lies the last of TYs winter lettuce, turnips, carrots (all two of them) and parsley. There is a nice harvest of spinach but this is not the last of it.  We'll keep the spinach growing in the garden as long as possible.

As all good gardeners do, we started the spring season by planning out what seeds we'll sow in each area of the beds.  We kept the following tips in mind:

• what plants are good companions to one another
• when will each type of seed be planted
• when will produces be harvested
• the height of climbing/tall plants (peas, bean, cucumbers, tomatoes, okra)
• the sprawl of sprawling plants (squash, melons)

Due to the dog, bees, and such, we are not planning to build more boxes this year.  We'll work the four we have, plus a few patches in the yard, as well as some pots for herbs and flowers.  However, in addition to the bees, we will be adding another new item to the "farm" this year - berries.  Tom's been itching to get berry busies planted since we moved in.  We just put an order in to the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service of Mecklenburg County (geez that's a long title) for blueberry, raspberry, and blackberry plants. We'll go pick them up at the office of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service of Mecklenburg County (heehee) in two weeks.

You may not be able to read this, but this is TYs spring garden plan...

and this is summer.














Beekeeper Tom has been doing well in bee school.  He's half way through the 8-week program and is learning a LOT.  His head runneth over with bee knowledge.  Saturday was a bonus class specifically about equipment.  He came home and promptly began assembling brood boxes and covers.  (It was a bit too cold Saturday evening to work outside so the floor of the den worked quite well.)

Plus he had an audience and lots of help.  Here, Olive supervises with an a string from Barkley (the blue toy) hanging from her mouth.

Maizie approves of this size box.  She wanted to test it out and make sure it was big enough to house 3 pounds of bees. She appropriately decided it was perfect for a queen. She should know, right, Queen Maizie?

Olive holds down the cord to the drill.

Sunday morning we took Olive for her first group hike at Reedy Creek Nature Center.  There were seven dogs and owners plus Turk.  We had a great time and Olive did too.  I didn't bring my camera but several people did.  They all got really good pictures of the dogs climbing on rocks and playing with one another.  If I can, I'll add them to the next post.

After the hike we came home and got working on cleaning out the boxes to get the ready for the new season.

Tom added leaves to the till into the soil.

He pulled out our old friend the Mantis tiller.  What a work horse this thing is.  Totally worth the money.

Because we have a few sections in each box with still-growing produce (garlic, collards, spinach), Tom had to carefully till only the areas where new seeds will be planted without disturbing the plants.  He did a great job!

I harvested a few more sprigs of parsley for dinner last night, then pulled the rest out.  Since parsley is an herb, I assumed it would die at the first sign of cool weather - like all the other herbs.  Who knew it would grow year round?  Nonetheless, it was time to pull it up and make way for some spring crops.

Apparently most veggies don't like being near potatoes so we'll use the same area we used last year - now called the 'potato patch'.  However it seems that potatoes and onions ARE good neighbors so we'll plant our onions with the potatoes and see what happens.  This will be our first attempt at onions.  The Mantis tiller not only tilled the ground, but by reversing the tines, Tom was able to get it to chew up all the monkey grass that bordered the patch.  (Wish he would have figured out that trick last summer before I dug up an entire bed of that stuff with a shovel.)

and TYs Spring garden has begun!