With a Little Help from Our Friends

written by Yvonne

Spring is here! The peach blossoms are out and looking beautiful.

We started a very busy day by finishing up some tree trimming.  Tom wrapped up eradicating the monstrosity of a dead bush-tree along the fence line.  This was a two-weekend project.

It appears that we made the right decision to get rid of it because it was dead and hollow.

There is a bit more cleaning up to do here but this will now be part of the berry patch.  We purchased 2 raspberry, 2 blackberry, and 2 blueberry plants from the North Carolina Extension Service.  They are in the black buckets along the fence.  Hopefully next weekend we'll get them in the ground.  This area will be home to the raspberries and blackberries, while the blueberries will be next to the bee hives.

Tom took out this dead oak tree two weekends ago.  It will now be the location for the bee hives.

Olive and I posed for a picture so Tom could capture the new garden hat I made.  The fabric has different colored lettuce heads all over it.

As previously mentioned, the blueberry bushes will go next to the bee hives which means we had to find a new home for the compost bins.  Ugh!  I pulled the fencing off the piles and relocated them to a new spot in the yard.

The compost will now be along the back fence rather than along the side.  Unfortunately this spot will be in the shade which means it will take longer for the compost to break down.  But we figure it is more important for the bees and blueberries to get the sun they need rather than the compost.  Tom is testing out my bin configuration to see there is enough room for our NEW GARDEN CART.  It's SOOO much better than the wheel barrels we have - each of which got for free, and we'll still use, but this cart is great (a cart-release lever makes dumping sooo easy). Maybe one day Tom will quit playing with the cart and let me use it. You can tell he never had a wagon as a child.

Our friends Jen and Jill came over to take a look at the garden and to lend a hand.  They are starting gardens of their own and wanted to see our setup.  We put them to work moving compost right away.

We invited them both to bring their dogs for Olive to play with.  And boy did the dogs play!  Five in all chasing each other around the back yard and some of the time, through the garden.  More on this later.

Not sure they were all that interested in worm composting (see the look on Jill's face?), but it made for a good demonstration.  The yellow buckets in the background were full of food scraps he's been collecting all winter to feed to the worms. Yum! Here he is harvesting the worm casing from the worms.  We'll use this when we dig holes for the berry bushes.

Shredding newspapers is a part of the worm composting process too.  The gals and Tom had some laughs while tackling this job. Olive even joined in for good measure.

After getting everything ready everyone (including the dogs) headed to the worm bin.

Time to feed the worms.

Jen and Jill thought the food scraps looked good enough to eat.

We are inundated with collard and spinach so the gals harvest some greens for dinner.

The play date with Olive was fantastic.  All the dogs played and chased each other for hours. This was the ONE time four of the five of the dogs rested for a moment...

the fifth one headed for higher ground by hiding in our old, rusty wheelbarrow.