Hot Damn! Spring is finally here! And no sign of snow in the forecast; isn't that a change of pace for a western Maryland kitchen garden! Easter weekend meant finishing up preventive maintance of all the power equipment and doing a good deep till today of the Food Patch and the tomato/pepper bed. I even managed to sneak in some early kale and chard seedlings into one end of that bed. The rest of the week is supposed to be rain so we'll have to wait a while to get in some onion sets, cauliflower and broccoli seedlings. And the strawberry sets are due in this week so we'll need to get those in soon too. I ordered 25 Sparkle and 25 Seascape from Johnny's. This cycle the strawberry bed will move to the center of the Patch. Sparkle is a classic June berry whereas Seascape is an ever-bearer used by many commercial operations. Between the two we hope to have a steady supply of strawberries all season; a large harvest of Sparkle in the spring and a smattering of Seascape the rest of the season. Of course that will have to wait until nest summer as this season will be taken up with bed establishment via picking off of all blooms to allow the plants to establish themselves for next year.
In other news, the girls were finally moved from their winter quarters by the Food Patch back over to their turf/pasture area. That part of the yard is till a bit sparse but the grass is beginning to green up and you could almost hear the chicken version of an "ahhhh" when we got them over there yesterday. Most likely we will need to move them every other day until the turf is completely back to full spring-time green but it is nice to finally get them back onto some semblance of turf. This week also will be the last flat of sprouted rye forage sprouts for them. That exercise was definitely worth the trouble and provided some much needed green forage through the depths of winter.
Hopefully Idun would be proud!
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