Spring is Here!

Saturday we had an absolutely gorgeous spring day; sunny with highs in the mid-60s. We did lots of spring-time activities, too.

Our day included a trip to Woodward, to visit Picket Fence Creamery to stock up on milk, hamburger and eggs; Prairieland Herbs, to buy handmade soap and furniture polish; and to Northern Prairie Chevre, where we bought tons of artisan goat cheese, including feta, parmesan and manchego.
I like buying as many products as I can from local farmers and craftspeople and these stops certainly fit the bill.
After a delicious lunch of eggs w/goat cheese and spinach, dumpster bread and dumpster tangerines, we headed outside to start work on our raised bed garden. We worked up the soil, added some compost from the bin we started last summer and planted cold-tolerant crops, including two different kinds of lettuces, swiss chard, radishes and carrot.


A great surprise was Sarah's discovery that our vermicomposting worms are still alive! We thought we'd killed them by leaving their bin outside too late this fall. So now the worms are happily eating yesterday's cabbage scraps and a couple of old bagels.
We now have two active compost bins made from garbage cans and our vermicomposter.

Next on the agenda is building another raised bed garden and adding a strawberry bed. There used to be an old carriage house behind our house. Sometime in the recent past, that was torn down and a new garage was built off to the side. Unfortunately, no one every dug out the old foundation of the carriage house and doing so doesn't fit in our budget right now. So this area is where we're building our raised beds.


We plan to take down these two trees, so we have enough sunshine for the raised beds. We want to plant two dwarf apple trees to take their place.












I'm sad that this big, old soft maple tree will have to come down, too. In trimming some branches last year we noticed that the whole trunk and the major branches are hollow, creating a dangerous situation. In the sunshine that will be created by its loss, we plan to reclaim a lot of the side yard and turn it into garden space.




















Other great news: Our three Freecycle peonies survived the winter! Peonies are notoriously difficult to transplant. We received these and a bunch of other perennials in June of last year and didn't get any of them planted until July or so. I'm delighted they made it!