A Sneak-peak at Spring
At last, we’re getting a break from the cold weather! At this point even average January temperatures seem really, really nice, and we’re thankful for them. We’ve had snow on the ground for a solid month now, but I think today’s rain, and the warm temperatures over the next week ought to finally send it packing. It puts us in the mind of Spring, so we’re doing garden planning today. Going through wish lists and seed stocks, consulting our seed catalogs, doing germination tests. It’s all very exciting!
Our goal for this year’s gardens is to do better than last year, which was better than the year before. We have certainly found that our chosen lifestyle needs to be viewed as an evolution. Each year we do a little better and add a little more, so that we’re always at the limit of our knowledge and capabilities, and we’re always ready to catch our breath when Winter arrives. And it’s still fun enough that before Winter’s half over we’re excited to start planning for the coming Spring and Summer. Here are some of the things we’re excited about this coming Spring:
Our bees (throughout the region, actually) did very poorly last year. We lost one hive completely, and would have lost the other if we hadn’t re-queened in the Fall. That hive seems to be doing well though at last check (a few days ago), so I expect it to make it through the Winter. We intend to get two more hives this Spring, one of them being, in name at least, Tretan’s. And at least one of the hives we intend to be a Kenyan top-bar hive (and picture here), rather than the typical Langstroth-style hive.
We’re expanding the gardens a little this year, doing more beans and peas, more lettuce, more herbs. We’re adding an asparagus bed, and starting the front yard flower and herb gardens (the intent is to turn that entire half of our front/side lawn into gardens). Our new Juneberry shrubs will be starting to grow, so no crop this year, but it’ll be exciting to see growth. We’re hoping to have a better grape crop this year, and will remember to cover the vine if we get a late frost again — we had a bumper crop started last year, and lost it. And we’re hoping to start more fruit trees and shrubs up the hill. We’re also planning to start raising some mushrooms this year.
We want to get the rabbits moved out of the current rabbitry in one side of the outbuilding, adjacent to the chicken coop, into a freestanding gazebo-type rabbitry, and we want to keep working at improving the litter size and survival. So far, the rabbits have not been anywhere approaching cost effective for us, but we’re hoping that once we get it all dialed in they will be. And on the chicken front, we’re excited that, with the arrival of Monkeyshines, the rooster, we’ll be able to raise our own chicks this Spring, rather than ordering them. We’re very interested to see what sort of babies we’ll end up with, and what color eggs the eventual new hens will lay. Currently we have white leghorns (white eggs), buff Orpingtons (light brown eggs), speckled Sussex (creamy brown eggs), and Ameraucanas (blue-green eggs). The rooster is a Delaware (hens lay brown eggs). So we got us a little genetics experiment coming up!
So that’s our Spring sneak-peek. Spring is a vibrant and exciting time around here, and there will be plenty of natural excitement in addition to our cultivated excitement. In fact another goal for the coming year is to do more wild food harvesting. Gabriel’s old enough now that it’ll be much easier to get both boys out regularly for hiking and collecting trips.
Finally, we’re hoping to have lots of visitors again this coming year. It was so much fun to have friends and relatives staying with us several times this last year, and we are officially inviting all of our friends and relatives to visit.
Mokeyshines working it