Today began with some kitty lovin's. These are barn babies, caught last week, along with their feral momma. Momma got spayed and is safely back in her barn, happy and healthy. Now we are making the kittens friendly; they'll be spayed/neutered, and adopted out.

Donna's rose garden by the house looks spectacular!

And the lavender is starting to bloom already! A bit early this year. It never grows very well for us, but we have a few nice bushes that overwintered well.

Here's a photo of one of Maggie's lasagna beds, in the early phases. I take big cardboard boxes (of which we get many!) and flatten them, and lay them in thick layers on the ground. On top, we pile all kinds of organic matter: old hay, weeds, compost, trimmings, horse manure,leaves, bedding from Maggie's rabbit's litterbox. I usually am working on the beds to be planted next year, but you can also plant directly into it the first year. The soil quality is wonderful, no tilling is involved, and weeds are minimal.

Here's another project in the works: mulching around all our fruit trees (three peach, one plum, two pears and two apples) and planting perennial herbs and flowers around the bases. This will provide extra food for our bees, and make orchard mowing and maintenance much easier.

This is Beatrice, our first bee hive! She is doing well... Currently the Beatrices are enjoying the roses, lavender, and alexander. We installed two new hives on local farms a few days ago. Catherine is at Picket Fence Creamery, and Diana is at Raccoon Forks Farm in Redfield.

And last but certainly not least, we had a major Barn Cleaning Event today! Removing junk, sorting, and reorganizing. A very dirty dusty job (achoo!) but it's more spacious and clean now!

Maggie and Donna took advantage of the near-70 degree temps on Thursday to work on the lasagna garden. This doesn't look like much in the picture, but it's a nice thick layer of bunny poo/bedding, topped with old hay. Next two layers will be composted horse manure and some leaves.

We spotted Elisabeth, one of our semi-feral rescued barn cats from P.E.T.S, checking out our progress as we cleaned old hay out of the barn (her home).

a few photos of the straw bale/lasagna garden experiment. Planted tomatoes in the lasagna part, and will be planting in the rest of the straw bales (peppers and tomatoes) early next week.

So. After a couple of weeks of super-shop-busyness, we finally managed to get out in the garden and get some stuff planted. On May 14th. Frost-free date for our area is May 15th. May 16th - yeah. Almost had frost. Mother Nature has a wacky sense of humor....fortunately all the plants survived the cold temps. What's MORE of a problem now is the massive gusting winds we have had for a few days. That's really hard on the new little plants, especially combined with temps in the mid 80's. All we can do is keep them watered, and wait.....


We're trying some new things in the PLH garden this year. My mom's house needs a new septic system (groan) and it's going to have to go right in our biggest, oldest, main herb bed. *sigh* at first we were majorly freaking out about this. But then, after thinking and looking, we decided that it was a good thing. The bed had gotten weedy and really needed to be totally overhauled anyway. So we decide to simply tranpslant the few plants we really wanted, and have a much smaller, more compact, and hopefully easier-to-care-for herb bed this year. That's the plan, so....let's hope it works out that way!

So here we have, left, a beginning of a straw bale garden. This is six bales...I have 20 more being delivered today. I'm going to grow all my veggies (tomatoes, peppers, spinach and swiss chard) in it. They are just for personal use, so if the whole experiment is a failure, I'll just rely on the farmer's market and our local CSA. Right next to the straw bales is the beginning of a lasagna garden. It sounds really easy in the books. Just put down a layer of old newspapers or flattened cardboard boxes, then pile layers and layers of compost, mulch, wood ash, peat moss, etc. up, and plant your garden right in the layers. However, hauling wheelbarrowload after wheelbarrowload of all that stuff gets old...so I'm hoping the results are worth it. I have more pictures of the bed in progress - I'll try to post them all after it's finished.



Yesterday we employed the Automatic Lawn Mowers. They're very happy to be hard at work. :)

We also fenced off a large portion of the PLH acreage - the section behind and to the south of our shop. Donna's six mini horses need alot more pasture than they had, so we're trying to accomadae their needs. While cutting down on mowing at the same time - awesome!

And here's your gratuitous cute kitty pic. Violet LOVES this weather - she is naturally shy and cautious by nature, but when the weather allows us to leave the shop door open she gets brave and wanders outside to see what's happening in the big wide farm world.