Spring is hitting and I'm getting over my barren-winter gloom by observing, with glee, astonishment, and some delight, seeds that I'd forgotten I'd sowed coming up by the _thousands_. Not just the bulbs, but the salad-mixes I'm creating. I've got this sudden sea of fragrant green outside the kitchen door, and it's glorious every time I step out.
Not to mention I've actually got edibles!!
And we went and created this double-fencing concept as the new chookpen - I need them to create garden beds inside the dogpen, and the double fencing is to prevent the kelpies scaring the chooks into egg-bound - and it took me three days to realise we'd created 26-odd square metres of perfectly fenced garden space. So I'm madly sowing chook forage plants - green leafy things and seed-bearing things to reduce the cost of feed to us (sunflowers, amaranth, chard, kale, beet spinach), not to mention stuff we like eating - and plants that can take advantage of lots of sun and 6 metres of fencing.
So I spent most of a rather hot and sunny Sunday creating lovely little beds for beans and peas to grow up the fencing, and then created more nice beds for leaf amaranth and chard and some sunflowers I found from last year. Transplanted half-a-dozen warrigal greens - they're suddenly sprouting all over the place, as per my prediction, even though I didn't actually expect it to happen. It really IS unkillable. I will now never lack for the stuff. Yay :)
Corn and more amaranth (there's two varieties) are going in when I get in there during this weeks' evenings - love daylight savings starting early!!!! - and a nice gap for the tomatoes and eggplant and zucchini and cucumbers which are starting in the greenhouse and which will go in the first week of November.
That was about six hours of concentrated work, so for a break I dug over the established bed in the now-empty native garden (did I mention we moved ALL the chooks into the new pen? No?? We did that on the previous Friday) and planted carrots and beetroot (golden and stripey) and pumpkin.
Just to wind down, I put new soil in the beds around the verandah and scattered lots MORE salady leafy things, given their success (it took me three weeks to realise I'd put in rocket; it wasn't until it went to head and flowered that I realised what it was!!!).
I planned to end the day in the greenhouse, as I had the evening before, putting tomatoes and eggplant and zucchini and cucumbers (seeds) into pots, for transplanting in November. The potatoes I planted into sacks some weeks ago have gone berko, but a slight watering neglect means the carrots and beans and radishes and chinese leaves weren't doing as well as poss; not to mention the dormant chookseedmix in the soil had taken over somewhat. Saturday evening had sorted all that out and everything looking lovely. But Sunday ... I sort of ran out of puff :). Even though there's a kaffir lime and Maltese blood orange awaiting transplanting and just adoring the warm, humid, atmosphere, to the point where they're flowering and the smell is just _divine.
I love my greenhouse. My _lungs_ love my greenhouse. It's warm and cosy and smells of the earth, and it's soothing. But after about 8 hours, I was sort of over plants :)
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