Milestones, and real successes

First off, before I get into the meat of my post, I should take a moment to celebrate a bit of a milestone.  I was fairly close before my long hiatus, but today I finally hit a whopping 75,000 page views! It is quite an accomplishment since I had recently switched from my old hosting site (thanks Judy for all you did to start my blogging "career") and I'm quite certain I was over this mark there. I can't count the times I crashed her host service or made them make her pay more for the hits back when the infamous potato bin article hit on the Seattle Times.  My old photo hosting site even booted me AFTER I stopped blogging since it was so popular. Silly people.  Anyway, I celebrated with my eldest son this morning as we crossed over a bit of a milestone.  He thought it was cool.

Now for the real success of the day.  After ditching the kids my wife and I had the house to ourselves.  That allowed me to convince her to help me weed the garden beds.  We got to try out the stirrup hoe for real and found it not as useful as I'd hoped.  The broad fork was much better at bringing up clumps of weeds.  You may recall what the beds looked like before we started...

I shudder to think how bad this looks.  But a lot of elbow grease later, we had really accomplished something.

As you can see above, the process was to dig up the weeds in big swaths, knock some of the dirt off, then throw it into the wheelbarrow.  It wasn't as fast as we'd hoped, but it went fast enough. Many hands make light work.  I'm so proud of my wife for helping me.  I couldn't have done it without her.

Hehe, she just got a laugh out of my comment that out of 524 posts she finally made it on my blog.  Well, 525 is the charm they say, or do they?  Well, as you can see, the 11 foot bed is all done, and she pretty much tackled the entire 5 foot bed by herself.  Way to go dear!

You can see next to her the broad fork, or short pitchfork or whatever it's called.  It worked wonders to move it along.  At least it did until we had a bit of a casualty.

Poor broad fork, you served me well.  I'm hopeful I can find a replacement handle, maybe one that's metal and will hold up better, but I was in the middle of my 4 foot bed and prying up on the edge when it happened.  Oops.  It still worked well enough, but I want to fix it, or at least replace it.  Quite the handy tool. It helped us get to about here with only two wheelbarrows full of dirt and weeds. That's when my wife went inside to nurse a wound.

While she was inside, I unloaded the second of three wheelbarrows into the chicken run.  I was too tired to unburry the doors so they'd open large enough for a wheelbarrow to fit inside, so I ripped a hinge off the bottom of the left hand door.  Oh well, it still works for now. I'll fix it later.

The dirt probably has some bugs in it for the girls too, and if you can see the gaps under the footings, the dogs have been digging their way in. I need to beef up the protection, especially when the new chicks arrive.

But don't the beds look nice after all our hard work today?

We got three of the four beds done in about two hours.  I'm so pleased even though I know we didn't do as thorough of a job as we needed to.  As my commentators said, it's going to be a long slog to rid myself of weeds after letting the beds get that bad.  I think tomorrow after we finish I'll pick up some black plastic to put over the beds for a few weeks while the seeds germinate and seedlings grow and harden off before removing and planting.  Does that sound like a good plan or is it a pipe dream to think it will help?

I bet you never saw someone so happy about weeding, but I haven't had my garden looking this good in a year.  And no, I don't weed other people's gardens, hehe. I can't wait to finish up tomorrow. Hopefully I'll even be able to start some seeds.  And yes, I realize I'm way behind the curve.

Oh, and I love comments, so please talk to me.

Amazing weather, amazing progress!

Well, all it took was for me to post how bad our weather was on the first day of spring and presto! the weather improved.  As of 7 PM on Friday it's still a balmy 47 degrees and sunny.  Quite the change from the last few days.  What's more, this weekend is expected to be amazing.  I can't wait to get out there and tackle that weeding problem.  My brother over at Urban Homestead WA was just saying he isn't going to plant quite yet for fear of another late April cold snap.  Well, any long-time reader of this blog knows I have hoop covers on all my beds in case that happens. If I can get those beds weeded, then I can feel comfortable starting my spring greens, better late than never.

I was very encouraged by my post about my weed problem.  I was so excited to get home and try out my stirrup hoe that I didn't even change clothes.  Mostly I didn't bother because the sun was going down and we had company coming over.  So out I ran in my slacks and dress shoes to grab the hoe.  Quick like a bunny I raced to the bed.  This is where I'd left off after a half hour of grueling hand weeding.

Actually it was just the light colored dirt at the bottom that I got done earlier.  The rest I did in less than a minute with the stirrup hoe.  In case you're wondering what the heck one is, I took a quick snapshot of this miraculous device.

With it, I did in two minutes what took me a half hour last week. 

 I stopped only to come in and finish up dinner.  Sure I lost more dirt than I would like, but I did shake it off a bit before dumping it in the bin.  Besides, that bin went into the coop run, and I can use all the dirt I can get in there, the girls have dug it up something fierce with their dust baths.  What's the worst that could happen, weeds growing in the run, they would just eat them.  Hehe.  I'm so happy, I could have

Oops, you can see my gardening clothes.  Which reminds me, if anyone has a stressful job, 5 minutes in the garden at the end of the day does wonders to take the load off.  It has always left me clear headed and energized.  I've forgotten how good gardening feels.

Enjoy the first weekend of spring, what's your weather like?

July 11, 2011

Wow, it's been a bit since I posted, so I'm throwing one together tonight.  It's going to be brief however, since we're going camping for the first time this season and I won't be around to do anything about my garden for a few days.  Such is life as everything's bolting.

Speaking of everything bolting, today's post is kind of about it.  Since I'm horrible at weeding, we've had massive weeds growing up. Not so much the dandelions, even though we do have some of those, but others I can't name. 

The good news is that these weeds are very popular with the chickens.  Not only do they eat the leaves, but sometimes they'll actually pick apart the stems.  Very cool.  Even cooler is when I pull one out, roots and all, and stick them through an upper portion of the chicken wire in the arc.  It ends up hanging down into the arc and the girls have a blast pecking away at it. I've even seen them jump to reach a higher leaf.  Chicken TV!  Anyway, here's my little guy feeding weeds to the chickens.

You can see  the girls have a field day with the weeds.  If only I could be confident that they'd only eat the weeds if I let them loose in my strawberry patch, where there are weeds growing up along the fence line something fierce.  I've just got to take 15 minutes a day and weed.  It worked in our front yard when I used a weed popper to basically clear our yard of weeds a few years ago.

Fast forwarding to today, I was deep watering the garden for the camping trip bumping up against a 7 foot tall mustard green plant, dropping yellow leaves and who knows what seeds into the fall garden, when I had an idea.  I ripped it out, knocked some of the dirt off the root ball and stuffed it into the chicken coop.  It took up most of the space and the girls went to town!

And here's the girls munching away on it.

It's a good thing they love weeds as they're grass foraging has been curtailed since I finally mowed the back yard.  I hadn't really needed to since they do a pretty good job keeping the grass short.  Frankly I wouldn't have cut it except there are places I just can't put the arc. hehe.

So, what are you doing with all your weeds? Composting them? Putting them in your yard waste? Or feeding them to your chickens? I love comments and will be confirming them while I'm away assuming I get cell service.

Enjoy your garden!