A touch of spring was in the air yesterday – the sun was shining and the soil was thawing. And despite it being fairly chilly and quite blustery, it was time to get to work on the garden and henhouse!
In the morning, with freezing fingertips digging in the cold, damp soil, we planted 25 strawberry plants for our new strawberry patch and 4 different kinds of onions.
This is the June-bearing strawberry with which we have had so much success in the past. This year when the plants flower we will pinch off buds and let the plants get established so that they will bear more fruit next year.
We planted red, yellow, white an sweet onions. We put in about half of the sets for now – and we’ll follow up with a second planting in a couple of weeks so that our harvest will be spread out a bit more.
After lunch we quickly planted our spring seeds – lettuce, spinach, beets, carrots and 2 kinds of peas.
Last week our 20 new pullets arrived and are presently housed in our small barn – which soon will be needed for lambing. They’re quite happy there for now, but just today one of them laid their first egg, so they need to move in with the other layers very soon, which brought us to our other big project for the day.
Here’s a close-up of the new addition.
The old door will have to be taken off and relocated when the addition is finished.
Here are the nesting boxes, framed in.
And boarded up…
Speaking of boarding up, the boards are milled here on our property. The final project will have the board and batten finish, so right now there are even gaps between the boards.
Even with the gaps, these walls gave a nice refuge from the cold, driving wind yesterday!
When the battens are in place and the staining is done, it will look like this.
And a final view from across the pasture.
Today’s project was to bring the brooder box up from the barn to our basement – broiler chicks arrive on Thursday! It will be nice to have little chicks here in time for Easter!
Morning Star Meadows Farm 