Squeezing In a Garden Post

Since my Grand Canyon Journal posts will take some time, I am going to squeeze in posts between my normal Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule with more current activities, starting with this one of our garden on the farm. It has been a very cold and wet spring thus far and just two days before this photo, we actually had some snow. Needless to say, it hasn't been good gardening weather thus far with the exception of this past weekend. We drove down to the farm and the southern 1/4th of our east garden was dry enough to till. The rest of the east and all of the west garden were still way too wet yet. So I fired up the tiller and we quickly planted three rows of peas and marked them with dried out asparagus shoots from the bed I was standing in when I took this picture. Other than that, there wasn't a lot we could do. The three pear trees that were living last fall are putting on buds but the two plumcots and the sour cherry that died last summer are all barren of new buds. We'll give them another few weeks and then try and replace them this year. All were somewhat insured so it shouldn't cost us more than time to replace them.

Below is a shot from inside the new greenhouse (which I have yet to put siding on) of some string bean plants. Since this is our first year with a greenhouse, we are taking things slow and seeing where and what we would like to do with the space. I installed a solar light and bought a 35 gallon barrel which I filled up with water about 8 gallons at a time using two five gallon buckets. It took only four trips so it wasn't terribly time consuming to do and probably easier than stringing out all the hoses to do the same thing. Long term, we would like to perhaps experiment with rain collection to eliminate that need altogether.