Sunny April days

The last few days have been gorgeous and warm, so we've been out in the garden. It feels so great to work in the warm sunshine – back in February I was sure it would never be warm out again. Silly.

Planting Lincoln peas (my favorite). C. places the brush trellis, I add the
soaker hose, and we plant a zigzag row on each side.

Over the last three weeks we got all the peas in. That's three long rows of Lincoln shell peas, and three of Cascadia snap peas. Oh, and there's an 8-foot row of Sugar Hearts, since we had some seed left from last year.

The next day, the chickens and guineas scratched out and ate one whole row of pea seed, so I replanted, and now the birds are confined to the chicken yard. I felt sorry for them, though, and put up a "chunnel" along one side of the garden fence so they can booble around and eat greens and bugs. Not peas, though. I'll get a photo of it. It's just a line of cedar 2x2s from an old deck railing leaned onto the fence and covered with chicken wire.

C. has a row of spuds in, as well as patches of spinach, lettuce, carrots and some other stuff. Some of the tomato seedlings in The Monstrosity (seed-starting set-up) have grown so big she's started potting them up and moving them to the greenhouse. We've got a heat cable out there, so it's pretty warm and they seem very happy. She started some squash seeds and some corn inside today.

I hauled three buckets of alpaca poo over from the barn for potting mix. C. adds compost, garden soil,vermiculite and some commercial potting soil. We've got lots of tomatoes to repot over the next few weeks, plus peppers and tomatillos and... We'll need lots.

Our (optimistic) last frost date is around May 15, and then there will be a mad rush to get everything in the ground.

I've been moving strawberry plants to the edges of the terraces so I can pick them from below. It beats the heck out of wallowing through a big patch of them.

I'm working on the watering system, laying down drip tape, drip hose or soaker hose as C. plants each area. The kids are coming up tomorrow, so I'm hoping they will help me get the irrigation manifold set up on posts, and I can start connecting the lines. I do have a secret fear that, like last year and the year before, my watering system will be a failure, and we'll be dragging hoses around – despite buying 1,000 feet of drip tape. We'll see. It is amusing to measure the beds for hoses – some are 37 feet long, some 43 and 24. We obviously did not lay the garden out on a grid, spaced for standard hose lengths. We just kind of did it. By eye, by golly, like good hippies. So it's a good thing we are doing a custom watering system.

C. is feeling poorly, her knee twinging and her right wrist still in a brace. She soldiers on, though I detect crabbiness on occasion.

Yesterday I ventured into the crawl space to turn the outside faucets on. (Surely, smart people such as ourselves could come up with a system accessible from the main floor, no?) It's complicated, even for those without MS. I drop a stepladder into the crawlspace under the new part of the building (circa 1955), creep down and close up the PEX line. Then I heave myself out, over to the old entryway and down into the old crawlspace (1936), past several beams to turn on the line. Then there is always some kind of problem (usually a frost-cracked line) and I turn it off and crawl back out, over to the new space to fix the problem and back to the old side to turn it on again. It's more tedious than it sounds, and I usually have some kind of meltdown, especially when my helper is listening to loud music instead of my hollers for assistance. Harrumph.

But I did prevail, and now the hoses work. No more hauling buckets of water to the big animals!

It's good. There is much to do. I'm tired.