How is your garden list of things to do for the week looking? I’m trying to be realistic, prioritise things and still have that goal of doing something for half an hour in the garden each day.  Hopefully we’ll be able to tick everything off the list over the weekend weather permitting.

Some tasks on the list;

1. The seed succession planting for this week, another punnet of borage, tomatoes, beetroot, peas and beans.

2. Setting out some teepees for the peas that are ready to go in the garden.

3. Replanting the Autumn Joy Sedum that Michael and I dug up and divided yesterday afternoon.

4. We still have some newly arrived fruit trees to plant out as well.

5. There is still the hothouse to work on and the fencing around the herb garden.

 

Honeybee as always is good company in the garden and follows me around, pottering about at my feet. Picking a bucket of weeds, herbs, and mustard greens for the hens in the big hen house is still a daily priority. Honeybee of course checks the full bucket before I give them to the hens, she does like to check for her favourites. Letting the weeds grow on and picking them for the hens before the weeds go to seed is working well. So important for the hens to have diversity in their diet with them not wanting to free range as much due to the colder weather. I wrote a blog post about collecting food for the hens and you can read it HERE

 

It developed into a very windy afternoon and gosh the hens really don’t like the wind, they tuck themselves into a sunny spot in the hen house where there is lots of protection from the wind. Honeybee isn’t a fan of the wind either, she either sits in her bath for hours at a time or she wants to be in her nighttime enclosure. On days like today we empty her bath early, she enjoys pottering amongst the puddles the empty bath water makes. It keeps her busy and distracted from the wind, keeping an eye on how full the bath is getting Honeybeee walks up the ramp to her bath and jumps in. With lots of practice she is good at estimating how deep the bath needs to be for a gentle landing and a bit of a splash. We leave the hose in the bath until it starts to overflow then she asks to have the sprinkler on her. It’s a funny routine that began we she was a duckling, between us we understand each other, it’s really very similar to communicating with a dog or a cat, certain prompts mean something relevant to a situation. With the bath settling and soothing her Honeybee is set for a couple of hours, in between napping she reaches over and grabs any greenery she can reach with her beak and puts it in the water.

Our initial potato crops are in, Michael planted some Nicola potatoes in a raised garden bed that we had well manured and mulched several weeks ago. We covered the rows of potatoes with some covers to prevent the frost from damaging any new growth that pops threw. Gosh the frosts this year have been brutal, I am reminded again and again that what pulls through and misses the brutal frost without a blemish is a garden bed full of plants or pocket of plants where there are different layers of low, medium and tall growing plants and trees. My neighbour always said that we need some hard frosts, it sweetens the ground, a theory handed down through generations of farmers in his family, it must be right.

Those Nicola potatoes haven’t been showing signs of new growth as much a I would have expected. Just like when I couldn’t understand why the garlic wasn’t sprouting and caught her grandmother Duckie eating the tender young garlic shoots, I caught Honeybee squeezing into the cold frames covering the newly planted Nicola potatoes. That duck! Honeybee being partial to a teeny tiny new potato had it all figured out. I on the other hand was totally oblivious to her goings on.

Happy gardening, hope you get to spend some peaceful time outside over the weekend.

Take precious care,

Jude x