The one-hour-a-day gardening project continues and my partner and I worked 15:45 hours in the last sixteen days, although the season’s total average is still only at 0:36, so I need to pick up the pace! These last two weeks have been busy with weeding, establishing more beds, and harvesting.
These Last Weeks
My hybrid kale-mustard has gotten out of hand and bolted with the hot temperatures, so I cut back and weeded the plot aggressively. Other raised beds had been neglected and they got some attention to clean out the excess weeds. My partner spent some of her weekend weeding the kohl rabi and chard plots, which now look much better.
Springtime is when we eat leaves, summer and fall is when we eat fruits, and winter is when we roots, generally speaking. This year’s crop of blackcap raspberries is looking good in our “berr-ea” (berry+area). We also planted strawberries in a new bed with newspaper sheet mulch covered by straw. This time we chose June-bearing varieties instead of ever-bearing ones because it is easier to have a short harvest window instead of a meager crop all summer.
Although not strictly part of the garden, the bees are doing well and we’ve expanded our single hive that survived the winter into four hives. Most of our new queens hatched successfully, but one did not, so we’ll have to get fresh brood into the queenless hive. One of our chickens was attacked by a raccoon a month ago and she has made a full recovery: the laceration on her side has healed and feathers have regrown. She seems to have a full range of motion.
And finally, we’re beginning to put up food for the winter. Generally I try to avoid freezing things because it requires a huge amount of energy to keep things that cold for so long, but greens, such as the mustard picture below, do best when frozen. I also dehydrated some to make mustard powder to add to pasta dough and soups, but freezing is really the best option for us right now. I’ll have a post outlining this process coming up next week.
Daily Hours
We averaged 59 minutes a day in the last two weeks.
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