
The usual view of the garden. Spreading leaves on the new placed onion sets in the garlic, Aerron in the white top, Robin way back at the spreader in the red shirt, loading leaves.

Cherries slowly developing on our trees. this was one of the few trees to have any cherries and there are not many here. They are young trees only about three years in the ground here.
We are now well into spring planting in our vegetable gardens. The weather has been mostly warm enough over the past month though overnight temperatures have been a bit cool. A lot of vegetables respond well to these temperatures including peas, lettuce and spinach. The fall planted garlic is growing very well and we have planted onion sets in the spaces between the three row garlic beds. Once the onions are all in, we will plant melon seeds between garlic rows so that each bed of garlic will have a row of melons. The garlic was well covered in leaf mulch in the fall. That mulch was raked back to plant the onion sets which were then covered with leaves and the melons will be seeded, one melon seed every foot or so by just making a hole in the mulch to expose the ground beneath. By the time the melon vines are starting to run, the onions will be well established and starting to get bulbs, and the garlic will be harvested. This is a new method that we are trialing. We think it should work, hopefully it will work well.

The garlic with onion sets planted between the beds.

The onion sets between the garlic beds. The mulch is thicker on the garlic.

One of the onion sets growing between the garlic.
We do have rhubarb, green onion, mints and plenty of wild greens all growing quite well and being harvested. The wild greens include lettuce, nettle, dandelion, garlic mustard, lambs quarters and more. The wild greens are not usually considered to be vegetables, just weeds. But though they are nuisance weeds they are also perfectly good nutritious vegetables. It is all in the definition. Weeds are anything growing where you don’t want it to and vegetables are anything that is eaten.

A nice patch of stinging nettle. It grows wild and is a bit of an invasive species though easily eradicated.
Our chickens are still locked inside all the time because we are trying to avoid the Avian flu. We are complying with Canadian Food inspection (CFIA) recomendations. The chickens are not too happy about that, nor are we. It costs us more in feed to keep them inside. About 25 to 30 percent more. Feed costs are also up about 30 percent over last fall. But for now we are still maintaining our egg prices at $5.00 per dozen for both the chicken and the duck eggs. We now have a cooler (an old chest freezer), parked near the road at the end of our laneway, which is kept stocked with eggs for sale.

The chickens a little startled by the flash and wondering just what the photographer is up to.

Just a nice looking hen. This breed of chicken is known as a Welsumer having originated in the Dutch village of that name.
We finished planting all the onion sets yesterday and got three more rows of potatoes planted as well. There are just 10 more rows to be planted now but mid-July we’ll have another several rows of potatoes to go into the ground. Some of the tomatoes have been transplanted. Much more needs to be done.

A potato plant just a few days out of the ground

A pea plant slowly but steadily growing.

A lettuce slowly growing