A Straw Bale Exploded

Well, actually it just looks like one exploded all over the yard.
Straw bales are one of my favorite mulches as they are inexpensive and one of the best for hilling up potatoes. Today, however, the straw was spread over newly seeded beds of greens, butternut squash, tomatillos, and garlic. The tomatoes also received fresh mulch and the asparagus received worm castings.
In another part of the yard I added the other two sisters to the already planted squash: corn and pole beans.
I also weeded the side yard and tossed a bunch of greens to the chickens which were happy to receive them.

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Grass Be Gone


The front yard at our house has the best sun year round and all that is growing there is grass! Unless we had a cow it is not very edible. OK, the chickens will eat what is in the grass catcher after mowing but really how much grass can they eat?
So, the first patch of grass has been claimed in the goal of growing more edibles. Now the rest of the yard…

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Make Cooking Fun


Cooking is so much more fun when everything is prepped and ready to go. Actually it can make you feel more like a chef – even if you don’t have a sous chef and had to do all the cutting and grating yourself. Clockwise, the above ingredients shown are green beans (blanched), green onions, swiss chard, grated fontina, grated gruyere, red bell peppers, grated parmesan, pasta dough, leeks, and hiding behind the leeks are the shallots. Just off camera the Italian sausages are waiting.

The filling for the Butternut Squash Manicotti.

The Italian sausage filling for the other Manicotti.

The Béchamel sauce

The pasta sheets ready and waiting.

And I forgot to take any pictures of the final product, but it was good!

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Teasing Onions

Today I planted out lots of onions. How many? Don’t know. I started some onion seeds a long time ago. Last Saturday I also bought a six pack of onions. Today I decided that they all needed to go into the ground.

If you have ever planted onion seeds you know that they grow in a big clump. When they are about the thickness of a pencil you plant them in the ground. But, before they can go in the ground you must tease them. When the seeds are growing in a pot or a six pack they are growing very close together. To plant them in the ground with the proper spacing you must tease the roots apart and then plant each small plant in the ground.

I planted the seedlings around the herb bed. I surrounded the potatoes. I planted them around an empty bed.

Hopefully we will have lots of onions!

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Swarming Day

We had some uninvited guests arrive yesterday afternoon. Don’t get me wrong, I love bees but not when they are swarming! Actually they won’t really hurt you when they are swarming it just seems scary. They decided to take up residence in a bush in the yard. They are about a foot off the ground so I worried that the chickens would get into them and both bees and birds would not like the result.
      

The bees would probably have left our yard on their own but we worried that if they moved to an unsuitable place that someone would just call an exterminator. So we decided to have the bees removed from the yard. We called Backyard Bees and they sent one of their beekeepers out to take away the swarm. They will rehive the bees and find them a new home. I would love to have kept them but they said that the bees would have probably left and gone back to the bush. If I really want bees they will have to bring me another hive with bees that have been removed from another location.

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