Gardening

Two weeks ago I locked myself out of the house while taking the dogs out. Not my finest moment.

The wife was at work, I was in pjs, and it was about forty degrees out. To keep myself occupied while waiting for wifey to get home (I had to kill an hour), I decided to take my twitter followers on a tour of my garden. I showed them everything that had wintered over - the blackberries, rhubarb, blueberries, and herbs.

Well, I finally got around to planting the rest of my garden, so I thought I'd share some pictures of the yard with you:

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Last year we planted 27 Roma tomato plants in just one and half of those 4x8 boxes. It was a little... crowded. We ended up getting well over 150 lbs of tomatoes, the vast majority of which we turned into salsa, tomato paste, and spaghetti sauce. This year we've cut back and diversified with broccoli, peppers, and more cucumbers.

A word about compost: I keep two separate compost bins. One is for leaves and kitchen scraps. This will be turned monthly and added to my garden in the spring. It does great things for the soil. The other compost bin is for particularly weedy grass clippings, weeds from the garden, and leaves from the areas in which we have poison ivy growing. I could use those stupid garden bags to get rid of that refuse, but that seems like a hassle.

I put clean (not a lot of weeds) grass clippings on my vegetables to help keep weeds down and the soil moist. I put wood chips on the blackberries, blueberries, rhubarb, and raspberries, as they are permanent plants.

On Monday, wifey and I did our first hive inspection. We didn't take any pictures of the inspection itself, but here are some of the bee yard:

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The girls were looking a little rough after the winter, but there was some brood in the frames and even a couple of frames of fresh capped honey. We put the top brood chamber on the bottom (because the queen works her way bottom to top as she lays eggs), and added the honey supers. Hopefully the extra room will encourage the queen to lay eggs like crazy and in a month we'll have a booming population.