Six eggs in one day

I feel a little bit like the little tailor of fairy-tale fame, but today marks the first day all six layers have left us an egg on a single day.  I may need to plan a quiche for next week.

18 Feb two varieties of lettuce

Quick note: put two varieties of lettuce seeds on the prepared dirt in three boxes.  Used Burpee Salad Bowl and Ferry-Morse Grand Rapids that were in my refrigerator over the winter.

Lovely day for hanging out the laundry.

15 Feb planting peas

In garden box 4, I worked in fallen leaves, then set up tomato cages and planted green (English) peas around those (American Seed Green Arrow variety).  Used up whole packet by planting last 6 seeds on fenceline.

Next to garden box 2 we worked in more fallen leaves - the trees have been quite generous! - then set in the boxy/linear trellises and planted snow peas (Burpee Snowbird variety).  Half a packet of seeds remains to plant more in two weeks.

Last fall, I had done a bit of an experiment along the fenceline, planting one section just forked and hoed, one section with top soil forked and hoed in, and a third section with compost and top soil forked and hoed in then planted green beans and snow peas.  Not unexpectedly, the bare ground section had the lowest sprout rate, but the snow peas did better than the green beans there, so I learned that they will grow in straight sandy soil although they certainly have no objections to organic matter or enriched soil worked into it.

Planting notes first week of Feb

No pics ... I'll get to those eventually.  I have now started the early spring planting, kicking off on Saturday with transplanting broccoli, cabbage, and lettuce starts that I picked up at WalMart on Friday.  On an impulsive whim, I also bought garlic bulbs and asparagus crowns ... now I need to quickly dig beds for them.  From what I've found online, asparagus beds in Florida usually only last about five years instead of 20-30 years up north.  Even so, that is still a better cost:benefit ratio than buying spears in the grocery.

Back in November, I had planted top-crop turnips, spinach, and lettuce ... and only got turnip greens and tomatoes, which died around New Year's with the first big cold front of the year.  The turnip greens have been doing quite well, much to the chickens' delight.  I plan to plant them more kinds of greens, as they have laid through most of the winter.  My neighbor mentioned to me yesterday that her hens aren't laying, so I gave her four eggs that were waiting to be carried in and in return she gave me a small round of Mexican bread she made (it was GOOD!).

So I planted green beans

The past couple weeks, I've been planting the last of the green bean seeds for a fall harvest.In three beds, green beans were all I planted, and in all three of those beds what I have growing is ... tomatoes.  In one of the beds, it can be explained by the tomato plant in the corner of that box, but the other beds either didn't exist or didn't have anything planted over the spring and summer, so these little tomatoes-who-could must be from the compost pile that I've started using now.

Talking to my mom this morning, she actually asked if I knew the difference between green bean seeds and tomato seeds!  LOL Yes, and yes I know the difference between the seedlings that sprouted as well.  This mainly means my compost isn't "cooking" on the inside, even though it both looks and smells like nice compost.  It should be interesting to see which varieties these volunteers are, as the volunteers tend to be the most vigorous tomato plants.

Now, for an actual recent picture of me for friends and family:

planting green beans for fall

That's my new straw work hat, as opposed to the "Florida tourist" straw hat I bought in St. Augustine's Old Town a good five years ago or so.  St. Aug is a lovely little tourist trap, and we plan to go in November when they have the pirate festival.  Yes, those are my old garrison BDU bottoms as well, and they are more comfortable to work in than they were back in the spring.

When the weather clears up again, I'll need to do up a post with pictures for my experiment along the fence line.

Fall planting

Being this far south, gardening is a year-round sport.  That said, I didn't do so hot over the summer ... pun intended.  I'm down to about a handful of tomato plants left alive between the hornworms, the heat, and the sporadic rain.  I had thought I was doing pretty decent with my pepper plants, until I went next door and saw her three and four foot tall plants loaded up with ripening peppers.

So now I'll get a chance to do better with the fall and winter gardens.  So far I've planted green beans, snow peas, and carrots in the past couple weeks.

Hornworms

I can't call them just tomato hornworms after the ghastly devastation overnight.  After supper last evening, I was admiring my ripening and soon-to-ripen peppers: cubanelles, gypsies, anaheims, and carmens.  I had lost one cubanelle pepper to an unknown varmint that took a big bite out of the middle of it before it had completely turned orange.

This morning, I woke to carnage.  I am now down to one gypsy sweet pepper, no cubanelles, no anaheims, and lost a good half-dozen carmens in addition to a handful of my beloved datils ... and the culprits were hornworms.  Big, fat, juicy hornworms ... yes, the chickens have had a great morning as I found hornworm after hornworm and put them through the chicken wire.

For the record, hornworms are even more difficult to spot on pepper plants than they are on tomato plants.  It took me four or five times hunting to find the one on the datil pepper plants.

Right now, I feel discouraged, as if I am simply growing hornworm bait in my garden boxes.

Don't even get me started on the battle to keep the lawn tamed.