Why?

Adventures of a Modern Day, Middle-Aged Hero, on the Glory Road(to family security)

4.17.2015

I blame the chickens.

Several weeks ago(like, so early that I was embarrassed to admit it while 2/3rds of the country was still covered with snow), I threw some seeds into one a few of my raised beds.  A few days after that, the chickens darted past my daughter one day when she was trying to feed them, so, rather than round them up, we gave them a free day to play in the nice green yard.  Of course, the yard wasn't good enough for them, so they also decided to get into the garden beds, and made quite a mess out of the one I had planted in.

Rather than start from scratch, I just decided to rake it all flat again, and see what happened once it warmed up some more.

Well...I've gotten a pretty good turnout from my seeds.


Now...when I planted these seeds, on the right side of this box there were two nice, STRAIGHT rows of turnips.  The left side was supposed to be two nice STRAIGHT rows of radishes and carrots planted together.  The theory there is that the larger radish seeds make it easier to plant the carrot seeds, and then the radishes are ready to harvest before the slower starting carrots get too far along.

We'll see.  The totally random nature of this bed has made thinning a major pain, but even that keeps the chickens happy...they love the young radish, turnip, spinach and kale greens I give them from thinning things out.

In the bed behind that, I had to panic and spend money to install some netting/trellising for my snow peas.  I just haven't had the time to go run a bunch of twine and rope for the peas to climb, so instead I bought some 'garden netting' for more money than I should have spent.


I think I just need to keep my eye out for someone getting rid of old soccer netting next time.  And yes, this bed needs some serious weeding.  There are also 4 overly optimistic 'Hey, there are on sale for $2.00' early tomatoes in this bed.  If all 4 survive, one might need to go away to make enough room.

Yeah, the chickens hate that too. 

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