Hurray! Hurray! It's Straw Bale Day! Junior Farmer Ryan delivered my 5 bales of straw for mulching in the garden. It's part of the deal with our land renters that I get all the straw I want (I will get a few more bales come Fall) and we also get a few of the big round bales of hay for Ithaca and the current Steer each winter season before they go on pasture for the rest of the year.
Now I'm 100% MOTIVATED to get all the beds ready to go; I clean them up and do any weeding, and then layer them with fresh straw. When I an ready to plant, I just pull if back, plant and re-cover. I have one bed I had to blast with Round-Up. It is FULL of BINDWEED! Ugh! But, that'll all be gone before that bed gets planted, and I'm just doing flowers there, nothing edible. Sometimes you have to use drastic measures when you're up against bindweed.
Yesterday we got another 10 crowns of asparagus planted - part of my bed was looking really weak, so I'm beefing it up with the, 'Jersey Supreme' variety. Hoping it takes off again. Sure do MISS my 40' row of Asparagus at the other farm. I should've doubled the price of the place based upon that alone, LOL!
We've got an excellent string of weather all week, so I'll be hitting her hard. Mom and a family friend want to come out and help me plant, so that will be helpful and appreciated. I want to have everything 'ready to receive' for them. I've got all of my porch pots planted and planted a big container with herbs, today. Grass is growing faster than fast, so more mowing by the end of the week. BTW - it hit 75 today...and is 110 in the greenhouse! You can see why its not very useful much past May - until Fall again. I've already watered twice, today. Still waiting on Nasturtium to germinate, but I see ONE little shoot poking her head up, so there's HOPE!
I didn't post about it here, but one of our hunting dogs, Shasta, took off on Saturday and we spent HOURS looking for her, contacted everyone in the area, ran FB Ads, called the Humane Society, etc. She had her collar and dog tags on with our phone number right on the metal tag on her collar. We had a neighbor let us know that he 'heard her' on Saturday evening, but it was beyond his property.
So after a lot of tears, anguish, worry, sleeplessness, etc. we FINALLY got her back, today! She was holed up with the NUNS at a new Monastery that was built in the area! They practice life with NO technology, but they DO have a land line for emergencies and called the Sheriff TODAY - FOUR DAYS LATER! They also cut her EXPENSIVE collar OFF of her for some reason. *Rolleyes* Anyway, Shasta is home, safe and sound. She's the one we loaned out to a friend all winter to hunt Bobcat. I spent ALL WINTER worrying that she would get hurt or killed this winter, and now she pulls this stunt. She is on Double Secret Probation for the next YEAR!Shasta is the English Hound on the right. Buddy Fremont on the left.
They are from two different breeders and Fremont is a number of weeks younger than Shasta, but they were raised together. (That's just where they napped - they weren't confined to a box, LOL!)
