Sunshine!!

It's nice and sunny this morning, it has been very chilly and dreary here all weekend. Today is supposed to be 60 and sunny so thats a nice change, good for the seedlings too. Heres the spout updates, first off are some of the herbs, some of those seeds are soooo tiny its amazing anything grows out of them.

These are mostly the surplus tomatoes there are also some peppers and eggplant too.

Tomatoes are on the far end, I will post a closer pic of those later on. I think a couple of the earlier really cold nights had stunted some of them, it seemed like some were even burnt and all their leaves fell off. So I figured that what is it gonna hurt to leave them and see what happens, well all but like 9 made it and have mostly all of those damaged ones have caught up with the good ones.

Here is the red raspberry patch, they just started to come up like a week ago and have been growing fast.

Here is the public service announcement of the week. Do not ever use those expandable peat pods with the netting over them to start your seeds. They are marketed as you are to just plant the whole thing in the ground and they will degrade, well this one had grown a season and then sat in my compost for at least 2 years and look how degraded that netting is. Right. Also notice how the roots started growing up through the hole instead of through the netting, not good!

Lets visit the girls. I am pretty sure there was some disappointment yesterday when they realized the compost pile was gone (thank goodness). When I let them out of the run they usually start to walk then full on run over to the pile, they did this and then just kind of poked around the flat ground and wandered away.

Before.

After.

Funny girl found a nice spot where the pool used to be to start a good dust bath.

Heres one days jackpot, of course these were not all in the basket, they were all over the coup.

My dad was talking about how cool he though double yolkers were and that store should sell them, I responded with mine did that all the time when they first started laying and did for a while after but its been many many months since I had seen one. Next day ->

This little sunflower started itself right in the middle of the floor in my greenhouse. Well I am going to see just how far we can go with it! Most of them got way taller than the roof last year so we shall see what happens.

The gourds are clean and I have started painting and staining. This is not all of them, I have about 1/3 more to add. If you wish to see one closer they will hopefully all be for sale at the Hartville Flea Market memorial day weekend. Tell are your richie shabby chic/country lovers to come on out and buy one for everyone they know.

Letting them overwinter in the leaves in the garden produced the most awesome designs on the gourds, I think they are beautiful. I am also a nerd. I want to do a bunch with just clear coat on them, hopefully others will like the natural look. 

Heres the test batch, there will be a learning curve on the stain, the first little blue one showed lots of "brush" marks so I had to figure how to put it on to work with that, there is no way to do it without marks, it does not absorb stain like wood would do. The paint is pretty easy. I just love them, I want to keep them all and hang them from my trees like a crazy collector. Well at least I will just keep the ones that crack or are defective somehow. Drive by in a month and see how that worked out for me.

I had wanted the big compost pile to work so badly but it was just too big to turn and got out of hand. While moving this pile we got to the bottom and look what I found! Perfect black gold, I got a total of 3 full wheelbarrows, enough to spread a thin layer on all the garden veggie beds. I was pretty awesome. Its just what it is supposed to be, crumbly soft and earthy smelling. Just lovely. Its showing up a bit light in the picture as it was pretty black looking in real life.

I will leave you with this picture of the new feature at the chicken spa-dust bath area in my flower beds. Its the hosta salad bar! I think it took 2 whole seconds before the polished off all 4 of them on the side of the house. Opps, small fence now up, the spa is shut down for now!