Have planted some strawberries, a gift from a co-worker and some yellow onion sets. Cleaned the some of the beds and spread compost on them. The rhubarb that was planted late last spring is coming up, looks healthy. The raspberry plant that survived is budding up and will be joined by four more if they ever get here. Ordered them and some more onion sets (red and yellow), some horseradish root and 50 strawberry plants from Gurney's 6 weeks ago. Hopefully the order get here in time to plant the onions, the farms around here planted their onions the last week of February. In a couple of weeks I'm going up to Spokane to pickup an order of berry bushes ordered from the conservation service there. There will be 5 each of American Cranberry, Northern Blue Elderberry, Golden Current and Shrubpea. So need to get their holes dug and admended before then. Bought some seed potatos, which need to be chitted and their bed prepared.
Lately I have been browsing the Forums at Permies.com, interesting stuff. The talk of Hugelculture beds has gotten me converting one of the garden beds into a hugel like bed. The picture below is of the construction of said bed. I started by removing the soil from the top of the bed(which is place to the right in picture), then dug down 9 inchs(which is on the tarp to the left). Then the pit is filled with wood chips mounded up to 12 inchs deep in center which are then topped with compost and manure; then finished with the soil remove in first step. I'm thinking of planting pea's and beans in that bed this year.
Had another load of wood chips delivered a couple of weeks ago, the workers doing the job were driving by, saw me, stopped and ask if I wanted another load. So the big pile in the front yard got bigger.
The dew pond experiment isn't working to well. The few times the dew has formed it doesn't seem that much gathers in the pond, and if there is any it evaporates before I get a chance to note it. Will let it be for another month or so, until the Skitters come out anyway, as we have Nile Virus around here.
Note that there are two new links of interest in the sidebar, Permies.com and Paul Wheaton's Site. Paul posts short videos to utube.com about permaculture topics and has a pod cast where he talks about topics that are discussed on permies.
Garden On.
