It’s a nice breezy and cloudy morning here in Southern VA. Hoping to see the sunshine this afternoon. We have had rain and some pretty bad storms off and on since mid-week last week. It has made getting out into the garden….difficult. To put it mildly….LOL….can you say MUD? However, all the rain has made everything so pretty and SPRING green. I love the greens in the spring….all the different shades that you see in the new leaves on the trees, the grass and the flowers starting to shoot up. Our daffodils have all but finished now, but I found some red Tulips out front that are now blooming. The Irises in the side beds have shot up over the past week too and now have blooms getting ready to open, I can’t wait to see the colors. It has been really cool watching all of the plants coming up that I had no idea were here….we are going to have a profusion of Day Lilies too. I have also found wild roses climbing the fences in several spots….I love the little pink wild roses.
Bloom on Apple Tree
We have a small orchard here at the farm and the apple trees are in bloom and so pretty. It’s an old orchard (not sure how old, at least 15-20 yrs old) but the trees appear to be fairly healthy. We pruned them a bit about a month ago. I would love to add some peach trees and a pear tree….maybe a cherry. All in good time….smile. We also have blackberry thickets, several large ones, out in the back fields, and of course they are climbing on the fences in several places. Yum. I managed to find some blackberries last fall after we moved in here and they were huge, big as my thumb. I don’t know about you but I love blackberry cobbler and jam. Also in the way of fruit we brought 2 blueberry bushes over from Becca’s old house and they seem to have taken the move rather well so hopefully we will have a few berries off of them this year….I would love to add some more of those as well. You can do so many things with Blueberries. TinMan makes a wonderful Eyesight Support Tincture with them.
We have potatoes and onions to get into the ground today. We prepared that part of the garden last week and after all the rain the fertilizer should be well into the soil by now. We have two large garden spaces, both about 50 ft long by 30-40 ft wide. We had my brother and his friends come with a large garden tractor, discs and tiller to do the initial tilling back in early March. The land we are using for the gardens has been used mostly for cows in the past so the dirt is very rich looking, great soil. I did a soil test kit on both of our garden plots last week just to see if they needed amending with anything. The soil here on the farm is fantastic.
The front garden (where we will plant the potatoes, corn, beans, etc) has almost perfect soil according to the test kit so we just added a little 10-10-10 fertilizer. The back garden (where we will plant squashes, tomatoes, peppers, etc) needs a little lime and 10-10-10 added to it, otherwise it also appeared good in the soil test. TinMan and our friend Becca went and got some horse manure from another friend’s house on Friday and we added that to the back garden. We will probably end up going to get another truckload of that for the front garden as well. This manure had been sitting for awhile and is very nutrient rich. As much as possible, I would like to get away from having to add anything to the soil next year. I am going to start exploring what the requirements are for the USDA Certified Organic label. I’m sure it’s a long process like anything else government related….LOL.
Well, the day is starting to pass by so I’d better get myself up from this desk and get a move on. I hope ya’ll have a wonderful week!
Blessings,
Storm
Rosemary by the Garden Gate 