Hey Look, a Garden Spot!

We are taking a week off of homeschooling to get the spring garden ready.  This week as Lent begins is a week off and our next week off is the first week of Easter.  I'm feeling pretty proud at getting things so scheduled so nicely.  That is, until we walked outside this morning.  It was 35ºF and breezy.  Ugh.  And it's supposed to rain later.

Some people clean out their garden in the fall; I've read about them in magazines. But we leave everything where it stands until spring forces us to clean up.  Well, it's time to clean.  We pulled the corn stalks and threw them to the chickens.

The livestock fence we used for trellis had to be taken down.  The vines pulled off relatively easily now that they are dry and dead.

We planted a row of turnips for the cows last summer that has to come out so we can till.  They've been under a bed of leaves all winter and many look fantastic.  Some look icky (they went to the chickens) but the cows have a lot of turnips to look forward to.

I pulled the last of the carrots.  Many of these were planted last spring and were too big.  If we had dug them last fall they would have been woody.  Today, after a winter of freezing, they are sweet and crisp.  Wow! 

We've been eating on this kale patch all winter and I can't decide what to do with them.  I don't want to till them under because they'll keep feeding us for another month or two, but it's not convenient to till around them.  ...hmm...  I'll keep thinking.

I wasn't going to prune the grape today, but we discovered that its vines went way out into the garden.  They'll get in the way so they had to go.  We also moved a volunteer grape that we discovered last year.  I hope it comes up and produces like mad.

After two hours work, we were exhausted and the garden was cleared enough to get the tiller in.  Tomorrow (we hope) we'll do the first till and then start spreading compost.