Leprechaun

If you close one eye and squint with the other eye you'll see a picture of our resident leprechaun. 
Happy St. Patrick's day.

Garden Starts

With less than great results last year when we started our own seedlings, we ended up with only a few of the many plants we started that actually grew very well and made it to the outside garden and survived.  This year we decided to enhance our process.  We bought a seedling heat mat that heats the starts from the bottom and keeps them about 90 degrees.
Look at the pictures below, these seeds were planted last Tuesday, 5 days ago. 
Cucumbers, cabbage & cantaloupe.


Tomatoes:


If these keep growing at this rate I am sure we will picking cukes and tomatoes before we can plant them outside.
The weakness now will probably prove to be the light.  We do have a couple of full spectrum bulbs over the top of these but I do not think it is enough.  Next year we may spend the money on a table light system that provides more light, this year we will see how these do with what we have.  At the worst we will buy starts again.

A Brief Update

Just a quick note to show I am still here.
Yesterday was a beautiful day, so spring like and different than the last two Marches.  Last year and the year before we were still buried under snow.  We have had hardly any snow this winter.
We put in our first outdoor workday of the year yesterday.  While the chores were not too onerous we still felt sore when the day was done.  Some of things we were at:

• Adjust doors on the chicken house, they had swollen over the winter and did not fit well.
• Get the last window in the chicken house.
• Clean up scraps of wood leftovers from chicken house construction.
• Adjust door on the cat house.  Same problem as the chicken house doors.
• Put up some decoration on the Multi-use shed.  A couple of old saws that hang on the wall.  These I had taken down last fall prior to the painting project.
• Tessa cut off the old dead Peony stalks from last year.
• Wanda cleaned up the pile of leaves from the backyard I had raked up the other day.
• Organise storage shed, just in time for more junk from house to arrive.