Ready, Set, Grow

                Hey, sorry I didn’t post anything last week but I have been super busy with seeding, work, and the bees. I started seeding both my gardens on the 19th and we happened to have the same hot beautiful clear weather every day until this Saturday, the 23rd, in which I finished. I put a total of about 26 hours so far into seeding and I accomplished this by after getting off work, driving straight to the garden, and working till about 10 or 11 at night. I usually just used a headlamp or the trucks headlights when it got dark. It wasn’t so bad except for the enclosing sound of coyote howls and yapping approaching as the sun went away. It's enough to send shivers down your spine when all of the sudden the howls stop… but at least I got to see great sunsets everyday haha

                                  

                 I feel like I was a little late with my cool season crops but only time will tell  what happens when things start popping out of the ground. Right now there are a few vine crops emerging and the berry bare-root crops showing new growth. For now, I am just waiting for rain and watering lightly to hopefully encourage some germination.

                I didn’t think I would fill up the whole acre but I did! I’m pretty excited how things went so smoothly and how my new garden tools worked out. The bulb planter was definitely a good investment for seeding a 100 potatoes and 600 onion bulbs. Also the precision garden seeder saved my life for corn and bean planting. I ended up planting over 5000 feet of sweet corn which I’m pretty excited about. I hope that the new herbs and other crops that I have never tried before emerge well and that I can recognize any problems that come up. I think I have now perfected row spacing and seed depth management for most crops. The next step is to repot and harden off my greenhouse plants and transplant them out into the garden within the next couple of weeks.



                For the bees, my Dad and I have been medicating them for varroa mites and foulbrood in which I will be talking about in the next post. We were also examining the queens health and seeing that she survived the hiving process, and equalizing any hives to take from the rich hives and give more bees to the poorer, smaller hives. The queens looked great, see below for a picture of one and the finished seeded garden.