April 3-10, 2012: Cold busy week, but the garden keeps growing!

April 3:  Got the greenhouse frame up, but found that one of the bottom plastic braces was missing!  

April 4:  Bill made a new wooden brace for the bottom of the greenhouse.  Jim put in 4 t-posts and wired the poles of the greenhouse to it, in order to make it wind-worthy.   I put the cover on and the greenhouse is ready for plants!

April 5: Moved 5 of the seedling trays to the greenhouse

April 6: 60 degree sunny day.  Greenhouse was up to 100 degrees!   I opened it up and temperature  fell quickly.  Weeded, Dug up, and added manure to onion patch, including digging out a few strawberries I’d put in last fall and moving them into new strawberry bed to replace three others that looked dead.  Planted 2 rows of onion plants from Gurney.  I was surprised by what arrived.  I thought they’d be onion sets like I’ve always planted.  But these were plants (thinner bulbs with green shoots about 6-8 inches tall).  Watered everything.



Raspberry patch




New onion plants, next to October's garlic planting




Zigzag strings on peapod teepees, with tiny lettuce seedlings along side of 2-3" tall peas

April 9:

Put up strings for peas to climb on pea teepees—it was trickier than when I put strings up on the fence trellis.   I ended up with a crazy zig-zag of strings going every which way!  I finally covered the landscape fabric we put in last fall in the raspberry patch with woodchips.  Weeded furthest north veggie bed, so that farm staff could move some manure down to there, in order to make room for new apples trees.  Also raked grape bed smooth and marked where new posts should be put.  Watered everything. (extremely dry spell of weather) 

April 10:  Farm staff put in posts and rails for grape trellis, and moved asparagus bed posts to make the plot larger, since there’s always been a few asparagus plants outside the corral we built to contain their summer foliage.   Unfortunately, one of the asparagus mounds got trampled—hopefully it will survive.  They also moved a lot of the manure from the apple bed down to the first veggie bed.  This afternoon, I raked the new apple bed smooth, and moved more of the manure to the yet unused far end of that bed, and filled 2 wheelbarrows with manure, hopefully to use tomorrow.