Green Beans and Peas

Our vegetable garden has five rows, each about 30 feet long.  Except for some perennial asparagus, the crops vary and are rotated annually.  With the winter behind us, this weekend we started planting a cover crop of green beans and peas throughout the empty garden.  Not only will these be edible when they mature, but they will discourage weeds thus reducing our reliance on chemicals, and retain moisture thereby cutting back on our use of water.  They will also give the area a pleasant uniform appearance.  If the cover crop is turned under before flowering, the plants will actually increase the nitrogen in the soil, or so I am told.  Next weekend we will finish with snow peas and cow peas.  The soil was amended with compost and manure in the fall, so no only a light tilling to remove weeds was required.

The 48" stick is marked at 3" intervals to serve as a guide

for spacing seeds.  The sheet of plywood prevents 

compacting the soil with bootprints while planting.

March Yard Pick Up

My young son said this was a "three holiday" weekend.  He meant Friday the 13th, followed by Pi Day on Saturday and the Ides of March today.  For me it was the annual weekend of outdoor cleanup.  Somehow I manage over the winter to accumulate various piles of debris around our yard.  This year it included a spoiled crock of sauerkraut, a large blue tarp, several defective watering containers, a number of five-gallon buckets, a stack of random red bricks, even more stacks of one-gallon pots, half a chord of firewood, and multiple locations where rabbit droppings that belong in the garden were dumped haphazardly by the hutches.  It is my hope that by chronicling it here I will be less likely to repeat this offense next winter.  Today the neighbors got most of it cleaned up and put away.  We even found an hour in the middle of the day to replace the brakes on the neighbor's truck which is a very rewarding experience considering that his life and the lives of his entire family depend on our doing it right.

For $20 we replaced the PVC pipe holding up the hoop house.

It has become an annual chore after the last snowfall.