It feels Like Springtime

It’s Spring and I’m like most gardeners that want to start planting in my garden. I know it’s too early in our area, we still have some cold nights and the last frost could be as late as the last week of April.

My seedlings are growing, I re-pot the young cucumber plants in bigger containers and they are big now and ready to go outside but they’ll have to wait until next month. It looks like I might have to do indoor trellises for them.

I’m thinking about re-potting the tomatoes also.

The peppers have decent size containers, the plastic cups are great for sowing seeds indoor.

Bell peppers

I work in the garden when I have time, normally it’s after work during the weekdays and a few hours on the weekend. I still have a lot of cleaning to do and preparing a few more planting beds for the indoor young plants. I have some railroad lumbers and they are heavy, not sure what I will do with them yet.

I moved the mint to the raised bed, hopefully the loose soil will be better for them.

This is the Asian variety and I got it from my sister’s garden.

The blueberry plants survived the winter, I’m looking to add a few more plants.

I have 4 persimmon trees and they all look healthy.

It’s budding and I hope to get a few persimmon fruits this year.

This is my second year gardening here, and it’s very different from gardening in the city with a small plot of land. You could hear everything that’s going on around you, whether it be your neighbors mowing the lawns, next door neighbor on my right watching the Western movie or next door neighbor on my left came out to chit chat with me and all I want to do was to work in my garden.  Living in the country has its advantages, I live closer to nature and only hear sounds of nature while gardening. I do have to say that the chickens and ducks make some noises but they don’t bother me at all.

We have over a dozen newly hatched chicks and they are in the basement under a heating lamp to keep them warm.

It’ll be a few weeks before they could go outside.

This little chick hatched today and was sleeping. I’m glad we have many chicks, some were incubator hatched which took about 21 days, and we have a few newly hatched from the broody hen and Muscovy duck. Bo has both sitting on the eggs right now and once the chicks hatched, he has to bring them inside otherwise the duck will step on them. So far one chick died because he didn’t get to it right away and the duck stepped on it. They are so cute when they are this little.

Seedlings Update

The seeds all sprout and I am so glad to see all the young plants. It’s still too cold to plant in the garden, I normally plant them in late April. In the past, I bought young plants from the local nursery and it was very expensive. I could only afford to buy a handful and pray that they’ll make it through the cold nights. The seed packets are less expensive than individual plants, and I’m hoping that these seedlings will continue to grow and stay healthy indoor until they are ready to go outside.

The cucumbers are getting too big, I’ll start transferring them to bigger pots this week, and might have to make an indoor trellis for them at the rate that they are growing. Note to self “start the indoor seedlings late March for April planting.”

Since I’ll have many young plants, I plan to plant them in pairs this year to make a bigger bush. The Pepper hot mix seedlings might look odd when planting them in pairs, they’ll most likely not be the same kind of pepper plant.

As you can see that I like hot peppers, these are the Jalapenos.

I didn’t have much luck with the tomatoes in the past, but extremely hopeful this year and will be planting these in pairs also.

I love bell peppers, I’m eating 2 per day right now and can’t wait to pick them from my garden.

The weather has been seasonably warm in the past weeks and my Ornamental cabbages are bolting. We are expecting some snow tonight, and temperature in the low 20s at night for this week.

I saw a few people covering up their flowers today. The Azaleas bloom in spring and their flowers often lasting several weeks. My Azaleas came out early and the flowers will not be able to stand the below-freezing temperature this week.

We had some below freezing temperature last Saturday night and my tulip tree flowers wilted the next morning.

The early warm weather during the day and cold weather at night are not all bad, the ducks and hens laid more eggs in the last few weeks. My sisters and dad are glad to get fresh chicken and duck eggs from us.

Instead of buying the chicks Bo decided to hatch his own.

The first one that came out was the Ameraucana chick and hope the rest will hatch in the next few days.

Incubator Chicks Update

The chicks are over 2 weeks old now, and last Sunday Bo delivered them to his mom. The photos below were taken at 2 day old, only 25 of the 41 eggs hatched survived. The bathroom/tub is not an ideal place to hatch and raise them, I have noticed that I had gotten sick the last few times during the first week after they hatched. It must be bad ventilating, plus allergy season this time. I had a bad case of bronchitis. I would love for us to have a little barn/lab to hatch them, something to consider down the road.

Taken at 4 day old.

Taken at 10 day old

These below were taken last Sunday at 2 week old right before they went home. I thought we would keep them longer but they started flying out of the tub, it’s really a sight to see.

This little rooster started to fight back, it must be a born instinct.

This was their transport cage, they didn’t mind going in there at all.

We finally have our bathroom back for now, not sure when we will hatch the next batch.