Half-way Through January…Garden Chores

January 20, 2014

Halfway through January & still pluggin’ away at my January TO DO list!

We have moved up here in Eastern NC! We get about two whole days each week in which it is warm & dry enough to venture outdoors! Wooowhoo 😉 Some things I have been able to get done:

• Pruned the rest of the blueberry bushes

(with no ‘before’ photo, it’s hard to see how much was pruned but it was a lot, believe me!)

(the brush pile with all of the blueberry prunings)

• Pruned all of the fruit trees

(before) (after) (the blueberry bushes were a lot more obvious/pronounced but until we stake this tree up, I don’t want to prune anymore)

• Ripped up two tarps & weed cloth (it was impossible to keep the bermuda grass out before having our BTE garden — still is pretty difficult) in some raised beds to make them BTE garden beds

(weighed down — windy day…i save these & put them around the edge of the garden to help keep the bermuda grass out)

• Covered those beds with mulch (the plethora of worms found was encouraging!)

• Covered some more area with chicken manure (pics above)

• Finished covering the sweet potato patch with chicken manure (didn’t have enough chicken manure the last time I emptied the table under the roosts)

(new manure at top)

The chickens are not quite pooping enough 😉 so if it ever warms up and my husband gets a day off from work, we’re going to head down to the horse barn so I can spread manure on the rest of the garden and around all of the trees.

As I mentioned earlier, I recently planted onion & celery seeds. As I get more milk jugs, I’ll continue to plant more cool crops this month — lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, kale, etc. before moving on to warmer crops in February.

(celery) (onions)

I transplanted some kale from my neighbor’s garden into mine, since the chickens devoured mine, a while ago. I covered the kale because the temps were fluctuating so much. We have had so much rain and the cover was keeping the kale from being rained upon – they were starting to wilt so I made the decision this week to uncover the kale and the next day…our first snow! 🙂 Go figure. The kale is fine though. As soon as it warms up, I’m sure it will be growing like crazy.

One last thing…the chickens! They are giving us about a dozen eggs a day now! I am so happy that the daylight hours are growing longer — for many reasons but all of these eggs are WONDERFUL! So I guess that’s our only harvest this week but I am very happy with that!

Are you harvesting anything in your garden in January? Check out who is over at Daphne’s Dandelions 🙂

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