February 10, 2014
I harvested the last of the carrots this week. I have started some more but it will be awhile, that’s for sure. They were all pretty pitiful; one was eaten up pretty badly and some were pulled up completely.
One day this week, my daughter forgot to lock the gate of the run and the chickens got out and ate most of my kale 😦 I am hoping, as long as we can keep the chickens away, the kale will bounce back when it warms up.
Our only harvest these days are our eggs. As the days grew longer in January, we were getting about 16 eggs/day from 19 chickens! And then it got really cold for a couple of weeks, snowed, etc. This, apparently, put the chickens in shock and we are down to three a day again 😦 The weather has warmed up slightly (staying above freezing at night) but we still are not getting very many eggs.
(frozen egg — gave it to the kitty) 
(trying to get the chickens out of the coop. putting down hay later really helped) 
(only harvest for the next couple of months)
Working on the February TO DO LIST:
- Picked up some horse manure from the stables and spread it in a couple of places (hopefully one more load will be enough to cover the rest of the garden)
- Made our last Square Foot Garden bed into a BTE bed (cut out 4 layers of tarp & weed cloth). whew!
- Continuing to make greenhouses. Planted some warm-weather seeds in half of them one day when it got into the 50s but still have some more planting to do!
- Any day the wind dies down and it is at least in the 40s, I spread some more mulch around the blueberry plants & garden. Because the mulch in the walkways and between the blueberry plants is on top of tarps (to keep the bermuda grass at bay), the rain tends to wash some away every year.
SWEET POTATO CONUNDRUM:
I was going to go ahead and start some sweet potato slips indoors but as I did more research, I am now thinking I may wait and start the slips outside. The only way I had ever heard about starting slips was in a glass jar, in a window. I have never had success growing things in our windows because ours are energy efficient windows but I was going to try anyway this year.
While researching, to make sure I had all of my information together, I ran across a blog post in which this lady grows her slips right in the ground. Then, I was looking in Rodale’s All New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening for information on when to transplant the slips (how long they need to be) and I saw they recommended starting sweet potato slips in the ground as well.
Has anyone ever heard of this? Has anyone every tried it? What do you think? I definitely love the simplicity of it and the fact that everything stays outside (we don’t have a lot of extra room in the house). The ‘scary’ part is, you put the roots in the ground later (warmer weather), which means if it doesn’t work, it’s too late to grow the slips the other way — so I am putting a lot of faith in a method I have essentially never heard of.
Any insight is more than welcome! And check out what others are harvesting this winter over at Daphne’s Dandelions 🙂
Gardening Without... 