Lent starts tomorrow with Ash Wednesday — don’t forget to stock up on fish! — so here’s a cute story about a boy who decided to spend all of Lent in a tent.
And here’s why Pepper won’t go anywhere near the cows when we take her to the farm:
image from icanhascheezburger.com
Cows are mean critters where dogs are concerned.
Sitting tends to be hard on my back, and I do a lot of it since I work at a keyboard. So I’ve been interested in alternative ways to work for a while. I looked into those kneeling chairs where you sort of half kneel and half sit, but people who tried them said they felt good at first but eventually just transferred the pain to other places. The chairs where you sit on a beach ball sounded the same way. The only way to try either of those long enough to really test it is to buy one, and then you’re stuck with it. Read more »
I’ve wanted to put wheels on our chicken house for a while, to make it easier to move around. It’s about all I can do to shove it from one spot to another, and I need to be able to move it every day to give them fresh grass and keep them from digging holes in the yard. It should make for about a two-week rotation.
I haven’t posted much about the garden lately. I guess it hasn’t seemed that interesting—just harvesting things and wishing it would dry out a little—but I’ll try to catch up on that soon. We did finish our garlic harvest, though, so here are some pictures of that.
One thing low-carbers hear a lot is that we don’t eat enough vegetables. The USDA’s food pyramid recommends 3-5 servings of vegetables a day, but they also recommend 6-11 servings of grain, so they’re insane. And since they define a “serving” of vegetables as a half-cup of cooked veggies or a full cup of raw, most high-carb eaters I know don’t come close to that. (Remember, corn and potatoes are not vegetables; they’re in the grain category. Neither is ketchup.)
Time for another garden update, with extra pictures! Comments follow the images.
More garden pictures! Things have really grown a lot lately, with the rain and warm weather we’ve had.
It’s been five weeks now since we planted the first things in the garden. Sometimes radishes would be ready that quickly, but we did have some pretty cool stretches. They shouldn’t be far off, though. I thinned things somewhat the other day and fed what I pulled to the chickens, but I need to do some more. Time for some updated photos; as always, click to make them bigger.
Some carrots broke through the surface yesterday, so now every variety we planted has at least a few seedlings showing. I took some pictures today. As usual, click on them for a close-up.
When the temperature finally got over freezing yesterday, I pulled the plastic off the garden bed where we planted garlic and transplanted some herbs last fall. The plastic probably wasn’t necessary, but we got the garlic in pretty late, so I wanted to try to keep the soil from freezing solid before the garlic got established. The herbs—rosemary, thyme, and sage—look rough, but alive. Most of the garlic is sending up shoots, so we should get a good crop out of that.
Here’s the west raised bed, which has the herbs and garlic. The east one is still bare. (Pepper is sneaking into the picture, as usual.)
Photo by Angel, 2009-03-05
And here’s a close-up of the garlic.
Photo by Angel, 2009-03-05
Now we’re hoping the seeds we ordered last week will get here quickly, so we can get peas and radishes planted soon. We also need to pick up some onion sets and get those started, and go ahead and plant some leftover lettuce seed from last year. We’re also toying with the idea of adding another raised bed or two—we already have the lumber for one more.
We’re also planning to get some chickens soon, so I’m sure I’ll be writing about that too. Should be a busy backyard this summer!
