A Weekend at the Farm 02/26-27/11

This is the Star Garden with all the dead debris cut away. You can really see the star shape in the early spring. There is so much just beginning in the garden right now. It is such a joy to watch.

• Shredded leaves for mulch.
  
• Mulched in the Infinity Garden.
  
• Finished laying down gravel in the path I built next to the Long Border. Looks good!
  
• Sprayed fertilizer over my Frost Proof Gardenias.
  
• Cleared out a flowerbed of dead vegetation and leaves. This is the bed that my Blue Mist Flower grows in.
  
• Sowed lots of flower seed in The Orchard: scraped away the mulch, spread some compost and potting soil to give the seeds something soft in which to germinate, and watered it all in. Several varieties of agastache and echinacea.
  
• The peach trees and plum trees are just beginning to flower! So beautiful.
  
• Sowed some herb seeds in the Infinity Garden: borage, pyrethrum, feverfew.
  
• Fed the bees some sugar water. Two to one sugar to water. This helps get the bees through the spring dearth. The spring dearth is the period of time when the bees are becoming really active and want to begin collecting nectar and pollen, but there are not many flowers blooming. Clover will be the first vegetation to flower. To add sugar water to the hive, the hive top is removed, and a tray is placed on top of the hive. The sugar water is poured into the tray. They can access the tray from inside the hive. Then the lid is placed back on the hive. Nothing to it.
  
• Pulled up some Homestead Purple Verbena that was overtaking everything in the Star Garden. Dug some up and transplanted it to the Rose Garden.
  
• Cut away dead vegetation in the Star Garden and raked over the gravel. Looks much better!
  
• Admired the beauty around me.
  
• My Erlicheer daffodils are blooming. They smell wonderful. Really sweet.


• Put up some additional stakes for my peas to climb.


• Watered here and there.


• Began the long process of cutting away all the dead vegetation in the grass garden. All of the grasses will look like small round mounds when I'm finished. My husband suggested I use the weed eater to do it. Good idea if I can control it. I've weed-eated before and the thing tends to get away from me. I end up with big bare patches of dirt where I've not only torn away all the grass, I've churned away all the dirt as well.
• I walked up on a mole coming up out of the ground in one of my rose beds. They can't see you if you stay really still. You can stand directly over the hole and watch them as long as they don't detect movement. They're actually very cute, but they can really make a mess. He cam up time after time pushing dirt up into a mound.