Vines and paths


I'd been saving apple juice jugs to turn into cloches and was starting to feel a bit hoardy. Instead of letting them pile up, I've started a new garden path.


Over to the right of the path I've added a male cold-hardy kiwi. Since the area is near the carport, which has a concrete slab floor, there were some areas in the soil where the concrete jutted out. I dug around the concrete as best I could to loosen the soil, which is rich, airy, and soft anyway, and decided to plant it slightly elevated so it would have options where it could spread its roots. There's a female companion that needs to go in the ground as well.

Hard Working Hens


These nice spring days, we've got eggs out the wazoo. There will be quiche with foraged greens, there will be all sorts of homemade custard, the gardens will be amended with chicken poop and the slugs will be deterred with crushed eggshells. These girls *just might* work harder at keeping us all healthy than what we do for ourselves.

Murky mucky mud


We hadn't cleaned the pond in 3+ years, since before Mabel. Yesterday it was time. It was actually way past time, but so it goes with little ones--time speeds up and to-do lists quadruple.


Last summer the fish population peaked at 15, now we're back down to 2. Predators get them and a few times I've found a dead one floating. The floaters get buried with a little ceremony akin to Garden State.


A couple hours of later, the plants around the pond are mulched with nitrogen rich muck and the pond was refilled with rain barrel water. We've tried barley powder to keep the algae down, but I'm not great at remembering to add it weekly.  I know we need more shade to keep the bloom down, but I'm also thinking of trying bokashi ceramics like these folks did. Do you have a pond? How do you keep it biologically balanced?