Today we have a beautiful sunny day with temperatures in the high 60’s, the first really perfect day in over a week.  It started off cool this morning, only 42 degrees but with the sun shining it has warmed up fast.  Norman went for his walk and I worked on my family tree.  I am writing down the Knight line right now, Leafy Knight was my grandfather Browns, grandmother but her name was one we all heard of often and I have a copy of her family bible which went back for 5 or 6 generations so her line was a must for me to research.  After breakfast Norman went to the garden and finished planting the corn.  Now that whole garden is planted.  When the corn is up to about 4 inches he will thin it to stand a foot apart and plant a bean seed between each stock.  He has to do that for I hate to thin and throw out the small plants that have struggles so to live, if I can’t eat them or transplant them I can’t thin them.   I went into the Hickory Grove and worked at cleaning up the small branches that fell this winter.  Holly and Laura got out the large branches now I will finish cleaning it all up so it is easy to walk through there.  I don’t walk as easily as I used to in the woods so I like to pick up all sticks and cut out all briars and sassafras seedlings and they pop up everywhere.  

Norman pulled the tractor into the grove and I filled it up with sticks so at least in this area it is easy to walk and looks nice.  Now I have about four more cart loads to clean up and that job will be done.  I think tomorrow we will burn.  We have this cart load and four or five others that Norman took to the burn barrels before and all the paper and other burnables that have collected the past three weeks.  We do not take to the land fill anything that will burn as we are too cheap to pay 11 cents a pound to get rid of waste, just burn it and use the ashes to fill in holes in the woods.  

Here are the potatoes in the lower garden.  They are growing like weeds and do note- no weeds at all.  Taking the time to weed the space good before tilling it helps to keep the weeds out and as the plants get bigger they shade it soil so well the weeds can’t get started. Every day I go and talk to my plants and tell them how pretty they are and as I walk through I stop and pull out any little weeds that try to grow so until the canning starts to take up all my time I can keep the weeds out of the garden.  

The potatoes are on the left of this picture in a L shaped addition to the garden.  This is the rhubarb and beside this is the summer squash planted.  In front you see 7 rows of corn that Norman just finished planting.  In the distance you can see one of the two cucumber cages that are in at tright he ends of that one rows and the rest of the garden beyond that.  

This is a side view of the garden with the potatoes in the distance and one row of the newly planted corn on the right out of sight. The seven rows you see in front are all planted with beets, spinach, zucchini etc. on the left are the beans, broccoli , onions and cauliflower.

I tried to get a picture of the beans.  These two rows are bush beans and if you look closely you can see a few up already.  They are all coming, the sun is encouraging them to make an appearance.  

These are the last three rows with cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli and onions with peppers are the end of the rows.  Note the tall stakes,  we tie those together to make another fence inside so the deer can’t find a clear space to jump in.  So far it is working.  

I tried to get a picture of the whole garden but as you can see I couldn’t quite make it all fit but it does give you some idea of how big the garden really is.  However until you try weeding the thing you could never believe how big it really is!  In addition to his garden we have the kitchen garden, the butter squash garden, and the sweet potato garden.  We try to keep the vine type plants in their own garden so they don’t crowd out the other plants.  

This is part of the sweet potato bed we put in Sunday.  I used the clippings from Norman’ s hair cuts all winter and put those around the plants and have a mesh netting over the whole garden to try and keep the animals out long enough for the potatoes to get growing. We have tried different things to grow sweet potatoes but have never been able to keep the animals away from them long enough to get anything but a few small potatoes.  Hope this works.  The ground is away from the main garden and is a new bed made from spreading out the compost pile.  It is nice looking dirt so should be good for the plants.

Back up at the house things are growing well.  We have had three small meals of asparagus.  We gave one to Joe and Holly on Sunday.  Joe said he loved asparagus but had never tried any fresh right out of the garden.  I wish we could get a lot growing but we haven’t found the secret yet.  Today we had fried green onions and turnip greens.  This is the second meal of turnip greens we have had and I guess it is the last as now they are thinned out enough to have room to grow properly.  

This is the lettuce and it needs a lot of thinning.  We have had one salad from the thinnings so far and will have more this week.  To the left you can see the spinach coming. Next week that will be ready to thin and we will get a couple good meals from those thinnings.  The beets are a couple weeks away.

Here is another shot of the kitchen garden and it shows you the green onions and a little of the turnips.  In the back ground are the spinach and the beets.  

And then just for beauty we have the snow ball bush and the iris in the background.  These are the bearded iris and they are not budded yet.  

The iris in the Hickory grove are starting to bloom.  They are the purple scented ones and they are much earlier than the yellow Japannesse iris or the bearded iris both of which come later.  

This is the May flower bush and it is just starting to bloom.  It looks so pretty and smells so heavenly.  I am so glad I finally got one to grow.  

Lastly are the grapes, as you can see they are starting to form.  Can’t tell just yet what size crop it will be.  The blueberry doesn’t look like a very big crop but maybe I will be fooled.  It has happened before and hopefully I am wrong here again.  Have a great day.