Spring?

Not quite blooming. It's a good thing they don't taste good to javelina

It's too early for Spring to start but tell that to the birds, plants, bugs and other critters who have decided otherwise.  I saw my first lady bug two weeks ago.  The bees are busy buzzing but what are they eating?  Okay, the peas in the greenhouse are blooming, but the door and/or walls aren't always open for them.

I'm taking my cue from nature because it means getting tomatoes (okay, I'm cheating by starting the tomatoes a whole month before their time) and spinach in earlier than I expected…and NOT losing them to cold.    I hope.  Does this mean we'll have a longer, hotter summer?  That's not a pleasant thought so I'm not thinking about that either.  Instead, I'm building gardens.

I have plenty of seeds to put into the ground: spinach, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, parsley, arugula, mustard greens, beets and the list goes on.  What I'm out of is garden space in which to plant them.  So I'm converting the field between the barn and the orchard to various shapes and sizes of lasagna gardens.  Once they're built and planted we're going to have to protect them because the girls (who gave us nine eggs yesterday) want to run free like the wild chickens.  On their way to feral chickendom they've been pausing in these new gardens beds to do a little scratching and pecking.  They like them so much it took forever to chase them back into the coop this afternoon.

Here are the new gardens I'm laying out. Click on the picture to see a larger image.

Well, I chased all of them except Big Red.  She's decided I'm her very best friend and likes it when I carry her.  "Whoop, woop, towoop, woop," she coos to me as I tote her around under my arm.

Lordy, lordy.  What am I going to do when it's time for chicken stew?