Walking up the lane to the garden.. I found a surprise in the iris by the fence.

Look real close

  pretty cute!!!

E put some extra wire around the area to try to protect the nest from raccoons and the dogs… I don’t know what mama was thinking when she put the nest so low to the ground.. She must know what she is doing but we thought we would help a bit. Once we had helped out our little mother,  I was able to get to work in the garden.

I have mentioned before how gorgeous the soil is. BR worked his genius here and that is a fact. Years of adding  compost, seaweed, starfish and the odd bone from dinner  to  the soil mix and the result is beautiful…. I dig my shovel into the earth and it comes up gold.. It is nothing like the soil I had in my old garden and it was in a farming community…  I thank BR every day I watch my garden grow.

The garden is gorgeous right now.. It is full of hyacinth and daffodils.    

A lot of the other spring shrubs I put in last year are blooming                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       and everything that isn’t blooming is covered in buds… Even in my little nursery the trees and plant divisions are thriving… (did I mention I love spring?)

Last year I spent a lot of our first month here weeding… The R’s hadn’t been here all winter and the garden needed to be rototilled.. E borrowed one from the B’s and it made a huge difference… This year, I put leaves from the south house on the garden to try to minimize the invasion of weeds during the winter. It worked pretty well. Today I dug a layer of leaves into the vegetable garden and turned the soil over… All of the rest I put into the compost.. (there were a lot).. On Sunday I will do I bit more tilling  (one-handed is slow going) in the soil and then it will be ready for planting.. there are quite a few veggies I can get started out there next week while E works on the water system at the south house.

Our compost is a large wooden box divided into three compartments… The middle one was full when I got here and the left side was filled with last summers cuttings and kitchen waste. We filled the right side during the winter. The middle compartment was ready though, and I dug in and brought out the richest compost you could imagine . I will use this as the soil for the  planter we brought from town last week and put the fig tree B&S gave us in it. I have decided to grow the fig  in a planter but I havent decided where I am going to put it. It has to be out of reach of the deer and eventually racoons. ( there won’t be any fruit on it for a few years ) We could always protect it as we have done the apple trees on owl lane…. I will think about it for a while… but I have the fig tree, and the planter and now some of this beautiful composted soil..

When digging up the middle compartment I came across the usual bones which I have become accustomed to.. B put his dinner bones into the compost to add calcium… (I guess) .. at first it was creepy but hey.. I am an island farming girl now.. I am cool with all of this… but I am a little suspicious.. today when I got to the bottom of the compost bin.. there were looooooooong leg bones in there….. I do not know who or what BR put in this box but that was NOT

a chicken’s leg