I don't care what the weather report says, I'm thinking spring and will continue to try to keep spring on my mind no matter how much ice I'm breaking.
There plans to build a green house probably next month. It won't be anything spectacular. Truth be told, I'm a real big fan of cattle panel hoop houses. (Click on the blue letters and it will take you to some photos of what I'm talking about). We get some pretty severe wind storms here but I read an article recently of a guy in Iowa who raises calves in them for a few weeks and says his won't blow away. They are staked down well and reinforced and Jeremiah and I have some ideas of our own to get one erected for seedlings.
The cattle panel hoop houses are great for so many things, including animal shelters (click on the blue letters again to see photos of animal shelters) and I have been a long time amirer of them. We've bought 20 or so used panels from here and therefor fairly inexpensively and since my barn would require a bit of modification to keep kids completely safe from predators, I'm thinking about erecting a couple panel houses to keep kids in. I haven't looked too much into sturdy waterproof canvas or duct tarps for an animal shelter but for a green house, Lowes or Home Depot carries heavy duty plastic sheeting that would do real well for a green house.
I got my first seed catalog in the mail yesterday so later today when the kids are home from school we'll go through and circle all the things we'd like.
I've been cleaning the girls barn practically everyday and dumping the contents of the wheelbarrow onto the future garden site. We have very loamy soil here on our property, I hear things do real well on it with some good fertilizer. I certainly have that, and A LOT of it! Around the end of March we may start rototilling the garden site to work in all the amenities we've been putting out and with seedlings started early, come planting time in May (or whenever it is) we should have no problem getting a few things to grow this year. We're all very excited to get started with spring and winter has barely just begun. We do expect a couple of warm days (by warm I mean high 40's) this week followed by a storm next Sunday. I'll take high 40's. Heck, I'll even take 40 if the sun's out and there's no wind.
We have an underground spring that feeds the pond. Just the other day while cleaning brush I also discovered we have a creek bed that feeds the neighbors smallish pond in the front corner of their property! Right now there are deer bedding in it. We're working towards clearing out the massive amounts of down trees and limbs in it. Jeremiah would like it looking like a real creek bed by spring. Eventually we'd like shore up the one side of the pond (where I usually take photos from), cut out a lower bank on the creek side and see if we can't actually get it running. If not running, the main purpose would really be to keep the water out of the back yard as that's the lower side of the pond. In very wet years, the neighbor says there can be standing water out by the goat's pen fencing. Some day Jeremiah would also like to get a windmill water pump working to keep the pond full all year round and to water the garden as they are both close to each other. In fact, we plan to use the underground spring as our garden water since it is very close to the surface. I'm guessing that the meandering stream of bermuda grass is the path the stream takes, the water is supposed to be pretty close to the surface so while we may fight the grass in the garden, until we can get a windmill in for running water, we're hoping the ground water and rainwater are all the garden will require. Otherwise we'd have to run a fairly long hose from the house to the garden.
Water has been piped out to the barn from the house and we could try to locate that, trench across the back yard to run a spigot, but I don't know if all that will happen this year. We'll see. Baby steps!
That's all for now...we've always got a thousand ideas running through our heads. Only so much time and money though :o).
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