Last week, I shared some of my spring preparations.  Well, it turns out that all we have done in the past month or two was prepare for spring.  So this week I will share more of what we have done to prepare for this year and some pictures around the homestead.

Starting down by the road, next to the driveway:

I love gourds and planted six mounds of them.  I put up another trellis here to try to keep the gourds from getting too wet.  I planted birdhouse gourds to make birdhouses, but I also planted dipper gourds for ladles, corsican gourds for bowls, and snake gourds to make bracelets. And I planted Caveman’s Club gourds, but I have no idea what I would do with them.

All different kinds of tomatoes and peppers.

Here is the bed of the sad little butterfly bush I am hoping to rescue.  I added compost and leaf and straw mulch to help it along.

I also planted some bee and butterfly friendly flowers to bring pollinators to my garden.  The grape arbor will run along one side of this garden, so that there will be an unused trellis next to the garden bed.  So I planted more gourds here.  I did a lot of “chop and drop” mulching throughout this bed and the bed for the grapes.  I chopped the weeds down and left them in the beds.  They will compost in place and fertilize the garden as they do.

I will be putting in an arbor for these newly transplanted grapes soon.  There will be many plants growing between the grape vines to add to the variety (polyculture) of this “living fence” system.  I also planted gooseberries and currants between the grapes because they will grow under the shade of the vines.

Brussels sprouts with morning dew:

My spearmint went wild, like it always will, so I moved some of the runners into tires near the kitchen garden.  The tires will help contain the mint and the scent of the mint repels mosquitoes.

I planted corn rows along the side of the house to help shade the house in the heat of the summer.  I moved the bean tunnel to the prepared garden beds near the corn and planted cucumbers to climb the trellis tunnel.

This next “bed” was started and then I decided not to use it yet.  Too close to the solar panels.  But then I left a package of seeds out in the rain.  By the time I found them, they were well soaked and not moldy at all.  I figured that I may as well just plant them.  So they went into the bed too close to the solar panels.

There are plenty of of other things going on, but that’s all for now.