Gardening

Borrowing a line from a friend, this broccoli has an excellent supply of vitamin purple, or at least I think it's purple.  This broccoli has overwintered rather magnificently and goes to demonstrate that broccoli plants are perennials and that if you don't rip them out of the ground, they'll just keep going.

Has anyone else's raspberries already started ripening here in Portland, OR?  This is at least a month a head of schedule for these plants. I've been harvesting for a week or two already this year. I'm thinking I haven't had a hard frost here at the house since fairly late in March which is odd unto itself.

If anyone doubted the resilience of your average earthworm, doubt no more.

The story starts a few days ago when the dogs were a bit muddy one day from a walk so I used the 'dog' towels on them. After forgetting about the towels for a while I noticing the towels today then forgot about them and they sat out on the cement of the back patio. I gathered up the towels and with a few other old towels and threw them in the wash.

Imagine my surprise when I emptied out the washing machine and found a live earthworm moving around fairly well, which is fairly remarkable as I have a particularly efficient washing machine that spins at 10K revolutions per minute. As I also have a new worm bin it seemed to make sense to add my very, very clean earthworm to my worm bin.

I have been harvesting about a quart of fruit from the yard every week since early may, including my first harvest of pears that I planted two years ago. One of my chestnut trees is also producing, though I'm going to have trim back the mature maple so my other chestnut tree can get enough light.

In an effort to expand the fertile of my yard I had five yards of organic cow manure + wood shavings delivered by Soil Builders. Initially I thought I would have two days to spread the mulch but the storm system moved in early so I had to move all five yards of mulch in about 7 hours. In the front yard I spread the mulch in the blueberry and rose/salal strips on either side of the drive way and a wheelbarrow load where I plan to plant the Olive trees and around the two new chestnut trees.

In the backyard I spread the mulch around the two pear trees, the strawberry patch, around the fig/cherry/fennel area, around the russian quince/boysenberry patch and along the east and south sides. I'm hoping to have tomato plants around the russian quince patch, along the east side. I also spotted several ripe strawberries among in the main strawberry patch and the smaller colonies scattered around the pear, cherry and russian quince. I should mention that I intentionally didn't put any of this mulch in my existing garden at least for now as this is the first time I've worked with Soil Builders and simply don't have much bare ground in the garden. When I sheet mulch in the fall I'll likely have another five yards delivered.