Garden

The garden is still going well, the okra is about 4″ tall now. We are supposed to have a warm autumn, so hopefully we get another feed of fried okra out of it this year. I am planning to put more cardboard out between the garden beds but in the meantime I just sprayed some of the weeds to keep them down a bit. The okra is really loving the warmer weather and the baby spinach is doing well. We are getting plenty of tomatoes and lebanese cucumbers, but the lettuce got scratched up by the birds. 

We have been getting plenty of solar energy, our bill up to February 10 is nearly $23 in credit, so that will be $38 credit carried forward to the March 10 bill. We have gone ahead with the quote for the double glazed window upstairs where the balcony was and the two sliding doors downstairs and paid half up front. They will come out to do the final measurements soon and supposedly manufacture it all in March, then install them in June or July. That, together with our wood heater should make for a more comfortable winter. Maybe after those are installed we can organise the next round of window replacements, or something else.

Both of the chickens are laying again but one is laying a smaller egg compared to the other. Instead of fighting about it at breakfast we wait till we have two of the one kind before we eat the fresh ones. I usually give them a treat of dried mealworms after they lay their eggs in the morning. I’m also feeding them extra cucumbers from the garden which I stomp on first to expose the insides. They seem to like them like that. I still have a plan to build ours a better chicken coop and maybe even get a couple more hens for a more regular egg supply.
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A few more thoughts about the garden, for next time. We only need one lebanese cucumber plant and one zucchini. Two pickling gherkins, and a lot more of the bush type green beans since they freeze really well. We seem to be doing OK with just two tomato plants this time, so we will keep doing the same. The new perpetual spinach plants are looking good and should be usable in a couple of weeks, so maybe plant two new ones each time. I don’t know what to do about the beetroot, and I tend to plant way too many carrots and end up feeding them to the wallabies, so this time I have planted none. I haven’t planted any radish at all so if I do then just six seeds, then a month later maybe another six. I probably only need about six lettuce going at a time. That’s why I am thinking about more green beans which we can have as our vegetables. We did get eight lettuce seedlings which I put in last week and which have survived the mini heatwave OK. Will I keep to this plan? I hope so.