Evil Pea Weevil

We were notified by one of the seed companies that the pea seeds for this year may be contaminated with Pea Weevils. Pea Weevils only affect pea plants and are a pest that live in the seed. They advised us to burn them, or alternatively check to see if they have holes or yellow spots and conduct a specific gravity test. Specific gravity test is a fancy way of saying dump the seed packet into a tub of water, see which ones float to the surface and take those ones out. The ones that sink we kept.

After checking the seeds we rolled them around in Mycorrhizal fungi and set them aside to dry out a bit. Meanwhile, we finally got a chance to get dirty! In the garden we removed the mulch from three rows. In order to plant in a straight row and maintaining a desired distance between each row we used twine, poles and measuring tape to guide us. Using our fancy seeder, that took four of us to figure out how to load, we went down the three lines sowing our seed. So exciting!

Monday we did more garden work, pulling up broccoli from last year, removing mulch, weeding, and mulching the raspberries.

The most adventurous part of the day was when it was time to put the chickens away. As I may or may not have mentioned, one set of chickens are in the mobile coop. These little devils are really difficult to put away at night. It takes five people to put them in. We must look more than a little comical chasing around the 60 plus chickens with our sticks, that we use to hook on their ankle. They fly and run away, and hid under the mobile coop. We basically have to catch each one by hand because they haven't learned yet that this is their home and save haven.

Today we started some broccoli and cabbage seedlings and furtigated. I love that word. Furtigating is using a fish emulsion diluted with water to fertilize the seedlings. It contains alot of phosphorous and nitrogen. It smells like Sea World in the Greenhouse for about an hour after applying it.

In the afternoon we prepared some beds by turning the soil and adding compost. We then planted beets and carrots.

Its been fun being out in the garden the past few days. But I had to check in on the goats before lunch. The little kids hop up on top of the fuzzy sheep and it looks like they are surfing. It is by far the cutest thing ever.