04/10/13

I was very productive today. At lunch I went out and rearranged things in the shed where I park the RTV, to make room for stacking straw. I was able to make a spot to easily stack ten bales, and probably as many as fifteen without really being in the way too badly. I also discovered that I can easily haul six bales in the RTV, without any tie downs, and wouldn't be afraid to haul nine if they were secured.

After work I took a few bales to the garden and started mulching. I used one bale to add another layer around the garlic. I then started mulching the potatoes, and the walkways between rows. I had no idea how much straw it would take to do the job, so was surprised when I ended up using eight bales. Clearly we need to be able to start using other materials as mulch, such as leaves and grass clippings. Fortunately, though, re-applying mulch to the potatoes later in the year should not require as much, since I'll hopefully only need to add it around the plants themselves, and not to the walkways.

While I was mulching the garden Andrea was working on weeding the herb garden. Apparently the use of fresh manure was a bad idea, as there were a lot of seeds that resulted in a thick layer of grass growing over the winter. She wasn't able to get finished before dark, but make some good progress.

It was unseasonably warm yesterday, so we were both exhausted by the time we finished our projects. I don't know what the official high temperature was, but my thermometer showed 88 at one point. It was 80 degrees inside, with the windows open, so I'm very confident that the outside temps were in the 80s, even if the reading of 88 wasn't accurate.