Buried Treasure

The area where the laying hens are located is on a bit of a hillside covered in oregano, planted who knows when, which has gone horribly out of control. The hens dig around for bugs, but unfortunately don't seem interested in helping us pull out the oregano. Then yesterday Orrin went into their enclosure and noticed a patch of what looked like garlic scapes. He dug some of them up, and sure enough it was garlic. Like the oregano, we have no idea how long it's been there, but there is a pretty decent little patch of garlic that may have been just one or two, but that now has split into probably 20 or 30 small cloves of garlic. We've been wondering how well our own planted garlic will do this year, so this bit of extra garlic is like finding buried treasure. We can eat some of it, but also it can contribute to next year's garlic seed, so that we will hopefully need to save less of some of our other varietals.

Everyday it seems we find another reason to be grateful for the greenhouse. We have about 40 tomato plants, of which most are about a foot tall now, and a few are around 2' tall. The biggest ones are now flowering. There are a handful that are still tiny, but they were planted later, and are a later variety, so hopefully they will get big as the season progresses. The heat in the greenhouse is pretty amazing, how the sun's energy can be harnessed into this space and help veggies grow. I'm so glad we invested the time and money in it, as I think it will significantly lengthen our growing season, both in the spring and fall. We found that out already, with being able to have greens over the winter, and now we are seeing a similar effect with the warm weather vegetables.