Spring Postcards

It has pleased the Lord that we would have a gradual move from winter to summer this year. It is quintessentially spring and it has been such a gift.

And rain! No one told me how much easier it is to garden when you don’t have to constantly water your seedlings! Y’all everything is growing and we might actually be in danger of too much rain out in the potato patch, but that’s a different post for a different day.

We won’t do meat birds this year, we said. It’s just not going to happen this year, we thought. Well, plenty of skim milk and whey from Mabel co-conspired with that yearly clear out of baby chicks at Tractor Supply and let’s just say we changed our tune and 43 little peepers came home that day. The girls are in charge of their care (under Mama’s supervision) for these earliest weeks up by the house. That gives us just enough time to fix up the meat bird run, which is lush right now, before moving them out to free range in a few weeks.

Salads everyday, sometimes twice-a-day. Nearly all of of us love a big salad anyway so I’m just gonna keep filling this 16-quart stock pot with lettuce every morning because that stuff won’t eat itself. Along with the lettuce there are radishes, lots of self-seeded cilantro, and green onion thinnings I’ve been sneaking from the onion patch. Here’s a bunch of ideas for main dish salads in case you are also gratefully harvesting.

And please, if you live in a warmer climate like ours, do yourself a favor and plant cilantro and then when you “save seed” just give the head a good shake. We unwittingly now have a perennial cilantro situation happening every time a cool, rainy season hits us (i.e. spring and fall). And so all of that “saved seed” I never end up needing. Which is why I suspect I might find jars of coriander seed in the bedroom of my resident seed-saver, ten-year-old Abram.

And speaking of spring chickens… this little lady is nine-months-old tomorrow and at just the right age for garden blanket sitting while Mama does some weeding and harvesting. She is scooting just a little but not enough to get into the beet patch and tear it to smithereens like Rita, our mama kune kune, did. That was about two weeks ago now, though, and with the rain and lovely weather, the beets that were left have mostly recovered. Plus, she likes to eat dirt which to me is like letting her take charge of her own probiotic supplementation. Up to a point, at least.

How is spring your way?