Directly seeded carrots today, then covered w/ a bit of compost, and then watered them. Must keep those seeds moist. I dug their soil at about 10 inches, so I'm hoping they go that deep.

Also planted the broccoli transplants and lettuce transplants into the ground. These guys were healthier than the batch I transplanted a month ago. That's how cold this spring has been. My first batch was, admittedly, pretty lame for my first round. ...as expected.

Started tomatoes in their seed tray and are currently sprouting already. I have them outside today as the weather is AWESOME at 68 degrees. The sidewalk was decidedly warmer, so I put the tomatoes onto it - and I saw no damage or wilting, so I think that idea was OK.Tomatoes LOVE some heat.

Also - I'm reading a book called Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, written by Steve Solomon ( 6th ed if you must know) Very enlightening stuff.

Met another neighbor with a child of similar age to our own. They are doing the sisters and their husbands living together on a farm thing... their main concern is their carbon blueprint. Talked a little about cheese making with her. She is a friend of the wife's so I just tried to stay out of the way.

Installed bees into two hives. Went ok for my first time. I only got stung once and that is when I grabbed a tool without looking and wrapped my hand around a bee.

Today, I blew $220.47 on books at Powell's (not bad for 14 books), including American Horticultural Association's Plant Propagation, Gene Logsdon's Small Scale Grain Production, Dana Meadow's (posthumous) Thinking in Systems, Dmitry Orlov's Reinventing Collapse, and a number of Paul Hawken books, including Blessed Unrest.

This evening I went out and pulled weeds in several of my raised beds. It was therapeutic, as I had been putting it off for a while. Too much family stuff going on.

Worked on the garden retaining wall, put up 4 more RR ties, and hauled backfill. Later, my neighbor came over and helped put metal siding on the chicken house. Now I have to saw out 5 windows with the metal cutting circular saw (made for cutting metal). Nasty, spark-throwing, overhead job that I dread.

planted okra today. found weevils in a 25# sack of rice stored by itself in the food pantry. cooked them anyway.

Hope you've got eye protection.

I once spent a couple hours in the emergency room, with a suction cup behind my eyelid, pumping water through. About as much fun as a proctoscope, and entirely avoidable.

Bytesmiths,

Right! Your caution is well taken here. Getting steel in my eye a couple times was no picnic, but a bit of brass was far worse. Salt in your tears corrodes the brass instantly and makes some chemical that is extremely painful to the eye. Since brass is not removeable with a magnet like steel, he had to dig it out the hard way--with me awake to hold the eye still. I avoid all such experiences like the plague.

I wear glasses (like the ones in my avatar) with polycarbonate lenses. They need replaced every few months from the pits and scratches in them. Also wear a plastic face shield when needed, and that is not always enough. For this job, I'll use a Sawzall for the overhead work, since it is far less of a problem for flying chips, and what comes off of it are more directional. It is also variable speed, so I can run it slow and reduce the mess. The circular saw is very like a Skilsaw, but is heavily guarded and has a special carbide blade for steel. I use that only in the normal horizontal position to cut stuff before it is put on the building. The guards keep it more or less under control, but your hands still get some hot chips that find their way into your gloves. You have to dress like you are going to attend a forest fire for this.

Ear protection is important for these things, because the noise is raucous. I go for earplugs AND muffs, and over a lifetime of this I still have hearing loss. Enough loss that I just spent a chunk of money on a pair of hearing aids. I've done all the safety related things I know about, and still have plenty of scars and assorted damage. Your just can't overdo it on safety.

edit to add: I have some wire screen side shields for glasses left over from my days at the GM foundry. I'd better dig them out for this job, too.
edit again: Can't spell--not enough coffee yet.

Patience

I'm with you. Hot metal particularly in your boot is no fun. I have an old pair of tanker coveralls made of flax which I ware until it gets too hot.

Don't worry about the spelling it's the information that counts.

We have been cleaning out the chicken coop--there's a lot good composted poop that has had leaves, kitchen waste, sawdust, hay and straw, and other organic material added over the past year until we had about a foot of good stuff to haul out. We shovel it into 5 gallon pails and then haul it to where needed with the garden cart. By the time I have them empty my wife has the other batch of pails filled, so we get a lot spread fairly quickly. I put a few pails of it around the bigger fruit trees, less on smaller trees, also on the rows of berries, etc., with lots left for vegetables as the summer progresses. And then the coop will be clean and we can start over with new leaves and sawdust, etc.
Have lots of projects for the summer, such as new smoother flooring over the old rough barn floor in the upper levels of the barn to make the workshop areas more usable, and a roof over the entry way to the house to keep snow or rain away from the doorway. install the solar water heating panels that I was given a couple of years ago, and hook up some other ones that will heat some floor space in a shop area. Lots of trees to plant and mulch, and of course there is always something to do in the garden--lettuce, cabbage family and others, maybe some early tomatoes, too. (Our "usual" frost free date has been early June, but in recent years I have planted some tomatoes in April with no problems). Need to reconnect the rainwater system, which was disconnected from the eavestrough for the winter.

We cut window openings in the chicken house and installed the outer (storm) windows today. Caulked all 5 of them, so I'm ready to do metal trim and then paint the outside. Even though this is a tiny building (6' x 12') it still takes all the same steps to get it put together.

Wife and daughter thinned our broccoli starts and put out a full 80 ft.row across the garden. LOTS of plants. We'll see how many make it, and probably give away some.

Did some commercial work today, but mostly construction for us. Our stuff doesn't pay as well, but it's a lot more fun!

Tomorrow I go to the sandblast guy and take a burr mill, a corn sheller, a beam scale, and other odds and ends to get cleaned up. That is good fun, taking what looks like scrap iron and turning it into useful equipment. Myself and the neighbor who is restoring the Farmall Cub have been keeping the sandblast fellow busy this week.

WHAT DID HE SAY?

(In my case, it was being in rock-n-roll bands in my youth...)

It was rather entertaining in a former life, when, after my ex insisted I go for an audiology exam, the examiner took her aside after the test and patiently explained the difference between "hearing" and "listening." :-)

Requisite on-topic info: today, I arrived home to my community after spending a week in suburbia, which by now seems totally surreal. I know Patience and I politely disagree about this, but it was so lovely to be able to leave for a week, have a goat miscarry while we were gone, and know that trusted, loved, and capable friends with a vested interest were able to manage things while we were away. I've had "neighbours" take care of animals while I was away in the past, and in this case, I probably would have come home to a dead goat.

As with anything, sometimes there are problems, but other times make me so happy to have chosen community living.

Planted more veg - summer squash, okra, peanuts, lettuce, cukes.

Busy all day but the only prep related item was going through all of my seeds and moving them into glass jars with metal lids (a few have plastic but mostly metal) and moving the one's I will not be using later in the spring to the root cellar.
--------------
edit: and I waxed the cheese I made the other day... the directions I have been using lack precision so I hope that I am doing this right.

Plowed all 3 gardens today, dodging the new row of broccoli and a row of over-wintered kale. Moisture content was just right, so the ground broke up into an almost finished seed bed in the older patches, more cloddy in the new one.

Got stuff back from the sandblaster and painted it; now drying in the sun. Took off a load of scrap metal today, and gave it in trade toward some nails at the junkyard--150+ lbs. of them! Cost me $10 difference. The nails are a bit rusty, but not bad at all. Very usable as-is. New, they would cost about a buck a pound. They filled three 5 gallon buckets. All #8d, cement coated, which our kids will use when they get to building sheds and such.

Time to go disc the plowed ground before it dries too much.