We’re going to have a booth this weekend at the Mother Earth News Fair in Albany. We’re so excited! We had a great time last year and are so looking forward to being back again this year. (You can find us in booth 1034 near the entrance.) Things are always especially busy for us when we are getting ready for a festival of any kind. There are things to make (lots of things to make), display tweaks, and loose ends to tie up (like quickly ordering more business cards when you realize you’re nearly out.) Besides all the things we’re doing for our business, there are things to get ready at home and food to pack for the trip. And then there’s the garden.

With how busy we are in preparation, it would be convenient to leave everything that needs doing in the garden for after we get back from the fair. But there were seeds that needed to be planted now, and starts that needed to be transplanted now. (Starts that were actually past the time they needed to be transplanted, getting quite root bound in their wee pots.) When we got home from market on Saturday night, we got out all the seeds that still needed to be planted and started soaking them. We finally got our cucumber, summer and winter squash, beans, and sunflowers planted on Sunday. Phew! It’s funny how the garden can be a source of stress as we think ‘Oh we need to get this done and this done and this…’, but then when we actually go out there and dig our hands in the earth, and work in the garden, it’s the best stress reliever there is. Garden therapy works wonders, I must say.

We’ve been going outside some evenings to get caught up as best we can in the garden, focusing on what really needs to get done before we leave and then leaving what can wait. Some mornings Jeff works in the garden before he heads to his workshop for the day, while I get breakfast made and work in the house. He got twine tied up for the peas and beans to grow up. We’re harvesting peas now! Bracken likes to be the one in charge of harvesting them. We didn’t get very many red currants on our currant bush this year, just one to enjoy here and there. Our black currant has more berries on it and we’ve been eating them as they ripen. Some strawberries are starting to ripen! And Bracken ate the very first blueberry the other day.

The last few weeks I’ve been sore after moving muscles in a way they haven’t been moved in a long time, which feels good. Gardening is a good workout. We’ve been using Bracken’s red wagon for our gardening cart recently, conveniently moving it from place to place as we move around the garden. Since we’ve needed to maximize our gardening efforts, Jeff mixed all our planting soil in our wheelbarrow, blending in soil, compost, azomite, and fertilizer, and then it was all ready to do lots of planting. (I don’t know why we’ve ever done it any other way, mixing it individually in pots, it’s so much faster to mix it in a big batch all at once.)

Jeff had a creative idea to help protect some of our plants from moles this year. I know I’ve mentioned the moles before, but they do a lot of destruction in our garden. Sometimes it feels our gardening efforts are wasted when so much of what we do is destroyed by them. We get a nice garden bed all ready with compost and pop a plant in, and the moles come right in to get all those worms, digging around the roots in the process, and nearly killing the plant. Jeff traps them, but we only get one here or there, which doesn’t really solve the problem. This year he wanted to start planting everything that is especially sensitive to digging around it’s roots, in pots down in the ground. It doesn’t necessarily make for a pretty looking garden bed, but when we mulch with straw on top you can’t even tell there are pots buried all over. Now when we plant lettuce in the garden, the moles can’t dig under it!

In other homestead happenings, we had to separate one of our chickens. It seems she got hurt and then our rooster started picking on her. We’ve never had a problem with him before, that’s why we’ve kept him this long. She was living in our garden for awhile, but then we moved her to her own yard so she wouldn’t eat the baby plants. We’ll bring her back to the flock when she seems strong and ready to join them again. One evening this week all of our chickens got out of their yard and came pouring into the garden. I thought of them like a bunch of rowdy teenagers having a wild party without any regard for anything they were destroying in the process. Luckily, we got them back into their yard before they could do too much damage because this time of year with our starts so small, they can destroy the garden quite quickly.

So, we’re getting the plants tucked in and ready as best we can before we leave. Now if they can just stand the heat that’s supposed to be coming our way this weekend!