Nest Egg Nursery

So, about posting three times a week.

W2 job, children, and helping keep the household and homestead running smoothly can certainly limit your time to write on a blog, let alone work on your other projects. Sometimes it be that way. Anyhoo, nice weather is starting to flirt with us here in the eastern bluegrass although there are going to be a couple of hard freezes coming this week. I call it mud season or false spring, depending on the day. Warm weather with tornado warnings preceding two nights with freezing are just how it is here in Kentucky.

We had our first farmer’s market meeting this week and everyone seems excited and ready to get going. There is a really good sense of community among the vendors and I’m looking forward to making this year bigger than the last. If you’re local and grow or make anything at your home or on your property, please consider renting a booth this season. It’s not expensive at all and it is a lot of fun. Our next meeting will be April 18th at 6 pm. If you’re interested, please contact me.

Garden planning, seed starting, cleaning up what didn’t get cleaned up at the end of last season (looking at you, Court Days), working on new projects, and working on projects that probably should have been completed a long time ago took up the majority of this week, along with soccer games and college off-campus move-ins. I learned taking my time when putting in infrastructure is time worth taking (something I’ve gotten better with over time, for sure). A few years ago, I built some really big, raised bed boxes (4’x4’x2′) and used walnut poles that had been stripped for veneer for the corners. I came across a great deal on them and was trying to save money when I built these boxes. I knew at the time the corners would become an issue, but “it’ll be no problem to empty them down the road”. A few years later, two of the boxes are starting to come apart due to the untreated corner poles rotting. I ended up spending probably way too much time emptying and disassembling one of the boxes. It got done, but it was a huge time sink, not to mention my loathing of digging/moving large amounts of soil by hand. I have decided to replace these boxes with wicking tubs as the need arises. I’m losing a little bit of square footage but replacing them will be much more manageable when the time comes, not to mention requiring less water.

I also built five wicking tubs and will be filling them later this week after the landscape fabric I ordered comes in. If you’re new to gardening or homesteading, landscape fabric is worth every single penny you spend on it. I use it under all of my wicking tubs. of which I have a ton, and it cuts down on mowing and weeding significantly. We tried growing in-ground in holes cut into the fabric, but I quickly learned that method does not work for me.

This week will consist of laying fabric, filling wicking tubs, starting seeds in the shed racks (after the freeze, of course), plumbing the water catchment tanks, and moving the nursery tables onto the fabric. What’s on your agenda this week?