Yard Cleanup

Finally with a weekend that was sunny and there were no events going on elsewhere, we had a chance to work in the yard. We managed to put together a full pile of branches for the city to pick up this week. The new front garden bed was further worked on and the bulbs we planted in the fall are beginning to come up. The Maddock street fenceline has revealed a space for a flowerbed all along it. This had been hidden under the overgrown shrubs along the length of the fence.

The large bin we have from Victoria Community Composting is full to the brim - 360 litres of yard materials. The company offers a great service, once a month they come by and haul away your compostables, which can include fairly large branches, once a month and you get a 20 litre bag of finished compost. The service costs $20 a month, but I find it more than worth it because of the hassles they take away. I still have a classic black composter, but it only gets some of the overflow.

I have started the first lettuce seedlings indoors and want to try and get a good rotation going. I would like to have us have a head available per day from mid April till early November.

The veggie bed is going to need a lot of work the next time the weather gets nice again. My plan is to make 4x4 beds and work on a decent harvest for this year. I would like to get a lot of strawberries in place along with raspberries. I am not sure yet on what vegetables.

I need to also start on the chicken coop. From the materials that I have from the one I salvaged from the house on Earl Grey Street, I should have everything I need. I would like to have chickens in place my mid May. I think I should have 4, but part of me wants to go to 6. With four I should be getting close to two dozen a week, with six this rises to three. Our use is about one and a half dozen a week at the moment. Four will not really offer me the overflow I would like to have. I would like to be able to give eggs to friends, family and neighbours.

Ultimately I would like to getting enough fresh fruit, vegetables and eggs from the yard to be able to dispense with having to shop for any of it for much of the summer.

I also spend a long time on the weekend working on the flooring for the attic - I needed enough dry weather to be able to work outside with the wood. The salvaged fir flooring needs to be gone through and have all the broken bits cut out of it. The shards of the old fir are being burned each night in the fireplace, I managed to get it hot enough the one night to melt the glass on the fireplace doors....

Pictures and more details on the yard to come in the following weeks.