Farm Records: April 21

Today I put 16 tomato plants in the ground in the first long bed. They look happy. It's a wide selection of cherry and regular varieties. A record of the order of tomatoes planted is kept in the farm notebook, back page.

Earlier this week I put the first, largest tomato in a huge pot, a Cherry Chocolate. Some blight spots have appeared on its leaves and on other plants' leaves. I'm picking them off.
Yesterday I put all the cucumber seedlings out in their bed, plus a bigger cucumber, plus our lone squash plant. All these plants had been set outside for several days to grow accustomed to sun and wind.
I successfully started 6 golden wax bean plants and put four of them into a hill today.

 In the remaining bean hills I put blue lake beans directly in the soil, for the third time (!!!), hoping this time it is warm enough at last, and they will survive. They'd better, because I'm now out of blue lake seeds.
Wheat is still growing (among all the weeds and buttercups). Not as vibrant a crop as we'd hoped, but Adam still hopes to get enough straw to grow some mushrooms in the summer.

The honeybees are quite busy. No swarms that we know of. Oops! A few minutes after typing that, Adam picked up a small swarm in the wheat field, of all places!

Scooping them into the box with one gloved hand. He got one sting, on the other hand.

No boxes added recently.
The worms continue to do well.
The new barn cat, Bill, seems to be sticking around. She's free to roam but continues to use her litter box and eat her food. We see her occasionally skirting into various barn bays.
Saw a large mouse in the barn office yesterday.
The green potato tops are coming up again above the mulch we topped the bins with during the last cold snap.
Both beds of peas (English and sugar snap) are doing very well.

Lettuce is finally coming along, but did not germinate as broadly as hoped.

Both garlic and onion beds are doing quite well. Onions are splitting/multiplying now.
Remaining in the greenhouse: lots of tomatoes of various sizes (a couple dozen still needing to be transplanted out of their first cells), four pepper plants, six basil plants.
The fig cuttings did not take. They were zapped by cold even in the greenhouse. Will need to try again.
Adam put up deer fencing around the garden area to keep Ned out. He tends to tromp the beds.

In the house lot, all the plants I've put in are thriving. Doing particularly well are artemesia and hostas. A climbing rose was transplanted from the orchard onto the trellis and has wilted a bit for lack of water. It has been quite dry for the last week.
Highs this week have been in the 70s, lows in the 50s. Rain expected tomorrow. This March our highest temp was 86 and our lowest temp was 32.

 Ned has a good life. Buttercups galore blooming all over the pasture.