Helloooooooo there garden gals and guys! It’s been six months since my last post for the season, which you may remember ended with me picking apples from my apple tree and making a pie with them. Did you miss me? I certainly missed being able to share my garden goodness with you all.

Well, winter is finally giving way to spring, and I’m ready to get things rolling. I’ve already fallen a little behind because I haven’t ordered my seeds yet and seed-starting time is just around the corner! Eeek! But at least I have the seeds picked out that I want. I just have to place my order. I think I’ll be doing that sometime this week.

As my thoughts turn toward my little backyard farm, I’m thinking of things I have always wanted to try and deciding what I can tackle this year. First, I’m definitely doing the rain gutter grow system again.The garden soil needs at least another year of rest before I attempt to going back to planting in the ground. But I think the main thing that I am going try this year is having a worm farm! Yup! I’ve always wanted one, and they are pretty easy to do. I’ve always loved the results that compost have in my garden, so why not get some worms and let them contribute to the daily chores of my little backyard farm!

Speaking of composting, I’m also going to start spinning my compost tumblers and turn all that chicken poop I’ve been cleaning out of the coop this winter into even more fertilizer. Who knows, I may even start selling small bags of it on Craigslist. All I need to do is come up with a catchy name. Maybe something like Precious Poop. 🙂

You may remember that last year I canned for the first time. Well, I think I will do that again this year. Though I won’t can green beans. I just didn’t use them as much as I thought I would. I’ll do more tomatoes, and definitely make more salsa, as the six pints I made went very quickly during our big snowstorm!

I also plan to buy at my local farmers markets again. There’s only so much space in my backyard, and I just can’t grow everything that I would like to grow. I’ve made a mental note of the things we buy a lot of in the winter months. Frozen fruits and salad greens are high on our list. So, to save some money, I will be buying blueberries, peaches, and strawberries in bulk this year and freezing them for the winter months. Salad greens don’t freeze too well, so I will still have to go to the store for those once winter is upon us again.

You might be wondering how the girls are doing. Well my little egg-laying ladies made it just fine through the winter. They even survived their first molting and managed to grow their feathers back before the first really cold days of winter (I was a little worried there for a minute!). They even survived that huge snow storm we had. They were very happy when we dug them out of this situation with our handy dandy snow blower!