Red Hourglass in the Garden Straw

Black Widow Spider Playing Dead in Straw

Black Widow Spider Upright and Ready to Scurry Off

Today we visited Gruene Weide as usual with a list of things to accomplish. We planted nine tomato plants, six heirloom and three hybrid plants. We've been mulching all our garden (both house and land) with straw I bought a few months ago. So after planting the tomatoes, I grabbed a hay bail and rolled it into the garden from the hay loft. Inge grabbed the wire cutters to cut the bailing wire and just as she cut one strand she saw the spider shown above.

I brushed the spider off the hay bale where she landed upside down and played dead with the red hourglass prominently displayed. So I ran to the truck and grabbed my camera to snap a couple of photos. As often as I've seen black widow spiders, it's the first time I was able to get a picture with my macro lens! I used a piece of straw to flip it over to take a top-side photo too. She is so black and shiny I can see the outline of my reflection on her back!

Garden on February 4th 2013

 This year, in hopes of finishing the well drilling and having water available, we expanded the garden. It doesn't fill the entire space, but it does manage to fill about 70%. The piles of dirt shown up front consist of asparagus trenches with 16 root clumps planted. We planted straw bale potatoes in the yellow pile past the blank spot. Broadforked soil stands idle beyond the straw potatoes then at the far end, too small to see stands the very healthy onion patch where I planted seventy-some onion bulbs.

Garden on April 7th 2013

Green beans, cucumbers, black-eyed peas popped their first leaves above the crusty soil, popping a tiny crumbly soil lid aside in their reach for the sun. Today, the last of the 16 asparagus roots sprouted so we got the full planting to come up. Everything shows green everywhere this year because we received about two inches of rain in the last few weeks. We need more rain but for now the garden and the pastures and the woods all look vibrantly alive. Notice how the April photo appears so much greener than the February photo (naturally of course!) No bees have occupied the bee hive as yet and we don't see many flitting around the blooms either.

Trellis Posts Installed for Berry Row

Another chore started today involved planting posts with post hole diggers for the Blackberry and Raspberry row trellis. I planted three posts seen to the right in the photo and at a later date will install the rest of the trellis. In the foreground next to the black bucket stands one of the two apple trees we planted in February. (Both apple trees bloomed and have apples - which concerns me - I think a newly planted fruit tree should spend its first year growing roots, not fruit. Inge thinks otherwise so the apples grow, unpruned.)