The power was out at work this morning, so I came home at lunch.  Of course, I got the call that the power came back when I was within a mile of the house.  No worry, I still took the afternoon off to work with Anna on stuff around the farm.  We had our lunch and once Amanda was down for a nap, we got to work outside.

Last year, the garden consisted of 3 raised beds inside a fenced in area.  It was pre-existing, so we just added some compost and used it like that.  Our total planting area was about 130 sqft.  Today, we removed the raised beds, put down a layer of cardboard to kill grass and weeds, then added about 8″ of compost on top of the cardboard.  We reused the boards from the raised beds to go around the fence and hold the soil inside the garden.  We now have about 300 sqft of planting space ready to go.

After that, the kids got home, Anna went jogging, and I kept working.  I built a new coop for raising young chickens.  I should be able to finish it up tomorrow afternoon with another hour or so of work.  Of course, I also have to get to work prepping more rabbit hutches, because we are picking up 3 more rabbits on Sunday.  We anticipate 2 will be dinner in the next week or two and 1 will be retained for breeding with our New Zealand does.

Thanks to a tip I got this morning, we have decided on our Oberhasli buck.  Well, sort of.  We decided on a farm that has a lot of Oberhasli’s and we sent in a deposit to reserve a buckling that should be born in March.  I’ll pick him up from Maryland in May when I go to DC for business.