My daughter decided to start a "Organic Gardening" service. It's an idea I had a couple years ago and something we've talked about since, and she's doing it. It's pretty much the same as a lawn mowing or landscaping service, except we'll be doing veggie gardens.

She's expanded on the idea of setting up and maintaining veggie gardens by offering Herb gardens, Bee, Butterfly, and Hummingbird gardens, and even Pet gardens. Plus, she's setting up a "Veggie Swap" between her clients so they can share what they've got a surplus of, and offering to bring surplus produce to local "Food Banks" for charity. That's pretty cool.

She's calling it "Victory Garden Works".

I told her I'd help her if she wanted to give it a shot so I'd already committed myself, but it wasn't really all about her. I've know for a few years now that I need to get away from sitting on my butt programming all day so this is really a blessing for me. I'll still code, but I'll spend as much time gardening as I can to help get this going with her. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it works out. It'd be great it we can turn it into a full time job.

She's already got 3 customers signed up, and they're all very excited about this too. I'm hoping it will really take off. I'd love to find a niche where I could work outdoors, and at right at home a lot to boot.

I got three good afternoons in on my garden this past week. Got things cleaned up good and a nice thick layer of burro processed organic hay compost on top of my raised beds. Lucky for me I spent some time putting the garden to rest properly last Fall and it's really paid off this year. The soil is richer than it's ever been, and the worms have really been working out there all Winter long mixing the compost and mulch I put out there.

Her and I made some new hoop tunnel row covers and we're starting some plants from seed to sell to her customers. I got about 100 set out so far, a mix of all non-GMO, organic, pole beans, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, watermelon, cantaloupe, squash and cucumbers. One of my burros, Lewis, stole two packs of seed off the tailgate of my truck and ate them, paper envelope and all. Turned out to be both packs of the Tomato seeds we'd bought. I told him he was an ass. He agreed. What can you do with that?

This year we made the hoops with 1/2" PEX and I tied string between the hoops to help keep them propped up straight, and then covered them with 3.5 mil visqueen. I've done this before with stuff I had lying around but the PEX works really good for this and should last a really long time.

I'll start seeding leaf lettuce and radishes under a few more covered rows tomorrow which should be table ready by the 1st week in May. We'll start hitting the local Farmer's markets as soon we've got produce to sell.

I'll take some more photos over the next few days. The weather forecast is pretty sweet so I should have time to get all my raised beds covered and planted or starting seedlings like the one below. I'll try to capture the progress, but I tend to get caught up in the work and forget to take pictures. This year I have some motivation to do that though. I'll be making a web site for her business so I'll need photos of what we're doing.

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"You want to go where?"