Big bowl of swiss chard and kale. We've got a lot of this to eat up, thankfully it's so delicious we would never get sick of it. We usually steam our greens and top them with butter.  There's nothing quite like fresh, simple greens from the garden. 

Growing all our kale, with the exception of the plants still thriving in the cold frame, under row covers this year. Every year I find the young seedlings get attacked by pests which is quite hard on them. This year we seeded our broccoli, kale, cabbage and brussel sprouts under the row cover for protection with excellent results. The kale is buddied up here with beets under the same row cover. Our beets usually do quite well but the greens get so eaten that we don't eat them ourselves. We also planted our '3 sisters' garden under row cover this year for the heat amplifying quality of the row cover. Squashes, cucumbers and melons are planted with corn and soybeans for our version of a 3 sisters garden. The edamame or  soybeans are doing extremely well with seeds my sister picked me up from Annapolis Seeds. 

All in all the entire garden is doing extremely well this year. We're really having an exceptional growing year so far and hoping it keeps up. Last year was so wet and constantly raining, which presents quite the challenge when you have soil that consists mostly of clay like we do. Everything still did quite well, although not as well as it could of. This year, like every year, we added a lot of extra organic matter in case of another rainy year and the vegetables are really digging it. Our own chicken manure was finally aged long enough, two years, to apply to the garden.  Chicken manure is touted as one of the best manures to use as it is quite high in nitrogen and also contains a good amount of potassium and phosphorus making it a well balanced fertilizer. The high nitrogen level in chicken manure can present a problem when used too freshly on the garden. It can actually burn and kill plants if used to freshly. We compost our chicken manure to allow it to mellow out before using. We mix some of it with our regular compost to accelerate that compost and mix other components, like leaves and seaweed, with the remainder. You will read that composted chicken manure can be used after 12 months to as little as 6-9months, however I find it more beneficial to wait even longer than that. I've used composted chicken manure that was only a year old and it promptly burnt and killed plants on contact. Thankfully it was only weeds it killed as I was using it as the bottom layer on a lasagna bed. Also chances are there will be bedding, straw and wood shavings, mixed in with the chicken manure which require a bit more time to decompose. In my humble opinion, it's better to wait the two years before applying chicken manure to your garden.