Our Garden Grows

Today, between rain showers, I planted:

Tomatillos - 2
Tomatoes - 20 +/- (It was A LOT)
Sweet Basil - 7
Russian Red Kale - 6
Buttercrunch Lettuce - 6
Red (something?) Lettuce - 6

I also noticed that a few of the lettuces and kale that I planted from starts were bouncing back a bit - thank goodness. I feel like the mistake I made was to plant them on too sunny a day, near mid-day, and the poor little buggers just couldn't hang in there until the sun was low enough for me to give them a hearty watering. Hence the replacements/supplements that were shoehorned in today.

I also noticed today that some of my radishes are starting to pop up. Hooray for near-instant gratification!

Yesterday I planted a bed full of sunflowers - half Miriam Edibles and half Giant Greystripe. That makes 4 1/2 beds planted, 11 1/2 left to go. OY.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we'll get the bean teepee in (Scarlet runners and blue lakes), and possibly the cantaloupe as well.

Getting the Garden In - A Looooong Work in Progress

On Mother's Day weekend, we moved the (not terribly helpful) pigs back to their pen from the garden space. We'd moved them in there the week previous, hoping that they'd root up the grass in the garden space in a jiffy. One week later, a little bit of nothing had changed. So we powered on ahead. Bill & Olivia dropped the 18 raised bed frames in to place and attempted to smother the remaining grass within the bed spaces with a thick mulch of goat poopy straw.

The "garden mix" soil that we bought (1/3 topsoil, 2/3 mushroom compost) was delivered last Monday, and the laborious task of hauling it, one wheelbarrow at a time, from the front yard to the lower pasture, has been s-l-o-w. We've got four of our 3'x12' beds filled with soil, and just two of them planted. An underwhelming amount accomplished, yet I still managed to get a sunburn.

So, for the record, we have the peas, radishes, greens and beets in now. We also have a few strawberry plants in, but I hope to eventually fill a whole bed with them, so I'll need another good dozen to get the job done. Looks like I'll be hitting up the Farmers Market this weekend for the strawberries, basil and other starts which I didn't/couldn't start myself. The one year that Spring arrives on time and we're running late - d'oh!