Garden Update

The tomato patch. Larry staked the first row already. Lots more stakes to drive, though. Five rows of 15 plants each. Varieties: Beefsteak, Amish Paste, Hillbilly, Better Boy, Brandywine, Early Girl, Yellow Pear, Cherry, and a few I can't remember right now.

Yesterday we took a break from the cabin work to catch up on the gardens. Larry has been doing a great job of keeping up with weeds and has done a lot of planting, but with rain forecast for Sunday we wanted to get more seeds and plants in the ground. No sense wasting an opportunity for free watering and cloudy weather to settle plants in nicely.

Potatoes, beans and corn are up. The potatoes look spotty, but that's okay because the late arrivals will come along quickly. The frost this past week burned the tops of a few of the potato and half-runner bean plants, but they're pulling out of it. I have never before seen potatoes get bitten by frost. The corn is about 3 inches tall now, Early Sunglow which is a variety that ripens in about 60 days. Maybe by July 4th? I can dream. We planted it April 10, much too early but worth a chance if it makes it through. So far so good.

By evening, I was beat. We finished planting 75 tomato plants, 2 rows of corn, a row of purple beans and Italian beans and dill, red romaine lettuce and beets. Not to mention a dozen cabbages and a dozen or more broccoli plants, and a couple dozen leeks. I'm trying a new cabbage this year in addition to crinkle-headed Savoy, my favorite. The new cabbage is called baby cabbage. Each head is supposed to be just enough for a meal, and the seeds include several different types of cabbage including the ruby red ones. With just two of us usually here for dinner, big cabbages can last a l-o-n-g time.

This is the garden I call the spring garden because it has all early-planting veggies--onions, carrots, celery, spinach, peas (Dwarf Gray Sugar this year, a variety I like because its blossoms are pink and purple), beets, lettuce, dill, leeks, broccoli and cabbages.

Even after all that planting, and moving most of the extra tomato plants outside, the greenhouse still looks full. Peppers, herbs and flowers still need to be planted.

Later we went into town to get fencing for the turkey's pen, feed, mulch, fertilizer, and other things that attack the budget every spring. I saw some knockout roses, a viburnum, blueberry plants and currant bushes and those came home with us too. And since it was supposed to rain...we planted them all when we got home, and spread 12 bags of mulch. Larry did a little weed-eating and I pulled weeds in flowerbeds and by 7:30 pm we both just dropped into chairs and cried Uncle.

One thing I've noticed in my flowerbeds is that I have little im bloom at the beginning of May. The weigelia and a few iris are the biggest show right now, with a few other things in the flowerbeds coming in but it's mostly shades of green. I will have to think about that for next year and see what I might add to give more color at the end of April/beginning of May. Any suggestions?

I'm glad we drove ourselves to finish, though because the rain showed up just about the time we quit, and today is cool, dark and rainy and our new plants are standing up like they were never moved. Today I am working inside as it rains, finally getting my summer and winter clothes swapped out, paying bills, doing laundry and reclaiming the house from a week's neglect. It's our son Derek's birthday so tonight we'll have dinner at his house and enjoy some time with family.

All in all it's been a good weekend, productive and varied. Just the way I like it!