Greetings! It certainly has been a long time, hasn’t it? We never stopped gardening, I just stopped blogging. In the summer of 2017 I got back into community theater and that has been a whirlwind of productions, either as an actor, writer, director, or producer and has not left much time for keeping up with this site. Now that the pandemic has caused those of us with the option to stay home to social distance, I feel like this is the year to get this blog regularly updated again. I am remembering, however, that I will be struggling for content until the vegetables actually start to be harvested, so you’re in for about 8 weeks of me blathering on about books, other blogs and random plant facts. Watching plants grow is about as exciting as watching plants dry. But if you’re out of options on Netflix, swing on by this blog.
We got off to a great start this year, with good-sized seedlings ready for planting by mid-May:
Memorial Day weekend has always been our traditional planting weekend, per the advice of my grandfather and this year we got everything in on Friday. First we had some prep work to do:
We need to redo the fence on the main garden but have not figured out a workable solution to having a removable end piece with any of the options we have been exploring. J has suggested perhaps making the open end near the patio, but that gets into moving the bench, outdoor sink, and rolling across the patio which is not my top choice. J thinks the pie-shaped bed at the end of the garden would make a great rose garden, and I don’t disagree, but absent a workable solution for getting the tiller in there every two years, it needs to be something that gets planted annually.
Speaking of plants, here’s how they look after this weekend:
It’s not very exciting, and it won’t be for a number of weeks. The middle photo captures the newest bed addition, our hops bed – you can barely see the strings reaching up from the bed to an overhead pole designed to encourage the vines to grow up and around the strings. If it works, it should make a really interesting backdrop by mid-summer.