We’ve been biding our time, patiently waiting since mid-February, to plant our garden. In the meantime, we got our seedlings planted and added a raised bed to plant our early cold weather-tolerant crops. With the new bed we now have a total of about 1400 square feet of garden including our herb garden.
Here’s our seedlings:
We have 60 heirloom tomatoes (four varieties), 36 sweet peppers (six varieties), and 100 chili peppers (six varities). Also basil, two different kinds of eggplant, two kinds of parsley and some Thai basil.
Here’s the raised garden with the hoops installed in case we need to cover them:
In there we have Swiss Chard, Pak Choi, Mizuna, several kinds of lettuce, spinach, radishes and carrots.
Here’s the full garden:
The stakes at the far end are where we’ll plant the tomatoes. We weave string between the plants and the stakes as the plants get progressively bigger rather than using tomato cages. The plants will likely get as tall as six feet before they’re done so tomato cages aren’t really useful. Our seedlings have such a good start that some of them will be close to a foot tall when we plant them next weekend. Under the ground we’ve already laid soaker hose to water them directly at the roots. That helps deter mold on the leaves.
Along the right edge of the garden we have asparagus coming up that we planted last year. It’s tantalizing because we have asparagus but we can’t pick it until next year.
In the garden you can see some dark stripes and that’s where I have dug some shallow trenches and then filled them in with compost. After that I raked it in and that’s where the happy little peppers and eggplants will go.
To the left of the picture you can kinda see onions (175 of them) already well progressed. Snap peas and shell peas are growing along the long edges of the garden.
Lastly, here’s our garlic:
We’re on about our fifth generation of garlic now. We plant about 1/3 hardnecks and 2/3 softnecks around Halloween. We’ll harvest around the 4th of July.
Next to the garlic is the bluebird house we put up last year:
They checked it out last year but declined to move in. This year they elected to stay so we have “Blue-ie” and “Blue-eese”. Hopefully they’ll raise up some babies which we have already named, of course (Blue-iss, MaryBlue, and BlueAnn.)
Things are ready and this weekend we’ll pull the trigger. Our long wait is over. Woo hoo!
I’m just sayin’…
