The Garden is In

Procrastination/schedule/good luck prevented us from putting any of our plants in the ground until this past weekend. The upside of this is that we missed out on some of the more … fun … weather Mo Nature has thrown at us lately. But the downside is that our garden starts in particular were looking pretty crappy. They needed more sunshine and room to grow and they needed it … well weeks ago!

We finally got a break from rainy/cloudy this weekend and struck while the sun was hot. We planted our front beds with a mixture of sad-looking strawflower seedlings we grew in the basement and a few more bedding plants from Wal*Mart (I figure if they can survive Wal*Mart, my garden should be like Eden for them).  The kids hung out with us while we worked out front. Ben was a pretty big fan of digging in the dirt. Go figure.

The front garden is pretty much done, with the exception of one corner where the sprinklers are wonky. We couldn’t put anything there lest we have to just dig it all up again. Unfortunately, the week has not been good for work outside since it’s drizzled all day every day (when did we move to Seattle??).

The back garden is almost solely our starts. We have baby oak leaf lettuce and two varieties of tomatoes. We also put in some basil starts from Wal*Mart and our chives from last year came back quite well. I direct-seeded some Chioggia beets and some butter head (butter cup? butter beer? butter something …) squash.

And of course, our raspberry patch, referred to, lovingly, as the firelane raspberry patch. This is where we took out ugly fitzer (evergreen) bushes that did nothing but trap whatever crap the wind threw their way … and replaced them with AWESOME raspberry bushes. These were a huge success last year and out-produced anything else we planted. I hope we have such good luck again this year.

It’s almost here!! Happy summer, y’all!