I know it is only May, still before our last frost date, but I’ve so enjoyed being outside, working in my garden. It feels like a soothing therapy, and in fact it really is! Sun, breeze, buzz of insects, fresh green growing things . . . how healing it is.
Come with me into my garden and I’ll show you what’s growing:
Here’s the first square foot garden bed I planted back in February and March, as the weather allowed. It includes sugar snap peas, red leaft lettuce, garlic, radishes, swiss chard, green onions, spinach and more. I’ve had to throw a blanket over it on cold nights, which is pretty easy when it is just a 4′ x 4′ box.
We’re already eating ripe strawberries from this 4′ square foot garden box that I filled completely with strawberries, then covered with a net so I wouldn’t have to compete with the robins.
One half of my garden is covered in square foot garden frames, and the other side I reserve for the big crops that need huge root space and love the heat of black plastic. Here you can see I have started my tomatoes and zucchini. Since our land yields an abundance of rocks, I use rocks to hold the black plastic close to the soil so the seedlings can pop up through the hole I’ve cut. The rocks also heat up the ground. I keep old milk jugs, filled with water, next to my heat-loving crops to help them through cold nights. The wire fencing tames sprawling crops like squash and melons encouraging them to grow up, rather than out, so I can still walk through the rows of my garden easily. Rocks, milk containers, even logs keep the plastic down tight to the soil so seedlings can grow out of the plastic and so the wind doesn’t take hold of it. Yep, that is a old carpet pathway between my black plastic beds. If you buy the thicker black plastic, you can reuse it year after year. The used carpet lasts forever and keeps my feet dry and clean so I can garden barefoot!
Last year’s green onions surprised me and bloomed this spring, and I was stunned at how beautiful and long lasting their flowers were! I even cut them and put them in a vase on my table. Isn’t a lavender pom-pom just what you’d expect a green onion blossom to look like? The bees love them! I’ll collect the seeds (or let them drop and reseed themselves) for another green onion crop.
Can you see the grape vine that has twined itself up in this tree? It’s a great place to grow grapes!
Ah, gardening season! Feels like paradise to me.
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