The Year of No Gardening : Planting just a few things.

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I transferred this blog from an older blog. It is dated: May 9, 2010

Today was a very good day to be out in the garden. Two days of cold and snowy weather to open to a warm and sunny day. And it's Mother's Day.

I did some chores around the yard and then walked around to check on what the snow and frost had done to my tender plants and my orchard. Happy to say - not much. The walk took me into my vegetable garden - one of the three that I'm not planting. The beds that my daughter had prepped were starting to take on weeds so I got out my garden spade and trowel and loosened up the soil, pulled weeds and flattened out the beds. She had planted glads along the trellis's, spinach along one side of one bed and some pole beans. Those beans that had been planted did get froze out, so those came out with the weeds.

I looked the garden over and thought, well I do have some glad bulbs left; some of the large bulbs that would produce flowers this year and the small corms that needed a bed to go into so that they could produce the larger bulbs in a year or so. So, I planted some extra bulbs in with those that April had planted, making the row wider and then where there had been a bed of red cabbage in amongst the oregano last year, I worked in the hundreds of young corms that came off the larger bulbs. Some will grow, some will not. I can toss some summer savory in with the shoots a bit later this spring.

I happened to glance over my shoulder and saw how tall the garlic that I had planted was getting - the garlic that would be producing large bulb heads and the young garlic that had been planted from the seed heads of last year's garlic. There are...thousands of those...so I pulled up a small handfull and trenched them in next to the spinach that April had planted. An experiment to see how big the set will get. Those infant sets will be used to plant next year's garlic sets in a much bigger bed out in the far garden when I get that bed ready later this summer. It will consist of two parts, the production bed and the youth bed. So in two years I should have a very healthy bed full of garlic and sets ready for the following year.

Looking at the spinach I thought well, a good salad with spinach needs some good fresh lettuce so I gathered some of my seeds from last year and planted a mirror row of the spinach, half with Paris Island Romaine and the other half with Green Nevada Batavia Lettuce. I glanced at the spinach and wondered - has it been two weeks since this has been planted? Yes it has. So I scoped out another bed that my daughter had prepped half of and thought that would be a good place for a second planting of spinach. Looking at that bed I remembered that I had 1 dozen broccoli plants in the house ready for planting, so I got those, put them into the next bed, west of the trellis, placed 3-4 Kentucky Wonder Pole bean seeds between each plant and trenched the bed in front of all that for the spinach. That planted, I went back through my box of seeds, thinking, what a waste that I won't be using up some of this seed. I have a lot left over from last year. I found what was a half of a package of Little Marvel peas and said ah what the heck. Those went in along the trellis, behind where I planted the young glad corms.

I cleaned out the wooden barrel on the corner of the garden. Some irises are coming up in there. The sage that I placed in there did not make it through the winter so I pulled out the corpses and placed two flat-leafed Italian Parsley plants in there and then transferred my Italian (or is it Greek) oregano to there also to spill over the sides of the barrel. Below the barrel is where my black eyed susans are and this year I had several babies, so I cut out some of those and placed them in between the narcissus that grows at the ends of the asparagus bed.

It was time to go back in the house. On my way in I thought - oh shucks, I forgot to put in the onion sets. There's always room for onions and well, even if I don't plant a garden this year, at least I'll have them.

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