Get This Garden Started, Part II

My Mom and I spent Sunday afternoon shopping and had a lot of fun. It was a beautiful day to be out and about. Unfortunately, toward late afternoon I started not feeling well. I tried to keep on trucking though, because I didn’t want to spoil anyone’s weekend. We BBQ’d for supper and then went for a family walk around the neighborhood. Unfortunately by later in the evening I was feeling worse and it became pretty noticeable to everyone else.

I went off to bed and woke up on Monday still not feeling great. My parents and brother left after breakfast and I spent most of the day on the couch catching up on Lost. I’ve been recording the episodes but just started watching recently; I find with Lost it’s good to be able to watch it all at once. Made for good sickie day activity.

However, it was pretty much killing me to be sitting inside on such a beautiful day, so later in the afternoon I decided I was feeling well enough to go out and do a bit of gardening.

I was accompanied by my usual feline garden buddies.

How happy does he look? I think I should send that picture to my Dad, to let him know that his chairs are being enjoyed.

I spent the afternoon weeding my little vegetable plot, getting it ready for planting.

I actually did one spot, probably 4 weeks ago now and planted some bunching onions which are coming along quite nicely.

But the rest still had to be done.

The other bits of green that you can see sticking up are the garlic plants that I put in last year. It’s spread out in a few spots, throughout the garden and it’s looking like I should have a pretty good crop this fall.

Yesterday, feeling much better, I went out and did some planting.

At this end of the garden I planted peas, beans, lettuce and cabbage. Not a huge amount, obviously, and I will probably find spots to stick in some more lettuce and cabbage when I’m finished putting in my tomato plants.

I also planted some peas along the back edge of this flower bed.

 

The soil is not good in this bed. I dumped on what I had left of a bag of compost and a bit of soil that I had; it could probably use more but I don’t have any at the moment. But pea plants are good for the soil, or so I’ve heard, and I still have quite a few seeds that need to be used. So I decided to plant some there. Worse case – they don’t grow; best case – I end up with more peas. Seemed like it was worth a shot.

Back to the subject of TV for a moment – I just finished watching this weeks episode of Glee. The first few episodes when Glee came back this spring just didn’t seem to have the same ‘Oomph’ as the first half of the season. But the past two episode have really knocked it out of the park. Glee is back!

Still more garden updates coming. Stay tuned!

Let’s Get This Garden Started, Part I

This past weekend was a holiday weekend here in Canada; Monday was Victoria Day. On the East Coast Victoria Day weekend is traditionally the weekend when you start planting your garden.

My parents & brother were coming to visit for the weekend, so things were busy, but I couldn’t let the weekend go by without a bit of garden time…

First though, look what my Dad brought for me!

Dad retired recently and now has more time to spend on wood working, which he has always enjoyed. He’s been making chairs and benches to sell. Coincidentally, I had been thinking I wanted wooden chairs for out in the yard, so now I have two chairs that were made by my Dad.

My mom brought some Hostas from her garden at home. We decided to plant them in the newer bed at the far end of the yard. There was one spot that, aside from a couple of tulips, was all weeds.

So out came a bunch of weeds, and in went Hostas.

Still lots of weeds, as you can see, but now Hostas as well. Yes, the weeds have to come out.  It’ll happen eventually!

The other thing that I asked my parents for was a few seed potatoes. I’m trying an experiment this year, and Dad & Mom helped me get things going.

These are Potato tubs. You add some soil, put in your seed potatoes and cover with more soil.

Then as the plants grow, you add more soil until the sack is full. There are Velcro slits down one side where you can reach in and pull out potatoes once the plants start producing. I’ve never tried growing potatoes at all before – I really don’t have space for them in my tiny little garden, but this seemed like a neat idea.

Stay tuned! More garden photos coming!