Well, shit. I am not good at this as you can tell. So much has taken place in the garden and in my head planning, planning anew, scratching plans and winging it. The winging it is where I feel best. I call it Zen gardening, or zen yard work. I go from thing to thing and sort of remember something I was going to do along the way that probably would have been forgotten if I hadn't happen to head in this direction, etc. The thing that's important (I think) is that I'm out in it and doing rather than sitting inside, waiting, dreaming and scribbling sketches and plans only to be lost in the reams of paper my kids bring home from school.
So, I managed to start a bunch of things. Peppers (red "lipstick" - a small sweet pepper I'm hoping will convince the kids through its cuteness to eat, an orange bell and a small spicy "Padron" from Spain - think Tapas). I also got some vine heirloom tomatoes - the usual Cherokee, Striped German, etc) and some tomatillos. I was "good" and did a nice hardening off of most of this, BUT I put the tomatillos right into my hot unfinished compost bed and burned the hell out of them. Did I not mention that I have a hot unfinished compost bed made mostly of the trash can full of kitchen scraps accumulated over this long winter and some mushroom soil (really, what is this really) and a little bit of dirt. SOme newspaper in there, too. Anyhow, I have that stuff started and a friend gave me some yellow pear tomatoes in exchange for 12 crowns of asparagus, b/c, while I haven't mentioned them yet, the other 13 took up a fairly sizeable spot. Fennel is coming up around the now blooming white spirea. I put the peppers and tomatoes in a spot improvised when a two foot high maple sapling was discovered there and planting around it was the only way I could keep Jim from mowing it down. The kids planted carrots, beets and pumpkins (lots and lots of pumpkin seeds) in the two big barrel planters that I had used to hold the kitchen scraps from the fall. I have a bit of an herb garden going near the kitchen which I wish I could claim to go to everyday for cooking inspiration, but so far I made one omelet with chives and one soup with sage. Both are flowering nicely, prettily now and I think I'm going to garnish with chive flowers on something sometime soon. Basil is stillin infant stage and I keep forgetting to get (first find) taragon. I love taragon! So that's about what's going on, except there is some additional leveling of ground by rearranging sod (not recommended method, but I'm low on cash and flush in energy) and a poison ivy sighting and handling that seems to have gone okay.
Oh yeah, there is a 4 foot lovage plant in the front yard that looks interesting, giant ornamental celery bunch, but I must find some appropriate soup recipe soon. Maybe I'll make a few gallons of veggie stock and freeze it.
WAIT, very exciting. I get to see new green every day from my bedroom window as the "hot" bed pops new seedlings everyday from the melons (cantaloupes and water) and some beans.
So I'm caught up, and boy that's a good thing since no one reads this and I'm just reporting and not being very productive here.