Garden Beginnings 2013

I wasn't sure we were going to have much of a garden this year.  Charles and I have both been busy (well, to be honest, Charles has been busier... which is a good thing), and I just haven't really felt all that motivated to do the hard work necessary to get it up and running.  And then the thought of needing to weed ALL THE TIME... it's just exhausting even thinking about it.  Plus I know that my time will be limited this summer since I have a full-time summer gig running a summer program for the preschool down the road from our house.

Anyway, I did plant lettuce, spinach, and swiss chard a month or so ago.  Because I failed to water it, it's only just starting to emerge and definitely is not big enough for picking yet.  I'm thinking I missed the boat on the spinach, since by the time it actually gets bigger it will be too warm for it.

A couple of weeks ago, I weeded a couple of the other raised beds and planted watermelon in one and sugar pumpkins in the other.  Our fourth raised bed has perennials: mint and asparagus.  I decided to let the asparagus grow one more year before we start cutting it.  We planted it a few years ago, but we moved it when we moved into this house, so one more year to get established certainly won't hurt.

Yesterday, Charles worked to create walking paths through the big garden plot and then laid cardboard down (to keep out the weeds) and put garden compost that we bought in downtown Broadway down on top of the cardboard.  He got me two blueberry bushes for outside the kitchen windows for Mother's Day, and so he got those planted yesterday, as well as moving some sad looking rhododendrons that were where the blueberries are going.  At the end of the day he also still had energy to plant the tomato plants that we purchased from my colleague at school.

Today I did a little more to help out, by planting basil and cilantro in pots out on the patio, planting squash from seed in two rows of the big garden, and planting cucumber where it can grow in the shade of the corn.  Charles came out to help with planting three rows of silverqueen corn.  So, with all this, we now have everything in the garden except the pepper plants, which need to grow a little bigger before we put them in.

So, what we have so far is:
lettuce
spinach
swiss chard
basil
cilantro
sugar pumpkins
watermelon
tomatoes (cherry, roma, and three varieties of slicers: Blosser, Hertzler, and West Virginia)
squash (summer yellow and zucchini, plus winter varieties: acorn, butternut, delicata, and spaghetti)
corn
cucumber
green peppers (soon to come)

Tomorrow is Memorial Day and Charles wanted to grill out today, so he made a big meal of burgers, hot dogs, potato salad, chips, etc.  After dinner he made a fire, and this might have happened after his long weekend of work:

Super-sized marshmallow