So Tired

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  • The beds (see here for map)

Bed 3: beans. A couple of days ago I sowed garbanzo and lima beans, haricots verts and Provider bush beans. It’s so much fun, tucking in those beans: big, hefty, and immediate reminders of what you will be harvesting. The French lentils I sowed on the 13th have all come up nicely, and the red kidney, fava and cannellini beans that went in the same day are slowly heaving up, bean and all: what a sight!

Beds 5 and 8: ‘taters. I placed and filled up the three potato bins, which entailed a brief battle with poison ivy, huge sheets of cardboard, and a much more prolonger struggle with five wheelbarrow fulls of compost. I planted the Salem and the Bintje. All the potatoes are out of the bedroom: yeay! Speaking of potatoes, all of them, even the Banana Fingerlings I put in last, have broken the surface of the soil.

Bed 8. The 80 onion sets I put in on the 10th are pushing up nice green shoots.The radishes are of course in the best shape of all: the workhorses of the garden, they’re called, for good reason. There’s a few carrots to be seen, and a couple of blue flax (best companion flower for potatoes), but no sign of the nasturtiums/ia?

  • The seedlings

I’m hardening off most of the seedlings by moving them from the porch to the semi-shaded patio in the morning and bringing them in at night. It’s quite a haul, but a good opportunity to look at each of them closely. And what I’m seeing is that some are showing signs of stress, either because of the hardening off, or more likely because they are bursting out of their pots. Still, I daren’t transplant them into their beds because the fence isn’t up yet.

The seedlings downstairs – peppers, mostly – are growing very slowly. Due to the fiasco with the Peacework Peppers, which three surviving seedlings are still tiny, we may have to buy pepper plants. Next year I’m sowing earlier than when the books say, and an assortment of different kinds, to hedge my bets!

It’s hard to divide my attention between the garden, the seedlings in the porch, and the seedlings in the basement. Especially the basement, with its one remaining shelf of light, is depressing to me now. It’s where it all got started, but now it’s so much more fun to be in the sun and the wind and where the birds are singing.

  • To do over Memorial Day weekend
  1. Pot up the remaining 9 tomato plants
  2. Plant two tomatoes in old cold frame
  3. Finish filling up the pea bed (bed 2, 4 x 4), figure out “trellis”, plant peas {UPDATE} too late for peas, planted squashes and cukes instead
  4. Move rest of wood pile (just a little bit more to go) and stack in back
  5. Plant fence: {UPDATE} 3/4 done!
  6. Plant Beds 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12
  7. Prune bushes {had no idea what I was doing: will see what comes of it!}
  8. Dig and fill Beds 6, 9, 10, 11, 12

{UPDATE} Funny, I was going to write about how tired I was from all the work. Instead, as I was writing, I turned to what is growing and was invigorated. I’m not tired at all! Then I pressed Publish without changing the title.

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