First of all, I’ve been trying to get this one posted for a bit, but ran into a problem with WordPress where it wouldn’t let me post pictures. Fixed it, but I’m keeping the original date!
This is, perhaps, the earliest we’ve actually had most of the garden planted. This is despite it seeming to rain quite a bit and be otherwise dreary for much of the Spring. Brooke tried burning a lot of the leaves/branches/detritus back in February, but between rain and high winds, she was having trouble fitting it in. Ultimately, she got it done in early-April.
I tilled the garden on April 15th (Good Friday, so I was off work, anyway), and that gave it about a week until April 23rd when we actually planted a decent amount of stuff. Every year, we pull up the concrete bricks to do a good job with weeds before things get too crazy, but I usually do this after school’s out. We had enough time on April 23rd, though, and Brooke was in full planting mode, so we went ahead and worked on weeds quite a bit that day while also planting. It looked pretty good for awhile!
Brooke also got things like the tomatoes and peppers planted, though those were already plants that had a head start. We kept them covered with milk jugs for a few weeks, but it sure felt like less time than we sometimes spend on it.
I also ended up getting a lot of grass clippings started pretty early on. Our new mower doesn’t have a side chute, so it either mulches, or we have to catch the grass in the bag, so it didn’t take long to get a solid amount collected.
The main time sink, though, was working on the strawberries. Brooke transplanted some of them from outside our brick border to further down in the patch. She also thinned things out a bit and moved plants around so she could lay down some straw to act as spaces where we could actually get to the center of the patch and pick some strawberries. By this point in late-April, we already had some flowers on the plants, and now that it’s been a few weeks, we already have strawberries on! More on that next time, though…
Another project for the weekend was to split the remaining beehive. Brooke called this a “walk away split,” where she transferred some frames with brood over to another hive box. She had ordered another nuc that would take the third slot in our little bee patch, but the existing hive had so many bees that they were likely to swarm eventually, so this seemed like the right time to try something different! Calvin helped, too, using his own bee suit….that doesn’t fit all that well yet, but he’ll grow into it. 🙂
Hopefully I’ll get another post up in a week or so, as the garden is already a bit further along than when these pictures were taken. It’s looking pretty good so far! Plenty of time left this Summer to get some produce!