Sunday, May 2, 2010

Garden is almost ready!

My dad came over this morning and got started on the garden.  I have had it staked out for a while, but we had to cut the plastic  tape, but we left in the pegs...

First he spread out the compost/topsoil that he brought me yesterday.  Which looked like this on Saturday :

Hubby had taken more of the manure stuff and tossed it on the pile on the left...  but the compost is so nice and dark colored!

Ok, so...spreading it out...




There was a  bit more of it over there, so he took it too.


Ant this is the first actual tilling of the soil to mix it in


It looks so good!  (But, darn i can't wait for that fence to get finished)


All finished!



The yard slopes quite a bit, so my dad suggested that hubby take a few old boards we had lying around and make a retainer out of them for the back part of the garden.  We had plenty of scrap and they did it pretty quickly.


I also had dad do the part in front of where i planted the JA's ,  i am going to put the rhubarb in there and possibly the horseradish,  so i figured i might as well have that bit done. Otherwish hubby would have had to break it in for me with the mantis...  would have taken  him much longer.

It looks funny where it goes around the JA plot,  but i'll try and neaten it up some other time. We were in a rush last fall, so our digging wasn't quite as straight as the garden.

Very good day.

The weather was absolutely beautiful. I didn't check the temperature but i think it hovered around Perfect. It wasn't dry, it wasn't sweltering...it was sunny, little warm breeze... just right.  The Maine State Birds ( black flies )were out, but they weren't biting...too much..


Ok. Random spring pictures:

These are my tulips for the second round of spring bloom. They seem to come anywhere from 1-3 weeks after the Torontos.


This is a pink hyacinth that i do not remember planting. It has never appeared before that i know of and this is the first time i have seen it bloom.  I have no idea how it got there.  I must have put it there of course, but i thought i only put daffodills and crocus there.  Either i simply forgot, or my package of daffs had a hyacinth stowaway. The daffs were planted at least 4 years ago...


Oh, this is the Hoya Shepherdi flower penduncle.... or what i am hoping is.  Blurry, but worth taking note of so i know what to look for in the future:

The JA patch....  i think this was while i was trying to weed it...  The plants are not even big enough to make them out in this pic....


Apple blossom buds, turning pink...  Glad i happened to notice this  Friday evening because i sprayed Saturday and took this picture later that day... they are just about to open now.



The beach plums that made it through the winter.  The others got stepped on by mistake....  but i had to put them in drilled kitty litter buckets to protect them from being stepped on again.  The pink strings were supposed to prevent it, but no such luck.
Not a good picture of them, but i can at least record when they break dormancy in the spring for next year. Though this is an early year for everything.

Veggies revisited.  Again.


Kohlrabi, Burdock and Kale...  doing well.  Some of the other seeds in there are starting to come up, but are still small.

Pak Choi and Collards...  a month after seeding today.


Welsh onions and Shallots  (and a weed)


Lettuces... i need to trim out the twins....and eat them.


Assorteds

The other flat of assorteds... the tomatoes are looking good


Tomatoes and Tomatillo


Asparagus from seed.... so funny looking!


Another assorted flat


The citrus that i potted



























The grape. With the green onions behind that i planted for green onion tops.

Big honking rosemary....
I keep forgetting to buy plastic cups to transplant them all into. 

Goji doing really well...



The double flowered Rose of Sharon bush breaking dormancy. I don't really like the flowers much, some flowers don't double well and this is an example of that. Like hollyhocks, doubling the petals just detracts from the simple shape.  These flowers look like they have been shredded by wind.  I prefer the purple/blue shade of RoS,  this one is a medium pink color.  I might try to give this one away sometime later on. Replace it with something more to my tastes.

And the big Peegee Hydrangea is waking up.  It looks stark dead for most of the spring, its one of the last things to wake up.



Almost 11pm

I'm going to try and measure out the rows tomorrow, then dig the paths and mound up the beds. Thats the plan whether it takes me all week or not, i guess i will find out. Its dependent on weather, nap times and pain levels.