Gardening Season Kickoff

Skies over the garden

Since last fall, I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog. But I have been keeping quite busy!

We surveyed the garden starting April 8. And we discovered bulbs we planted last fall coming up, and volunteers from the previous gardening season.

Egyptian Walking Onion

Volunteer Simpson Lettuce

Irises

Garlic

Garlic outside the fence

Chives springing up from last season

On April 12, we began planting new crops and making improvements.

New bird bath just outside the fence

Collards (planted cabbage too, but it’s not pictured)

Radishes

Snow Peas

On April 14, we managed to put tunnels over the collards, cabbage and snow peas, but not the radishes. We lost the radishes due to snow. This was the last snow we experienced this season, fortunately. It was a very long and cold winter!

Snow, April 14. Notice the tunnels over the plants

On April 16, it was time to remove the tunnels again….you can see them beyond the fence. The snow melted pretty quick after that last snow.

The crocuses started blooming in between the time we took off the tunnels, until April 19, when this was taken….always a good sign to see the first crocuses of Spring!

First Crocus

And then the daffodils decided to show their faces. These were taken on May 3.

Daffodils and the chives to the right, how they have grown since the last picture of them!

The full row of daffodil starts, with more to come later. These are outside the garden fence and next to the grassy road

Daffodil sunning itself

The daffodil, she is calling to Spring and the seeds, to join her

Garlic – look how it’s grown since the last picture!

On May 7, when watering seeds and checking plant growth, we discovered carpets of these lush green and purple deadnettles out at the garden community. I picked a lot to juice and have in smoothies. Nutritious but not so tasty plain. You can’t beat free nutrition!

Purple deadnettles (aka Purple Archangel)

This year, we ordered the majority of our seeds from Baker Creek Seeds, and we got close to 50 different packets of seeds. We had to devise numerous shelving systems, in and outside of the house. We have three greenhouse shelves like this one…. and two open white shelving units.

Two greenhouses like this are outside on the front porch

One greenhouse is inside the house for seeds.

Time for some hardening in the sun

One of the 2 white shelving units. The other is larger and inside the house

We actually started the majority of the seeds from seed blocks, and transferred them to various different types of pots.

We took a walk through Springbook Prairie, browsing wild edibles, on May 11 (Mother’s Day). This seemed appropriate…. =)

Robin nesting May 11