Enjoying the first salad harvest of the season

It's been a day full of dirt-hauling, veggie planting, sledgehammer swinging, and thunderstorm dodging, but most of the planting beds are finally in!!!

The potatoes have already been hilled up twice, and today I added sages and basils to the thriving lettuce and potato beds.

The lettuce bed is producing mixed leaf lettuces, romaine, radishes, onions (I'm pulling the 2nd and 3rd in each row to use as green onions now), pansies (so yummy), brussels sprouts, carrots and marigolds (started from seed in glass canister greenhouses). Marigolds are the only item missing from our dinner salad - technically, we could've eaten them too. Even the carrot greens wound up in the mix. I have never enjoyed a salad more. However, the yummy beef and turkey burger with jack cheese was the icing on the cake!

I started the morning adding Columbines and Dianthus to the front garden in shades of plum and berry. Then I moved to the veggie garden and dug in the herbs: basil, pinapple sage (possibly my favorite plant of all time), cilantro, flat-leaf parsley, and dill. We had to finish the ground-level beds before I could plant the okra for Dylan. My son absolutely loves okra - pickled, pan-fried, sauteed, and fresh off the vine. We're going to interplant the okra with butternut squash and peppers. We dried the butternut squash seed from a squash we ate around Thanksgiving - it was so tasty! When he asked if we could plant it, I said, "why not? We can give it a try!" Thankfully those glass canister greenhouses are working like a charm. We have artichokes, delphiniums, more marigolds, dill, purple coneflowers, and a few more I can't remember ready to plant.

I've tried artichokes from seed for five years, and this is the first time I've had any grow to these heights. I've only successfully grown one delphinium from seed, but it was a beauty! Of course, it didn't survive that winter :(

My nephew and his family planted tomato seeds and wound up with a giant harvest, so we're excited to dig those in after a few weeks. I transplanted them with my neice yesterday, and they're doing great in their new pots. We've got a six-pack of cherry and another 6-pack of another species - no clue which!, but that's no matter. I cheated a bit and ordered a few tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers from Burpee.com. They're plants are always in excellent condition, and I'm excited for them to arrive in a few weeks. They're a few varieties I've never grown before, and I'm looking forward to trying a white eggplant.

Around lunchtime, my hubby, son, and I drove over to Camp's Plants in Mtn Home and picked up a second load of Super Dirt to top off all the lasagna garden beds. We made it home just in time to unload the dirt before the sky opened up and dumped on us. It felt nice digging in the warm dirt when it was just a sprinkle, but once the thunder started rolling, I felt a bit safer under cover.

It was such a perfect rain. I love the smell of wet dirt and grass! It stopped right at dinnertime, so I could put the burgers on the grill and still stay dry. The break in the rain also gave me some time to take photos this evening. (I'll be sure to post them tomorrow when the battery is recharged. I went a bit crazy with the camera.)

I have a feeling I will sleep very well tonight, as should my son who's exhausted himself out in the yard running back and forth between his teepee, swingset, the garden and sandbox. I hope it's a sign of things to come...

Cold Snap Peas

The kids and I constructed a mini-greenhouse this week for snap peas. (Figure 3/13/09) They wanted to see some results soon, and with this recent cold snap, I needed to improvise. I wet two or three paper towels with warm water and placed the snap pea seeds between them and them sealed them inside a glass canister and placed it in the kitchen window. To help add heat and moisture, I add my green tea bags each morning and evening to the canister and reseal. In three days we had growth which pleased the kiddos immensely. There's not much room in the garden, but we may add a second row of peas along the fence, since the peas outside haven't sprouted in this chilly weather. Guess I could just stick them into window boxes and let them trail also. We'll see what the little sprouts decide to do with their little sprouts (:

We have radishes, spinach, carrots, pansies, early onions and peas growing in the veggie beds already - in fact, we've been covering the rows with biodegradable tarps at night. They will double later as landscape fabric to block out weeds in the new garden beds - since they biodegrade within one year, we'll be able to till what is left into the soil next season. The onions are a bit of an experiment this year - I've always had alliums scattered throughout my flower garden to help with pests, so I'm doing the same in the veggie garden this year. I'm using them as perimeter plants and sowing them pretty closely. Friends of mine have pulled the 2nd and 3rd for green onions, leaving the 1st and 4th and so on, giving them room to grow later in the season. We shall see...