Sunday, April 28, 2013

Start of Year... 3?

This is the third summer of gardening at the house; I started off this year by buying a little greenhouse for putting seeds in.  It's a tiny thing with four shelves for seed trays or potted plants.  The day after I assembled it, it snowed.


The first warm weekend we got, I pulled out the shrub in the front flower bed and planted out all my bulbs.  I also moved the daffodils from back by the apple tree.  (They're now blooming.)  The shrub basically had to be trimmed of all its branches, and then I took out the trunk by a combination of digging with the garden fork and cutting large roots.  The trunk has already been burned; I've got quite a lot of branches still to go.


And then I did nothing for a couple weeks; I worked last Sunday and it was cooler again.  I had Friday off for working Sunday, so I spent about three and a half hours of it outside.  Half of that was spent moving this:


The wooden compost box was too close to the blackberry bush, really, and this is a kind of dead corner, anyway; I think the previous owners threw their garden waste in the corners of the yard because both are built up.  The neighbors' pool is next to the fence to the right, as well, or I'd plant a fruit tree back here.  Moving it pretty much killed my back for a day, though.  I pulled out a ton of sticks that had gotten mixed in but weren't really decomposing at all, so it's not nearly as full as it was.  About a third of the sticks have already been burned in the chiminea.

Moving the composter meant Saturday I didn't do much of anything outside, but today I got the longer bed in the garden turned over and planted stuff.  A new raspberry bush:

Raspberry twig

Strawberries, including moving the one errant one I found by the back fence last year; these are where the wooden compost box used to be:

Strawberries

Peas, with sunflowers planted in the middle of their fencing:

Peas

Green beans and broccoli; I anticipate some of the beans will not survive.  If they do, I am really going to have to get a pressure canner this summer.

Green beans & broccoli

And, well, potatoes.  They don't make the most interesting of pictures.  When it gets a bit more consistently warmer, the cucumbers are going along the other side of the bed; I'll put the fence up for them then.

Potatoes, stealth mode

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