It has been a rainy, cold, challenging spring in my garden. In spite of that, the early, early planting I did is getting close to harvest time. The Boc Choi in the front of the picture really likes short days and cool weather. It has been very happy:).

Even a couple of weeks ago, the plants were just sitting there. Finally, we got a couple of warmer days and it stopped snowing, freezing, hailing and raining 24/7 and, WOW, what a difference!

I was able to take a couple of sessions to shovel out the rich, finished compost from one of my bins and spread it on part of the garden and one flowerbed.

I’ve also been putting all grass clippings on the garden to be tilled in. In the forefront, you can see the second planting I managed to get in somewhere along the line between weather events. That broccoli got hailed on so many times, I had to re-plant 2 of them because they got killed, but most of them prevailed.

You can see them on the upper left of this picture, still standing, and starting to grow. On the upper left of the picture, there are more seeds that are just beginning to emerge–sow peas, carrots, beets and lettuce.

Yesterday, our only really nice day, I pushed the envelope and planted some more. You can see from how the dirt is packed down so hard that it was a little wet, still. But, I did it anyway. I planted cabbages (Quick Start, Red Acre, and Pinetree Mix), some of the onion plants (Patterson), a tiny row of cilantro, a few more snow peas (Oregon Sugar Pod II) , lettuce (Buttercrunch, a mixture, and Drunken Frizzy-Headed Woman Lettuce) and 3 rows of English peas (Maestro) for shelling.

I don’t plant a long row of anything we eat fresh, such as lettuce or snow peas, at any one time. Instead, I continuously plant new seeds, about every 2 weeks, if I can. Normally, I have lettuce from spring until fall with very few, if any gaps in the production. And, if it gets hot and they bolt, there’s always a new planting coming on.

Yesterday was also a very busy Sunday with church, teaching Sunday school, an extra evening service we usually don’t attend, Patsy needing a ride back to her job at camp, and some time with the babies. It was a real challenge, but I had to become the fastest planter on the planet, and Rob and Patsy helped with the babies while I did it. We returned the babies, I had Rob run me through Taco Bell between camp and evening church, and all was well.

As predicted, it rained again during the night and we are in for a week of rainy weather, they say, so it was all worth it. Now if I can just keep those 2 pesky crows that showed up out of the seeds……..