Room With A View

Come gardening season, my hubby's second floor office window is truly a room with a view.  I never tire of going up there to chronicle the stages of garden growth from this time of year all the way through the harvest.  (I do realize this may be boring as heck to you all, but it's a visual record for me during each glorious gardening season.  A gardening season which I missed so much last year while spending the summer with hands covered with minor carpentry injuries, polyurethane, paint and various adhesives rather than ground in garden dirt.)

Yesterday Papa Pea cultivated the field garden and pumpkin patch.

This successfully annihilated the robust little weeds of various varieties that were starting their assault in an attempt to take over the gardens.

We also plowed up an extension to the blueberry patch where we planted our three new little haskap bushes.  This area needs to sit for a couple of days now so the roots of the sod turned over start to die.  Then we'll till it up a couple more times before adding compost and a mulch covering for this year's growing season.  We haven't made a decision what we'll plant there in the future (more haskaps?), but it gets rid of a little more lawn area that we won't have to mow this year.

I finished prepping the strawberry patch yesterday and feel good about that.  Now the half-dormant plants need a good soaking rain and some warm sunshine and they will take off.

I still need to get the blueberry patch mulched with wood shavings.  With luck, that will happen today.  Starting tomorrow, our whole week looks to be filled with rain so today may be my last chance to play outside all day.

The Sweet Peas haven't gone in yet.  I'm about two weeks later than usual for getting them planted, so I'd like to get that done today also.  (I'm planting those you sent me, Erin, so get ready for more pictures of Sweet Peas than you may want to see.)

Now the field garden is ready for shelling peas and potatoes which I'll plant as soon as I can.  I haven't figured out this year's layout for the field garden yet so I'd better sit down with pencil, paper and my thinking cap soon.  I rotate everything planted there each year and am contemplating putting the potatoes, for the first time, in the area designated as the pumpkin patch.  I just have to do the math to make sure the 100' of potatoes we need will fit in that area.  Then the squash and pumpkins will be planted in a corner of the field garden for this season.

See that white stuff on the grass above?  Yep, that's frost this morning.  We had a low temp of the mid 20s overnight.  A couple more weeks and hopefully we'll be done with Jack Frost's antics.  For a few months anyway.

Got some more seedlings started under lights two nights ago.  The peppers and tomatoes I started around the middle of the month are over an inch high.  What a miracle to watch . . . those fragile, little sprouts coming from seeds so small I lose them under my fingernail when trying to plant them.

I sure don't take very good care of my house during these months of spending so much time outside.  I promised myself I'd do a cursory cleaning this morning before heading out to play in the dirt so I'd better get on that pronto.