Let the Gardening Begin!

I caved.  I gave in.  I succumbed.  I planted in the garden today.

And the weather is predicted to be so nice for the next week that I didn't even put a cold frame over the bed I planted.

As usual the first seeds that go in are ones that will give us some fresh greens to make into big bowls of salad with such nutritional value you just can't get anywhere but out of your own garden.

Now is that gorgeous or what?  (Okay, not so much right now, but I'm imagining what it will look like in thirty days.)

I planted this one whole raised bed in four foot long rows.  One row each of Scarlet Frill (a mustard I can't get enough of), spinach, kale, arugula and mizuna mustard.  Two rows of radishes and six rows of lettuce.  If that won't make a yummy salad, I don't know what will.

You may recall I really pushed Mother Nature this year (in northern Minnesota anyway) and planted my Sweet Pea flower seeds on April 15 when it was still really cold.  Sweet Pea seeds supposedly should sprout in 14 to 21 days.  This is day seventeen and you can bet I've been giving the soil beneath the trellis the oogle-y eye nearly every day lately.  This morning?  Sigh.  Still no sign of my little Sweet Peas poking through.  Barren ground and trellis shown above.

But then tonight as I was putting away my gardening gear . . . wha . . . wha . . . what's that?  Lookee, lookee!  Two little shoots that made the supreme effort to push on up through the dirt today.  Now with the rain forecast for tomorrow, I may see a bunch more of the little green guys by tomorrow night.  Looks like the Sweet Peas may be a go after all.

Papa Pea was busy in the garden today, too.  He finished spreading compost and did quite a bit of cultivating.  The Pumpkin Patch is shown above.  Said Pumpkin Patch is going to be, I'm pretty sure, turned into the Strawberry Patch this year.  I won't be able to fit all of the 200 plants I have coming in that one area, but it will hold a good bunch of them.  The rest will go (somewhere) in the Field Garden.

This is the Field Garden which along with the Pumpkin Strawberry Patch is now ready for planting.  Soon, soon, won't be long now!  ("Soon" being defined as in about a month when the new strawberry plants arrive and it will be safe to plant a good portion of my other crops.)  The lighter patch you see in the picture above is my remaining "old" strawberries which we hope will (not be too old to) give us enough berries for fresh eating this year.

These are the three containers, about one cup each, of fresh frozen chives I have left from my winter's supply.  They still look pretty good, don't they?  They freeze so well and add so much color to lots of different dishes all winter long.

As you can see I made it with plenty to spare because I certainly could be cutting fresh chives right now if I didn't still have these frozen ones.

There was a while a couple of weeks ago when I had serious doubts that we would ever get spring weather, but it has finally arrived.  Time to truly switch gears and get outside to play in the dirt.  Yippee!