Spring AT LAST!

Well, the weather has been great for awhile now, but I've been distracted with dealing with the chaos that ensues when one leaves eggs to boil on the stove for slightly over an hour while she drops off recycling and goes grocery shopping, remembering that she did so while reaching for a carton of eggs. The house was filled with eggy smoke, fortunately no fire, but a cleaning crew came in and cleaned (and moved around) all of our belongings, all of the clothing and other fabric items were removed from the house, cleaned, and delivered back to us in dry cleaning bags on hangers and in boxes, and, ultimately, our kitchen was repainted completely while much of its usual contents sat in boxes on our living room floor. That said, it could have been much, much worse, and our kitchen looks awesome.

Anyway, so not much gardening has taken place, even on beautiful sunny days, I did not find (or make) time to venture out. It's rather unfortunate, really, because it probably would have done me good.

So, today, on one of the colder, cloudier days in recent memory, we had 4 yards of garden soil mix delivered. With it, we re-filled the raised bed that housed tomatoes last summer, topped off the second raised bed we built late last summer, and expanded our "original" garden bed (in-ground). We also added lots of fresh soil to the small, long beds I put in at the top of our hill along the fence and to our "flower" beds in the front of the house.

The expansion portion of the bed was not dug out. I laid out cardboard, and we mounded soil on top of that. We will see how that works out.

Little baby seedlings are growing in a flat inside. We have a variety of tomatoes and peppers. Ben took the job of seed-starter, and I took notes on how much of what varieties we started and where they were planted. We will start another bunch of seeds in another week or two (melons and a couple of others that are to be started a little later)We wound up germinating seeds twice because of the crazy that settled on our household. We just did not get the first bunch moved into the flats quickly enough. Hopefully, we didn't lose too much time. We hope to avoid buying tomatoes retail this year the interest of trying to avoid the blight that plagued
us (well, our tomatoes, actually) last year.

There were a few things that overwintered in the bed along the house, which doesn't get as much sun as the main garden beds. We have several kale plants, rainbow chard, two broccoli plants and one cabbage. The broccoli and cabbage were eaten up by some seemingly invisible pests last summer, so, perhaps we'll actually have more luck with them while the weather is still cool. I assume we had cabbage worms. All I found were holes and little wet green piles of masticated (and, I assume, digested) leaves.