This weekend, we worked on the garden beds!

We moved something like 6 square feet of walking onions from various garden beds into the hedgerow, where we hope they will fight it out with the goldenrod and emerge victorious.

We then started to repair the bed most of those onions had been living in, noticed that we had two 3-½” bolts instead of the 4” we needed, and were about to go out to Lowes and then dinner…

…when we remembered that it was graduation weekend for the largest college in the area.

So we went for bolts the next day, bolted that bed back together, amended and turned over the soil, and planted asparagus roots and strawberries. This is now a perennial bed for something actually intentional, as opposed to a perennial-onion bed.

We had a little time left, so we turned over another bed, planted the cabbage starts, and planted two milkweed (fancy milkweed) and two fancy day lily starts.

So our garden so far:

[cabbage] [kale, needs work ] [sweet potatoes] [asparagus/strawberries]
[tomatoes][peppers, eggplant]][~needs work~ [ ~needs planting~]

And then, off to the left, a wide hilly section that has held/will hold various squash, and on the patio, a whole range of pots holding herbs, tomato, and peppers.

And so far we’ve only lost one pepper plant to the rabbits and, darn it, 1 pack of squash plants to the cat.

How was your (long, in the US) weekend?

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I haven’t done one of these in a while, but it’s the season to get back into them, I suppose: What I Did on my Summer Vacation Weekend.

Although in this case, it’s a bit of vacation, too, since I started with taking Wednesday and Thursday off, worked Friday, and then took the weekend.

So this extended weekend was all about gardening — or, more accurately, gardening prep. We went two two nurseries, pulled out all our nice ceramic pots to outline the edge of the “patio”, and then went to a plant sale at the local high school.

(Our “patio” is a slab of concrete filling in the space made by an L in house construction. It’s amazing how much MORE patio-like it looks with the addition of a line of pretty pots (Ollie’s Discount Outlet; one’s a little rhomboid, one has a flaw in the glazing, but they cost for five of them what one would cost non-seconds) does to make it look like an intentional outdoor space. Add in the nice plastic-decking-wood deck chairs and table we got last year and it’s a proper patio.)

We have something like six tomato plants, a pepper plant, seed potatoes, a variety of herbs, including our constants, flat-leaf parsley and columnar basil, eggplants (one small and white, the other tiny and orange), and crookneck, butternut, and zucchini squashes. We also got a couple landscaping plants, which kind of feels like growing up, or at least like paying attention to our yard.

(There are so many icky houses on my commute – cars on blocks in the yard, junk in the yard, no mowing – that I consciously DON’T want to be one of them. Not that I think T. would ever stand for that sort of mess.)

So once we GOT all those plants, then we had to address the issue of the garden beds.

If you look at a map of NY, you can see where the glaciers dug these long trenches (Finger Lakes) and then… stopped.

Where they stopped, they left all their gravel. Which is just about in my side yard.

So we have 8 4’x6’ raised beds (nothing longer than 6’ locust boards easily fits in my Yaris, sigh). But I screwed them together a few years back, and I didn’t use long enough screws. More Sigh.

Which means that a few of them have started to look more like _/ than |_|.

So we pulled off those sides, shoveled the dirt away from the side, drilled holes, inserted bolts with big washers, and bolted them back together.

We can has planting now?

Not yet.

So, first, we have to loosen the soil, add some more soil (peat, compost, coffee grounds, ground eggshells, ashes), then we have to lay down weedcloth, cut some holes in it.

THEN we can has planting.

As of this posting, I’ve got 5 tomatoes (4 plum tomatoes, 1 black cherry) and one eggplant (“ghostbuster”) in. And tonight’s the next bed over.

And THEN we have to deal with the walking onions…

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