Dirt Done!

It took me, with the occasional help from my two youngest, a week to spread the dirt delivery. At one point I was considering calling it "Little Red Hen's Garden", and it seemed to be another task that was to be done one bite at a time.

Doing chores like this is a bit of a Zen experience; doesn't take a lot of thought, is nicely repetitious, and your mind just relaxes. It's a bit like doing dishes by hand.

When we got the spreading done it needed to be tilled. This was very hard to get done, dh was resistant and the guy who usually does it was unavailable. Finally dh did go borrow Grandma's tiller and the first photo is post-tilling. I was on strike from cooking and housework till the planting was done!

We put in pole beans, green and yellow bush beans, and 15 tomato plants, 5 of them yellow. In the last week we also planted the front garden with zucchini, 2 green 2 yellow; 48 sweet bell peppers; eggplant, 2 long purple, 2 long pink; and 4 jalapeno peppers.

There is a bit of a story of the multitude of green peppers, we barter them for honey with a bee keeper who lives in a colder garden zone. He is just too up-the-mountain to get them to grow. Works for us!

I took the leftover landscape fabric and covered the beds for the transplants, it covered about half if the beds so we'll see if there is any change in production from plain dirt. Again this year I've put down grass clippings on the paths for weed control. We get these from friends who have a lawn-mowing service. They have to off-load somewhere, may as well be here. :o)

dh grows many of the other veg you'd expect to see in my garden in his market garden so I just get them from him. (Cucumbers, onions, carrots, potatoes, more tomatoes, pumpkin) I'm still trying to decide on corn, it's getting late to plant but they are so expensive to buy. Maybe that last little bit of the home garden for fresh eating and see if we can barter for more to can. (It takes 6 ears for each quart!)