Elizabeth Shack

We are swimming in giant radishes. Next year maybe I’ll remember to plant them in waves 1-2 weeks apart. Good thing we like radishes, and I eat a salad for lunch every day anyway. BTW, sautéed radish greens are good with a bit of soy sauce.

I’ve stated picking some of the lettuce, too. Otherwise we just have whatever beets need to be thinned out. They’re growing well. So is the chard. And the four or so volunteer dill plants. I hear some people in warmer parts of the country have things like zucchini and corn already. I’ll have to content myself with my tiny lettuces.

Saturday I went to the nursery and then spent two hours doing yardwork. We now have two cherry tomato plants–one red, one yellow–a basil, and an eggplant (because I refuse to give up).

Also, a new hydrangea and two more Japanese painted ferns. Not for eating. This is part of my long-term plan to make the yard look nicer.

I’m also making plans for digging a new vegetable bed later this year. I’ll leave space for a path between the new bed and the current one. Then I want to build higher frames than what I have now so dirt won’t fall out, and put paths down the sides and across one end, and add a fence to keep the rabbits out with a gate so I can get in. I’m not sure that will all get done this year, or at least not all at once, but it would be good to have something that looks neater and is easier to reach for weeding. Right now I have to stretch over the rabbit fence, which means bending it so it’s shorter and less effective.

(And then I have grand plans for surrounding the vegetable garden with more perennial flower beds and putting hanging baskets on the fence, and that will definitely not be happening this year.)

I planted my garden! We had fantastic weather this weekend, perfect for playing in dirt, so I went to the garden store and got seeds and potting soil.

Unfortunately the entire city had the same idea, and I hate crowds, so I didn’t spend any time browsing for random plants. Hm, maybe that’s a good thing.

I now have a vegetable bed and a collection of pots full of chard, lettuce, radishes, and beets. I’m interested to see if the radishes and beets in the potting soil actually form roots. I kept three pots for tomatoes and peppers. (And I’ll probably buy another pot or two so I can try eggplant again.)

Sometime this year I plan to turn the spot where the pots are into a second vegetable bed, put slightly taller wood frames around both beds to help with weeds, fence them with space between for a path, and put in a gate. That should look much nicer than what I have now. I’ll still need the wire rabbit fencing, but if it’s attached to a more attractive fence and I’m not pushing against it all the time, it shouldn’t detract too much. This is in my front yard, and my neighbors would probably appreciate some effort.

All I have in the backyard now is the rhubarb, which has just starting poking leaves up. I’m tempted to rake out the leaves and plant my leftover seeds from last year just in case they decide to grow, but there are probably better uses for that time (like installing a fence…).

I also finally repotted some of my house plants. The parent plant suffered a drought (a common occurrence in my living room) and died from the roots up, so I cut off the surviving stems and have been rooting them in glasses of water. For a really long time, because I didn’t have any potting soil. They did pretty well in the glasses, but they look nicer in pots.