Garden At The Moment

I confess, I have not been spending much time being creative in the kitchen. I have made the May bread for the Bread Baking Babes, but that won't be posted until May 16th. There has been the usual cooking for dinners for the two of us, but that is almost always something easy, tried, and true...and already posted on this blog.

The reason for less time in the kitchen has been that I've been spending more time in the garden. When the usual time (in this area) for weeding and garden prep came around in February and March I wasn't feeling well and had no energy.

Fortunately for me Mother Nature decided to ignore the calendar and give us rain in April quite a few times. That loosened up the soil enough for me to do April weeding and some planting, too. Sweetie dug some holes for putting gopher baskets and plants into the ground..a rose bush, a Meyer lemon bush and a daphne bush.

Those pesky gophers are not to be trusted, so almost anything that goes into the ground has to be encased in a wire basket to discourage the gophers from munching on the roots or even the whole plant. I lost 10 rose bushes the first year we lived here since I didn't know better and planted the roses right in the ground. I think those creatures are still showing up every year hoping I'll be that foolish again!

With May underway the containers that keep the plants happy and out of the ground are being filled with potting soil and I've gotten a few seedlings planted and a number of seeds, too. Rain is expected sometime during the next three days, so everything will get a welcome soaking.

Last, but not least, I've hauled quite a few bags worth of mulch to spread and keep weeds at bay. Since my strength is still not full force, I usually scoop about a third of the bag into a smaller container, spread that, scoop the next third, spread that, then haul the bag itself to be tipped and spread. It takes longer, but works just as well as trying to tip the whole bag out all at once.

Most years I plant a lot of tomato and squash seeds into little cells in February and start them in our sunspace indoors. Now that I have to restrict my consumption of tomatoes, that seemed like a lot of work for no reason, so I only did some squash plants that way

and purchased two tomato seedlings so that Sweetie would have tomatoes for his salads. These are all planted and doing well. Next I'm going to address the plants (and weeds) closer to the house. Don't expect too many posts, OK? The garden siren song is calling again.