This Year's Gardens: Chapter 2

The zucchini at full speed

Oh my. What a difference ten days make. 

On the seed front, zukes and cukes are going great guns:

And the cucumbers are right there keeping pace with the zucchini! 

On the pepper front, the lowly little seeds I had dried from store-bought sweet peppers are starting to rear their tiny heads. I do not know what to expect from them as I am no doubt dealing with hybrids and who knows what this next generation will hold. But at least they are coming up! 

Who knows what they will produce, but at least they are growing! 

But my Leysas? The seeds I bought in search of a "truly" sweet pepper? Up until Wednesday, my answer was have been simple. Zilch, nada, rien. And then this one poked up, barely:

Look close in the upper right cell

Okay, maybe hope does spring eternal.

Outside, the weather has been March erratic. Warm days, then cold. Light frosts, then nothing, then light frosts again. All the same, and knowing that we are in Zone 6b (last frost date is mid-April), we are starting to do outdoor garden work. Warren suggested we till the kitchen garden and we did our first tilling today (Thursday).

It's electric. It's lightweight. It showed me who's boss.

Warren did the first pass. I raked the garden over, raking up the weeds the tiller had uprooted and then I did the second pass with the tiller.

Holy moly.

Talk about a wake-up call as to how far I have yet to go before I am capable of working consistently with our lightweight tiller. After about 30 minutes wrestling with it, I finally got enough of the hang of it that I could kinda sorta handle it.

As I started in on the garden work, I set my kitchen timer for an hour out of the gate. As I told Warren, until I build up my energy and my reserves, I need to watch my time. And I am glad I did; I was ready to gather up my tools when it went off.

We have ambitious plans to clean up, clear out, restore, and expand our two front beds, the back perennial bed, and the small bed that hugs the back side of our house. And of course there are the kitchen garden and the Hej garden to turn our efforts to for this year's vegetables.

Here's to more tilling! 

First tilling done! 

Update

I wrote this blog out by longhand Thursday night, while I sat at an evening rehearsal of the Mansfield Symphony. This morning, before I came upstairs to type this post, I took a look again at the sluggard Leysas and this is what I saw:

The second little head is in the lower left corner of the lower right cell. 

Two are now poking up their heads! 

Here's hoping.