After hauling to many loads of soil over the rough, rough ground, none of us were up to doing it again today.

So our Sunday remained a day of rest!

We did still go out to soak down the beds we are working on, though, along with other watering and checking of things. There is fresh new growth on the grapes, which was good to see. I wasn’t sure they’d survived February’s deep freeze. We’ve got rhubarb coming up, and the one haskap is leafing out nicely. The other is still struggling. 😦 The garlic is looking awesome. Unfortunately, the birds are digging into the soil, as they have been digging into all the leaves on the ground all over the place. They’re not after the garlic, but they’re scatting soil all over, and some are getting partially uncovered in the process. We’re going to have to come up with a way to cover those!

While checking out the snow crocuses and grape hyacinths (so many are coming up now!), we found a strange, furry, orange mushroom in a tree.

Rolando Moon found a perfect spot to settle down and groom herself! 🙂

The girls and I talked about where we are going to plant things; the space we have to work with is turning out very different than we expected while working with the satellite image, and we’re going to have open spaces where we had expected to have garden beds.

Which is okay. Nothing is written in stone, and most of the beds are going to be temporary.

We then went through our seed packets, sorting out the ones that need to be planted before the last frost date.

There are a lot of things that should have been planted “as soon as the ground can be worked”, but we aren’t ready for all of them.

These are the ones that should be in the ground right now.

Two of the three beds for the spinach collection are not ready yet. The kale will be interplanted with onions, and one of those beds is ready. The bed for the strawberry spinach is ready. The beets will be going into the new bed beside the garlic, and that one’s not quite ready. It’s a small bed, so we will probably be planting one type there, and another somewhere else. The poppies will be going in the old kitchen garden, which also is not ready yet.

We still aren’t sure where the carrots will go. They need deep soft soil, so I think they will be going where the potato beds were last year. We are making those longer, so only the part that was used last year will have the soft soil needed. Some might end up in the old kitchen garden, too.

Then there is the next batch.

We can start planting lettuces now, with successive sowing every couple of weeks until about the middle of June, before it gets too hot. These will go in the old kitchen garden, with some of them going into the retaining wall blocks, which are ready now, and others further into the garden, once we’ve worked out where the paths will go and add more soil.

These can be planted in the middle of May. It’s a bit surprising for a corn to be planted before first frost. Once we’re done with the beds that need to be direct sown right away, I’ll be marking off the block the corn will be planted in. At the same time these are being direct sown, I will be starting the Montana Morado corn indoors, along with half of the sunflowers.

The kohlrabi will be interplanted with onions. Onions are supposed to repel those beetles we had issue with last year.

While going through the seed packets, we discovered an oops.

The pink celery should have been started 8-12 weeks before last frost!!

So we quickly planted them now.

The seeds are absolutely minuscule! They are surface sown, so they just needed to be scattered on the soil and pressed down, so we used a take-out container as a mini-greenhouse. The sun room is warmer than the house, and there’s no room in the aquarium greenhouses, so we set it up with the tomatoes and luffa. We still use the ceramic heater bulb at night, but according to the thermometer in the sun room, it reached almost 30C/86F in there today!

They’re getting less than half the time to start than they should, but we’ll see how it goes. Who knows? We might have a long summer this year.

Everything else that needs to be direct sown has to wait until after our lost frost date. Especially the Peaches ‘n Cream corn collection. The radishes (two varieties) will be interplanted with some of them, to help break up the soil. They mature very quickly, so being overshadowed by the corn will not be an issue. The sunflowers will be a mix of transplants and direct sowing, to see which works better. And finally, there are the three varieties of bush beans.

If all goes well, we’ll be transplanting all the squash, gourds, cucamelons and tomatoes at about the same time. The potatoes and asparagus should be in and ready to plant by then, too.

The first few weeks of June are going to be very busy, and we’ve got a lot of manual labour to get done ahead of that!

The Re-Farmer