Garden Chores

This week has been a ~ wear bandannas in my hair and the same pair of brown, nasty cut-off garden capri's on my legs every single day~ kind of week.  I've been gardening, trying to make heads or tails of this vegetable garden of mine.  Or, dandelion and plantain garden since not much else had been growing in it.  I am a few weeks behind everyone else, it seems, and I am trying not to let that bother me too much by instead thinking about the fact that a start has been made.  "And I am not THAT far behind" I think...until I begin to count back to Memorial weekend that was, in fact, NOT last weekend like it feels like it was but several weekends ago.  And then I start to get depressed again.  :-)

But slowly, surely I have made progress.  This week I planted hundreds of things.  Not hundreds of different things but hundreds of the same things.  Potatoes.  Onions.  Tomatoes.  Yellow squash.  Acorn squash.  Dill.  Cilantro.  Watermelons.  Cantaloupe.  Peppers (sweet and hot but NOT next to one another like I did last year!)  I scattered the cosmos and zinnia seeds in the cutting garden.  And I spent so much time weeding the walkways that I almost regret loving walkways so much.

I'll be laying down cardboard and putting a new layer of hay on the walkways as I am able but right now it is a race to just get things in the dirt.  That has to take priority.  I am hoping to have the whole garden planted by early next week but this coming weeks' schedule looks as hectic as last weeks' schedule with appointments and evaluations and paperwork and wedding photos and a million different things.  So, I hope. 

Two weeks ago- when the weeds were babies

Tonight before supper- the green patch to the right are parsnips- NOT weeds!  

I wish the before and after pictures seemed more profound than they do--- I mean, golly, I spent at least five hours out in that garden every day this week!  It should have neon flashing signs and a swirling disco ball or something.   There should be a party in there.  I'd go (if I weren't so tired.)

And while I have been making progress with the vegetables...my strawberry patch is beyond neglect. 

 Poor, sad, sorry looking thing.  Yet, among those terrible half-blown dandelion orbs, there are baby strawberries fighting the good fight.  Keep fighting, little berries!

 I need another two or three me's right about now to get all the things that need to be done actually done.