It's officially mid-May, and the scramble is on! How on earth anyone with a full-time job can put in a garden by Memorial Day has always eluded me. It's just impossible to get it all done!
It's a catch-22. I'm so busy harvesting in the fall that I never clean up the beds. Which means they're a mess by the time spring arrives: dead leaves, old stalks, sometimes stakes and plastic mulch, and weeds out the wazoo. So the first thing to do in spring is clean up the beds. One at a time.
This past weekend I actually got peas, cabbage, and broccoli planted, and frankly even that small amount does wonders for my sense of accomplishment. It seems that I'm prone to see the glass half-empty, so I've been trying in the last couple years to focus on what I've got done than what's still left to do.
So let's focus: The peas -- Green Arrow and Dual -- and the pea fence are in. The cabbages -- Gonzales and Dynamo -- are happy in the dirt in front of the broccoli -- Packman and Waltham. the garlic I planted last fall, but a few stray cloves came up in the old bed, so I moved them to the new one, just for kicks. Mike's tilled the potato bed, and the bed for kale, bok choy, swiss chard, and spinach is cleared of weeds.
And then there's the occasional weeding and futzing in the flower beds (still focusing). They're not completely cleaned up, but the tulips out front look lovely right now. The daffodils and narcissus in the butterfly garden were a good idea last fall, actually, as was the mulching Mike did on top of them.
