Last weekend Sam sent me out for a little time alone.  I had a lovely two hours writing and thinking and praying, but there was a tremendous thunder storm with pea-sized hail and tornado warnings... and I wanted to be home. 

When I got home, Sam was at the window trying to snap a picture of the thunder cloud.  The kids were dancing in the living room, surrounded with windows.  So much for seeking shelter.

I know much of the country has been affected by severe weather-- severely stormy, severely wet, or severely hot.  We are no exception.  Evenything in our garden has taken several beatings and is still waiting for it to warm up enough to grow.  Grow, garden, grow.

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I awoke to bird song, this morning, at four-thirty.  We slept with the window open.  It's SPIRNG!

Our winter has been so unbelievably mild (I'm not comlaining, mind you, I'm just remarking) that I've been wanting to start seeds for weeks.

But of course, we've been planning a few days away, and there's no way I could ask my generous neighbors to come water our seedlings twice a day.  So I had to exercise some self-control.  Sigh.

All I've planted was a flower-box of lettuce and one of spinach.  The spinach just germinated.  (See the itty-bitty two-leaf seedling?  It is spinach.  This annual miracle:

                                        seed + soil + water + warmth + sun = plant 

never ceases to amaze me.  Praise God indeed.

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We had a gray weekend that cried out for garden planning.  (We even had rain, a rare occurance!)  I always think I'm just going to order a few seeds... and then the project spreads like a forest fire. 

Last year was our first having produce from both the farm and the garden, and I had a lot of duplicate produce in my garden.  So I'm going to plant only what I didn't get enough of (herbs for drying, tomatoes for canning, peas, butternut squash, melons) and let the kids choose the rest.

M chose a lot of flowers, and as she chose with such excitement, I was sad I hadn't given her the option to plant flowers before.  She loves picking flowers, and making bouquets.  Having her own-- especially since many of them are so much easier to grow than vegetables-- is going to be great for her.  O chose his favorite foods: carrots, cucumers, and melons.  J chose plants that had the word dragon in them: dragon egg cucumbers, and snap dragons.  To each his own, I guess.

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These are the iris my mom so kindly brought me and planted the day we moved into this house.  This is the first year they've bloomed.  Below is M's rose, given to her on her bapstism, by my friend Joan.  The last is the window box of pansies, planted right before a hard frost but still bravely blooming, on my porch.

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Here's what May 1 was like here.  You can imagine why things are growing extremely slowly in my garden.

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I love the idea of compost.  I love producing something so valuable-- earth-- out of what I grew up thinking of as garbage.  I love pulling the moist, black soil out of the composter and adding it to Colorado's dismal clay soil and watching things grow.  It's like magic: the best kind of magic that God ordained from the days of the Garden.

Our first composter (in Chicago) was always full.  Contained in a tall, black garbage-can like composter, it was impossible to turn and yielded a little compost each spring, which we dilligently worked into the already-rich soil.  I still loved it, but I wanted MORE.  FASTER.  (It's the American way, really.)

When I bought our first house in Denver and planted a large garden plot, I invested in a tumbling composter.  It promised yields in 6-8 weeks depending how often I turned it and how much sun and moisture it got.  My problem was this: because we produced raw compostable materials (i.e. kitchen scraps) in waves-- and more quickly than it could turn out compost-- we were always adding fresh scraps on top of half-made compost in the barrel, and it was never done.  So in the winter I'd throw out my scraps again, and each spring I'd get one batch of beautiful compost that "cooked" in its black plastic tub all winter.

So my plan now is not to add to it continually, but let the batch of kitchen scraps (greens) + yard waste (browns) cook for 6-8 weeks.  I tumble it almost daily (in the summer, several times) and the batch we started in December is now done.  Yea!  (Not bad for winter!)  Which means I need a place to store the yard scraps and kitchen scraps that are waiting to go into the tumbler.

This is green plastic garden fencing (it was less than ten dollars for 25 feet.)  I cut about 10 feet and twisty-tied it together into a cylinder.  If it ever gets full (which I doubt) I can just lift the fencing up and move it several feet over, and then shovel all the compostables back into it, thus flipping, or turning all the compost.  Then every 6-8 weeks I'll fill the tumbler from this. 

My hope is to have enough compost not just to feed my SFGs, but also to add to the soil in all my other dargen spaces, since our soil is so poor.

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Because we are planning to work at our CSA and receive most of our summer produce from them, my garden planting has been very light this spring.  Actually, I think I'm going to end up getting more of what I want this year than last year, when my planting was tomato-heavy.

I tried to start broccoli from seed and killed what came up by going away for four days.  So I bought broccoli seedlings last week and put them in.  I also bought lettuce seedlings (Romaine, of which I neglected to buy seeds last year) and put those in.  Once I had all those tasty little green plants in, it became imperative to put up the bunny cages!  (When I call them that, people ask where the bunnies are.  I guess I should call them garden cages, since I'm trying to keep the plants IN and the bunnies OUT.)

Last year I used a soaker hose attached to the wall spigot to water, but the garden hose is so bulky and doesn't really get the water in the squares well.  I know, Mel Bartholemew (author of the Square Foot Garden method) says we should water our plants by hand, but sometimes it just doesn't happen, and having the drips lines on a timer gets it done.  So this year I found drip lines to attach to my sprinkler system and am going to install them next week. 

I planted peas and spinach seeds on March 17, but they did NOTHING for weeks, since we kept having frosts.  They're tiny-- but above ground-- and we'll see if they can produce anything before it's 80 degrees.

More soon on my new compost plan... those of you who live near me (you know who you are!) please don't turn me into the Compost Gestapo.

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Here are this year's seedlings.  I learned a few lessons from last year's garden:

1) Only one cherry tomato plant (last year, they choked out everything else except the carrots, and I'm the only one who eats them in the family...)

2) transplant them from the peat pellets much sooner.

Last year, I started seeds in the little peat pellets 8 or 10 weeks before our last frost date, and they were pretty bedraggled by the time I planted them in the garden.  This year, I put the peat pellets in pots 3 1/2 weeks after planting them, and already the roots were emerging from the pellets.  In the bigger pots, they won't need to be watered quite as often (I was watering them 3-4 times a day).  Plus, this way they're much more attractive on the table.

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Last Saturday it was 74 degrees (a record high), and then blizzarding Sunday.  Quite a change.  We spent all day Saturday outdoors-- clearing out the garden, finding sandbox toys that didn't survive the winter, etc.  The 4 year old neighbor boy who was over playing kept coming up with reasons he needed to play inside.  Every time he asked, I said, "We're playing outdoors at our house.  If you want to play indoors, you can go to your house to play," and he opted to stay here.  They had a blast with swords and staves made from sunflower stalks I pulled up.

I have the gardening bug... I want to get compost into my square foot gardens, and start some seedlings indoors.  This year-- no more than ONE cherry tomato plant goes into the garden!  (Hold me to it, friends.)

I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is a delight.  The story of her family's year of eating only what they could produce themselves or buy locally is woven into her research about the industry that is our country's food machine... very interesting reading... and compelling.

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