A Gardening Weekend

 Saturday, I spent several hours in the garden.  The weather nice, low 60's and not very windy, and the sun actually came out!  It was the most sun we'd seen all week (which probably explains how I totally forgot to put on sunscreen and ended up with a sunburnt face).

After days and days of rain, I wanted to take advantage of the dry weather to get my tomato and pepper seedlings planted.  They'd been living outside for two weeks, so were adequately hardened off.  I did worry that the wet soil of the garden might not be ideal yet for transplanting into, but on the other hand, the small containers the seedlings were in were also saturated with rain, so I figured that it was probably a six of one half dozen of the other situation.  Hopefully the ground would drain better than the containers were, and the plants wouldn't shock too badly with transplanting.

At the end of the day, I had 50 tomato plants and 45 peppers in nice neat rows in the garden.  Fingers crossed that they grow and thrive this year.  The last two years were a bust garden-wise, so I'm really hoping that this year makes up for the two bad years.  DH is dreaming of lots and lots of homemade salsa, both fresh and canned.

Salsa of course also requires onions and garlic, both of which are also growing in my garden.  The garlic--five varieties--was planted last fall, all from cloves that I had grown in 2024.  In fact, one variety I've been growing since 2010? ish, from some garlic that I had bought from an online homesteading friend.

Great looking garlic for this year.

The onions are starts that I buy every year from Dixondale Farms.  I've lost count of how many years I've been buying my onion starts from them; they are a great company with a reliable product and awesome service.

200+ baby onion plants.

On Sunday, I was back in the garden again, with lots of sunscreen this time, planting cucumbers and dill (between the cucumber hills).  Interplanting the dill and cukes is something new I'm trying for this year.  No pictures of that because, well, it just looks like mounds of dirt every 4 feet with the mounds staggered every other row so I can still plant rows 3-foot on center apart from each other.  Trying to keep all that 'empty' space in the cucumber section from growing up in weeds until the cucumbers get to the vining stage is always such a pain (and nigh on impossible) that I always cheat the spacing a bit.

I did, however, take some pictures of some of my iris that are currently blooming.  I don't know the names of either variety; they were both given to me free by people I know/someone my Mom knows.

This variety I've had since 2004, when a family from church bought a new house that had iris all around the foundation of the detached garage.  They didn't want the plants, so gave me all I cared to dig up.

This variety is newer to me; someone my Mom knows was dividing hers in 2021 and gave my Mom bags and bags of them.  Mom planted what she had room for at her house and then gave me the rest.