Garden Time

We started  yesterday morning with a thunderstorm sweeping in from the north --rain is welcome to keep the pastures growing . . .

As soon as it passed, John was out with the weedeater, working around my box beds where herbs, lettuce and spinach, rainbow chard, white radishes, and purple carrots are trying to survive the onslaught of rabbits (which have pretty well done for my snow peas.)

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The rain was perfect for the asparagus (above the rock wall below) and the beds of peppers, eggplant, broccoli, cauliflower, collards, and three kinds of kale (Black Tuscan, Red Russian, and plain old curly kale.) I'm trying to keep the cole crops covered to foil the bugs but the wind  has other ideas.

  Of course I've sowed zucchini and yellow squash -- unenthusiastic though some family members are about these veg...

And the tomatoes went in -- Romas and Cherokee Purples and Mr. Stripey and Better Boy and Grape tomatoes -- the soil is beautiful and dark with large helpings of litter from the chicken house and the crimson clover cover crop tilled into it.

We can only keep our fingers crossed. The blight hit us bad last year and we had very few tomatoes.  But a garden is an exercise in faith and hope. 

(Yes, that's John with the lawn mower above -- he hardly sat down all day. )

 And down there, under the orange plastic netting, lots of sweet corn being kept safe from crows.

Not much to see yet -- but to a gardener's eye, ah! the potential!