On Tuesday, May Day, I was up early after a halfway decent night’s sleep. I felt I was well enough to get the seed starting done. When my helper arrived at 7:45 we took the car down to get new tires.
I had gotten mostly set up for the seed starting before she got there.
I still had several seeds to record before she could plant them, but was able to finish them while she filled pots. She had gotten 1 tray planted by the time the car was ready to pick up at 9AM so we went and brought it home.
Once I’d finished my job at the table, I helped with filling pots and watering them down. Last year this seed mix was new and easy to work with. But it was shipped in woven sacks vs the plastic bags from the previous company and over the year they dried out. Now it’s very hard to work with and makes an awful dusty mess everywhere.
Soon the dining window and the south porch window were full.
This is what we started:
Melons 9
Peppers:
Sweet 6
Kapiya 6
Paprika 6
Tomatoes:
Standard tomatoes 6
Paste tomatoes 6
Cherry tomatoes 3
Borage 6
Elecampane 6
Yellow Toothache 12
Allyssum 6
California Poppy 6
Cosmos 6
Lobelia 6
Marigolds 30
Portulaca 9
Zinnia 6
Total: 132 in 8 trays
We didn’t quite fill the roundtop window this time. The office window is still empty.
We also had 3 pots of liatris that had been in the fridge for a month and we planted those in a pot in the South garden. Then we cleaned up the awful mess inside.
Then my helper went down to the cellar and swept up the mess from moving the sandbox and got the crocks back into the old root cellar.
New Herb garden after all the rain
May Day on the farm 2023
Trees leafing out
My helper still had an hour left and it had stopped raining. The daylilies and iris needed to move to the West Shed garden that was ready for them.
I broadforked and dug a trench along the back while my helper started trying to dig the daylilies. They had loved being in the Small garden after years in gravely soil. Their root systems were enormous! It took 2 of us to get each clump out. This soil isn’t as good as the Small garden’s but it’s a lot better than what they were in.
We ran out of time to move the iris. Maybe on Thursday if it’s not raining.
I had an early nap and got to bed by 8PM. I’m still coughing a bit and not back to what passes as normal yet. On Tuesday my helper friend is here but it’s supposed to rain all day. I’d started a list of inside stuff to do when I saw we were to have a week of rain. There’s house plants to feed and cleaning to do. I will also probably have him make me a soup of some sort too.