Dear Dee and Mary Ann and Gardening Friends Everywhere,

Woo hoo! I’m on vacation for a week to work in my garden. “Having a great time, wish you were here.” Then you could help me weed and mulch and plant up containers.

I’ve already got a good start on weeding the vegetable garden beds, getting them ready to plant. As predicted, we did have some patchy frost Saturday night into Sunday morning so I’m going to wait until at least next weekend before I plant anything else in the garden. I’ve gotten nipped by a late frost before, so I am wary of planting too soon.

In the meantime, weather permitting, I’ll be hardening off my tomato, eggplant, and pepper seedlings, and going through all my seed packets deciding how to squeeze everything I want to grow into the space I have.

It’s like a puzzle, figuring out how much of each vegetable to grow, and then growing it in a bed that wasn’t used for that same type of vegetable the year before. I usually start solving this annual puzzle by first deciding where to put the tomato plants, and then everything else seems to fall into place.

Right now, I’ve got lots of lettuce and spinach growing, plus the onion sets and radishes are ready to pull. I saw a few pea blossoms Sunday evening, and my strawberry plants look like they will provide me with a big harvest in a few more weeks. I meant to take a picture of at least the lettuce, but forgot to before it got dark. Instead, you can see a picture of some chives that I’m growing in the perennial border (above) and the garden as it looked after I weeded for a bit.

I won’t have to do any more in the vegetable garden before I plant. It’s ready to go and so am I!

I hope you both have a great week. I should have lots to report in my next letter about all my vacation activities and adventures in and out of the garden.

See you at the garden centers!

Hortifully,

Carol