On Friday this is what our garden looked like. Pretty sparse except for those paper whites
That come up year after year.
What you don’t see here is all of the sorting and planting Matt and I (mostly Matt) has done
This spring to get us ready for this weekend! Memorial Day weekend is our traditional planting weekend – three full days and seasonable weather makes it the right time to get stuff in the ground. That and my grandmother always did it on Memorial Day weekend so I do as well!
Matt purchased a ton of seeds, I won’t list them all here but they will make their appearance as the summer goes on. In addition to the seeds Matt and I headed out to the Portland Farmers Market for 8AM on Saturday morning. We were there early but we weren’t the earliest! We tracked down a cart and got started.
We always work systematically – walking the entire market first to see what they have and then working our way back and picking up vegetables. We both have a love for tomatoes and I will admit to overdoing it this year – we have over 15 plants. But when plants look as good as this you can’t resist!
Last year we did these yellow tomatoes and they made the sweetest sauce – we are doing 4 of them this year.
We filled our carts up twice! This is what we ended up with
5 Pickling Cucumbers
54 Onions
8 Peppers (Green, White, Purple, and Red)
48 Stalks of Corn
12 Bean Stalks
2 Eggplants
7 Long Cucumbers
6 Broccoli
6 Cauliflower
12 Leeks
17+ Tomatoes( Better Boy, Patio, Sungolds, Black Cheery, Green Zebra, Taxi Yellos, Striped Germans, Pear Yellow, Early Girl, Rutgers and 1 Checkloslavakian Heirloom)
We also planted the following seeds:
Cantaloupe, Watermelon, Pumpkin, Summer Squash, Winter Squash, Carrots, Beets, Cabbage and peas
Then we headed home. The next three days were filled, and I mean FILLED, with garden work and outside yard stuff. Matt did most of it while I worked on our new front porch, had some client consultations and worked on some shoots. When all was said and done this morning the garden looked like this:
I KNOW!!! It doesn’t look like much and I have to hold myself back from filling up every dirt spot with a plan because when it starts to come in its just too much! Of course there is our canning/freezing/preserving plan but I will save that for later.
For now we are just patiently awaiting our first crop of peas – which I will promptly use to make pea risotto!
Yum-O!
