Boy was Memorial Day weekend busy and productive!  I have a huge veggie garden update.

It took a bit of work over each of the three days, but we tilled and planted the veggie garden.

Actually, it was a really slow process, but then our neighbor offered to run his tractor tiller through it, and it was done in half an hour.  Yay!  Thanks for good neighbors!

We got down the black plastic, cut holes and started planting seedlings of peppers, tomatoes, okra, basil, parsley, tomatillos and ground cherries.  I made sure to water them right away, they were thirsty.  The next day we finished the seedlings and added seeds for sow direct crops like cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, bunching onions and 7 rows of green beans.  Then I added some marigold and sunflower seeds around the edges to pretty things up.  I placed the sunflowers on the north side so that they don’t shade the garden and marigolds near the tomatoes for a companion planting and pest deterrent.  Then we watered everything in really well again.

I got about two thirds of my flower beds mulched.  Here is a new gooseberry that I was able to transplant from that same helpful neighbors brush line.  It was ill fated otherwise and I was in the process of rooting some additional plants fro the three gooseberries that I already had.  These are larger than my rooted plants, so I will have better production a little sooner now.

I transplanted all of this vinca to an enclosed bed in the front yard.  It hadn’t filled in the original space and was being choked out by mulch.  So I had to find a new home for it or buy more to fill in this area.  Transplanting the vinca to another bed was easier.

It will fill this small flower bed and won’t need to be mulched.  Ground cover and mulch don’t mix, people, they just don’t.

It is all looking much better.  Well, it was, but then I had to disturb some of the mulch to transplant some spring bulbs.

Check out these deck rail planters.  They are bursting with lettuce an greens.  I have been making a huge salad every night for dinner.  So yummy!