Starting Up the Veggie Garden

Well, it's that time again! Time to get out in the garden and get to work making it habitable for my little veggie starts. Last winter I planted some spinach and broccoli seeds in the greenhouse. The didn't do much then other than sprout, but I've been watching them all winter, knowing that once it got a little warmer they'd start growing again. I also rescued some chard that was growing in the garden before the chickens were let into it to eat all of my weeds. These warm spring days we've had lately are making it a little hot in there on these cool weather starts. So last week, I put the pots containing my overwintered spinach, broccoli and chard into the garden to cool off a bit. I went out the next morning only to see that a @$#$%^ Rooster had eaten every single one of my broccoli starts. We almost had Broccoli stuffed rooster for dinner that night. But luckily on our yearly trip to the Tulip Festival we stopped by Sno Goose Produce for an ice cream cone as big as your head. While there, I picked up a few more broccoli starts to repopulate the garden. If that dang rooster makes a buffet out of my garden again, he's going on holiday!

Yesterday was a gorgeous day here in the pacific northwest! So we all headed out to do a little more prep work in the garden. Hubby brought out some boards to shore up the downhill side of each of my planting beds making them look like fancy terraces. The Girl and the Boy both took some tools to the planting beds to dig up some weeds and I put some of my starts into the ground. So far I've gotten spinach, lettuce, chard and broccoli planted. The rhubarb is growing quite nicely and my strawberries are starting to put out new leaves. I can't really see any asparagus coming up yet, but I'm still hopefully that will come up again this year.

I've got more sprouts in the greenhouse that I'll try to get into the garden in the next few weeks: turnips, cauliflower, beets, cabbage, onions, kale, carrots, pole beans, zucchini, cucumber, and pumpkin. I'm not sure if I'll get tomato starts this year or if I'll pass...I'll probably get some just for the challenge. :)