Whirlwind Weekend of Gardens and Gardening

This weekend started with a trip to TAGRO.  On Friday, we loaded up a truckload of free TAGRO mix and amended and planted our parking strip garden.  In the evening, I went to the first garden social gathering of the year at my friend's garden in U.P.  It was so fun catching up and seeing how much they are expanding their kitchen garden this year.  

Saturday morning we hosted a work party at the Orchard & Vine Community Garden.  The Garden had it's first vandalism incident sometime Friday night.   Someone ripped out all eight blueberry shrubs that were planted in the fence planters and threw them into the street.  A neighbor kindly placed them back in their holes in the morning.  Only one was totally broken off from the roots.  A few nice large flowering branches were lost too.  So sad.  I moved a few of the nicer blueberries into a vacant bed in the back of the garden, just in case it happens again.  My strategy now is to plant "expendable plants" in the empty spots in the fence planters like annual flowers and herbs that recover quickly when damaged.  Per our original plans for the day, we continued sheet mulching the garden to smother the weeds.  We also planted some strawberries into the fence planter beds.  And we harvested some young mixed lettuce from our plot.  We ate a fantastic salad for dinner.  

Later Saturday, we picked up a rain barrel that our neighbor didn't want.  In return, we built frames with branches harvested from our garden over her raised beds and covered them with plastic to create rustic greenhouses for her.  

Sunday, we took Smithers to the Dog Park and Soggy Doggy, transplanted more tomatoes into gallon pots, cleared out some spent veg, grilled some chard and cut a bouquet of lilac flowers for my table. 

Needless to say, nothing got done on the kitchen this weekend.  I'll be back at it tomorrow.  

This is where some of the blueberries landed in the street.

Planter boxes sad- lost their blueberry friends.

A casualty.  Every bloom lost is a blueberry lost.  

At home, the bush peas are looking good

The sugar snap peas are blooming!

The tomatoes are happy.

The beets have gone to flower.  We ripped out most of them, but left a few of each type to collect the seeds.

Lots of onion rust.  I need to cut off all the affected parts.  It's been a cool spring and fungus thrives in cool wet conditions.

Cabbage Moth eggs on the back of a cabbage leaf.  We've been checking each plant periodically and squishing the eggs.  

Apple blossoms are almost done.  We saw lots of bees pollinating the flowers.

My young grape vine is going to have flowers this year.  Maybe we'll get a few grapes too.

We prepped and planted out most of our parking strip this weekend. We weeded and amended the soil with some Tagro.  We planted pole beans, bush beans, summer squash, winter squash, and half our corn bed.

This is our winter squash bed.  We planted pumpkins, Turban, Blue Hubbard, Buttercup, and Butternut. We're trying to not overplant and crowd the squash this year.

We filled in the trenches around our early potatoes.  The later ones are coming up nicely.

Fava Beans are blooming.

Fava Bean crop.

We grilled swiss chard for the first time today.  It was really good.  

Pretty Lilacs with Chive flowers.