Spring is Here!

I feel like Spring is officially here.  And I couldn’t be happier about it!

We’ve had the most gorgeous weekend.  Today it got up to 87 degrees F.  After church Benzo and I stopped by the ILs house to borrow some tools (Benzo had to fix the lawn mower today), had lunch and then he graciously sat in the car while I did a quick shop for warm weather maternity clothes.  I hated to buy them when I only have a few weeks left, but it’s really hot outside and I only had a few short-sleeved shirts.  I probably spent more money than I needed to.  🙂

Once we got home we got to work immediately.  Benzo on the mower and I headed out to the garden.  The first time this year!  This is what the garden looked like:

Last year Benzo and I were the laziest gardeners ever.  We let the garden go to the weeds and we never cleaned it up at the end of the season.  So what you see is a bunch of dead plants from last year and then a bunch of dead weeds.  On the good side, my kale came back:

That makes me happy.  I can start picking kale this week probably!  On the bad side, I think I may have killed my entire strawberry patch.  In my laziness I let it get too overrun with weeds and when I was raking them back today I couldn’t find any evidence of strawberry plants.  😦  Lesson learned.  I’m not too terribly torn up about it as they were getting a bit out of control.  Now I can start over with a better plan in mind, though it will be a couple years before I get a good harvest again.

Once Benzo was done fixing the mower he came out to help me in the garden.  He mowed the weeds and then tilled up about 25% of our garden space.  I think that is all we’re going to use this year.  As I said in my garden plan, I want to keep the garden very small and manageable and focus on eating everything we grow fresh.

The tilling didn’t take too long so we also had time to plant a few rows of cold weather veggies.  Benzo dug three short rows and then planted one row of kale, one row of lettuce (both green and red) and one row of radishes.  For more information on direct sowing, read my post from last year.  It was so windy he had a little trouble getting the seeds in the furrow.  We’ll probably have random lettuce sprouting up all over the garden now.

It made me really happy to be outside in the sunshine working in the garden.  And I’m really glad we got the garden tilled and those seeds planted because we are currently enjoying the first thunderstorm of the season.  It really is Spring!

Once we were done in the garden we spent some time relaxing and listening to the end of the Royals game (13 innings and the Royals won!).  Then we had some dinner, did some grocery shopping and made it back before the storm hit.  Finally we finished the day with a special treat.  Root beer floats.  I can’t tell you the last time I had one of these.  It was so delicious, especially in a frosty mug.

Strangely I’m not too sad that the weekend is over.  After such a productive weekend I feel ready to start the week off right.