Plant Progress

This was an incredibly busy weekend, but all with fun stuff!  It feels so good to be outdoors using up my storage of winter fat (still got more to spare!).  We've been doing a lot of physical labor getting the garden ready.  Lots and lots of shoveling - I wish I had a picture of the mountain of dirt that we had delivered.  On Thursday we finished building the beds, and then we spent most of Friday filling them up with dirt.  We had some dirt left over, so I suggested we use it to plant a raspberry bush.  So we went to Lowe's to look for one, but they didn't have any.  What I really wanted was an apple tree, but the hubster said "no", and maybe that was for the best anyway.  We didn't want to waste any time hunting around for a raspberry bush, so instead, we bought some strawberry plants on a whim.

I've never had strawberry plants before so don't really know if there's any tricks to success, but I will be very glad to have the strawberries if we get any!

So this is a picture of two of our beds all ready to go!!!!

Filled them up with dirt, added some manure and phosphorous (after testing the soil), raked it all in, although I was disappointed that the manure didn't smell like manure - I know I'm weird but I LOVE the smell of cow manure!!  Anyhoo,  now all they need is plants!!  I was going to plant what I had growing on the windowsill yesterday, but after talking to a few gardening "experts" at church, I learned that the plants needed to be "hardened" first.  I was already sorta doing that with the pumpkins and cucumbers, but didn't know that it was recommended for all plants.  Since they've been pampered on my windowsill all this time, I suppose it makes sense, and even though I'm anxious to get them planted, it might be worth it to wait a few more days while I get them "hardened".  This entails putting them outside in the mornings, and transferring them into the garage at night.  This gets them used to the elements of different temperatures and cool breezes.    

These are the plants that were growing on my windowsill.  There are so many of them so I just keep them sitting in the wagon during the day.

I knew I wanted to plant the cucumbers in buckets, hopefully to give them a better chance of success, so I have them lined up for the day to soak up some warmth and sunshine.  These buckets are very heavy, so it's kind of a pain to have to keep moving them, but hopefully the extra effort will pay off.  This morning it was kind of a cool morning, so I waited until the temps got up to 50 degrees before I put them out, just to make sure I didn't shock them too much.  I saved one cucumber plant for the bed, just to see how it would do in there.  Also I saved one pumpkin plant for the bed; that is why this pumpkin plant isn't in a big pot.

However...

This pumpkin plant that I put in the pot, I kept outside all night, instead of putting it in the garage because I was afraid that if I kept moving it, I might snap the vines off.  So I set it on the south edge of one of the garden beds where I plan to leave it all summer.  And I went to bed worrying about it, thinking that the cold night air would kill it.  This morning I went out there to check on it, and was pleased to see that the leaves were still green, and new flowers had bloomed.  So far so good.

So, this will be my daily (morning and evening) routine now for this week.  They say to do this for a week, but we are leaving for Hawaii on Friday, so I am going to get all these plants in the dirt on Thursday.  My hubster keeps telling me it's time to get the seeds planted too, but I don't know how many ways I can tell him what a big mistake that would be to put seeds in the dirt and then leave for Hawaii.  As Pete would say in "Oh Brother....", "that don't make no sense".