Post a Pic Tuesday– Deer me, what are you looking at?

We keep deer and not unicorns in the garden of late.  This has been your post a pic Tuesday.

 

Potato Planting Picture Post

We are finally preparing to plant and we are starting with something easy– potatoes.  The glory of potatoes is that you can just plant a sack from the store and get back several more sacks even if you forget to weed some weekends.  You can also in this climate leave them in the ground if you don’t want to harvest all at once.  So it’s a nice break-in crop.  

Preparing the ground for taters by digging up clumps of grass

 

More digging!

We have some native plant life around and about.  Out here in more rural Snohomish County, the native plants have not been pushed out as much as is the case in even fairly remote bits of King County.  Thus, we have lovely salmonberries that will soon fruit and make for delicious snacking when the kids party outside in the wonderful summers Cascadia has to offer.

Closer look at the salmonberries that abut the taters. Already flowering!

However, there are still a few places where noxious invasive plants crop up, like English Ivy, which can create “ivy deserts” where nothing else grows.  

 

Stupid English Ivy littering some junipers that have to come down anyway.

Conveniently, the junipers in that picture are coming down to allow for enough sun for the taters and other stuff we want to plant, so the English Ivy will be gone baby gone soon enough.  

It was nice to start digging in the dirt.  Hopefully we can have lots of planting through the late spring and early summer.  

 

 

 

Post a Pic Tuesday– Rhubarb Surprise

Alas, I have no recipes handy, just the plant itself.

That there is some rhubarb.

The previous owners tried to take it down, but a big old rhizome remained above ground and despite twelve whole months alone in the cold and wet, there was enough life in the old rhubarb to come roaring back, as you can see.  Pretty cool!  Much cooler than when bamboo does that! (I hate bamboo in the yard, it is super uncool and bamboo shoots are just not delicious enough to make up for the rapid growth and headache, as those rhizomes can kick it for up to 18 months).

I have been tweeting around a bit, but otherwise the household’s been far too sick for me to find blogging time, or gardening time.  So the pace will slow on all that.  This is already a year of challenges.  But we get to meet them with RHUBARB!

I cannot take the credit though, it was my lovely husband who noticed the rhubarb had started coming in while taking our oldest sweet child around and about the place.  He was thrilled, I was thrilled and now here we are.

This has been post a pic Tuesday.

Post a Pic Tuesday– More gardening!

De-fenceless junipers.

We went out and started taking down a fence so the junipers on the other side of it could be mowed down with a mighty chainsaw.  The fairy stroller is one of the many party favors my toddler is known to get down with.

We also dug up enough to go ahead and set up the raised beds Real Soon Now.We’ll also have a tater patch next to some salmonberries.  Should be interesting!

Veggie Plot of the Future.

Sprinkler wuz here.  Toddler is here.

Yes, that is a sliver of my oldest child, as always pretty in pink.  The weather has been so great lately, we’ve all been going out more.  It bodes well for planting next month.

Gardening Update

No pictures right now, but I have dug out most of the old sprinkler system despite a bout of seasonal poor health.  Lack of sleep due to nursing a frequent-feeding infant has made it difficult to recover, though the worst of it is alleviated with delicious bone broth, mostly from a cow we got from a lady down the street.  Despite all the tiredness I did do some digging on other than news stuff online.  Got dirt under my fingernails and everything.

Once I finish up removing that system, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to start setting up the beds and loading them with organic material in preparation for planting.  One thing I love about Cascadia is that it doesn’t require a lot to get things to grow.  We will have plenty to look out for sooner than we think.

The sun is making itself known again, and that’s always a great time to get outside and knock around the old homestead.  So I hope to keep on with that until planting time.

The garden will be simple, just a few kinds of root vegetables and some greens and some broccoli, as my husband is a broccoli fan from way back.  We got most of the seed from Burpee’s, because we’ve had good yields from them in the past.  I am looking forward to this, especially as it looks like we might have unusually pretty weather this spring.

Anyhow, enough about that.  After the garden, goats and sheep and ducks, oh my!