May long weekend

Lovely lovely long weekend! Giving the plants some fresh air. Wish I could just plant them already!


Even got the watermelon out of the house. These will be transplanted into a big container in the sunroom. I'm hoping that we get some fun out of them. We'll see! They're pretty finicky about transplanting, and if they DO put up with it, I have to make sure they get tons of nutrients, well-drained soil, air circulation, and manual pollination. It should be quite a little adventure.


One of my teeny patches in the yard. It's partially shaded but still gets a good 4-5 hours of solid sunshine. Today I planted lettuce and radishes in the end closest to the camera (they both do well in shade and cooler temps). At the end of the month I'll transplant the zucchini into the far end. Ideally I wanted full sun for the zucchini, but I've read that they don't mind a bit of shade. Hopefully that's true.


My other teeny patch. As you can see the lawn in this area was already pretty sparse, but both patches are on either side of the composter and have really rich soil. As a lucky bonus, I had left a bunch of raked leaves from the fall in these spots over the winter, so there's muchos organic goodness in there! Now I'm using the leaves as mulch for the edges, mainly to prevent grass from sneaking into the gardens. This patch gets almost full sun all day (aside from a bit of dappled shade from the tree). I'll be transplanting the corn and sunflowers along the fence, and then cucumbers will go along the ground.

I'm a little nervous about the ground planting... hopefully the landlord doesn't mind too much. My plan if she does mind is to say that it was basically dirt anyway, and that we'll happily put down grass seed in the fall (maybe some perennials even?). It would be an improvement to the yard in any case.

Also, as much as I'm anxious to get our OWN home with our OWN yard, I also really want to see this season through at this place. I guess the advantage to container gardening is that we could move most of the plants with us, but I'd still like to be here until the fall.