Making the Salsa Bed

Chris hated breaking his last night's promise to plow the backyard garden today. He was planning to use his Gravely. It's an antique, I think, but this would be our first experience with it for the garden so we were both excited to see how it did. Last night's 9/10" rained spoiled our plans and Chris was back on the farm instead with the Gravely doing some sickle bar mowing around the pine trees instead.

So, without any kids, without any visitors, and without the Gravely, that left me to try to find a way to get my vegetable seedlings into the ground--finally! I'd already wasted my first batch of tomato sprouts since I started them in February, afraid I'd run out of salsa before I had more tomatoes! Pretty foolish, I know! But now I had seedlings that weren't growing well because they needed outside in rich garden soil, rain and real sunshine. The first thing I did was to take inventory of the cold frame where my mix of lettuces and kale had been. There were a few stragglers, so I pulled them out, washed them up in the kitchen and allowed them to drain while I yanked out the weeds that had overtaken their space. 

All afternoon I worked, yanking weeds and preparing the soil for the new arrivals. I planted in the rain so no need to water further, I figured. I was a happy gardener, not really knowing how to go about crowding my veggies. I decided to do it a little like raised bed gardening since the veggies would have to be in there tight. The first thing that went in were the sweet potatoes. I had to have a place for them since the voles at the potato patch were horrible little monsters! They would eat them up underground and we wouldn't have a clue until harvest time. (But aha! We have now erected a raptor perch, hoping to attract hawks to find the voles since voles also eat pine roots, but I digress. The pines are a totally different topic.) Back to my gardening:

 In the very back I have yams and sweet potatoes. This frame has eight inches of topsoil and sand above the ground, so I suppose the potatoes will have room to burrow. In front of that are six yellow tomato plants. In the very front I have planted my ten little mixed pepper plants. I will dub this bed my "salsa bed".

One surprise: In with my pepper seedlings was one lonely unidentified tomato that I mistakenly labeled and treated like a pepper. So I potted it and it will become someone's mystery tomato patio plant.