Summer may finally be here..

It's been a long, rainy month, one where everyone had work for us to do and we were taking care of the neighbor's alpaca farm, too. So our garden got grown over with well-watered weeds and we had no time to pull them, and the plants in the greenhouse grew tall and didn't get transplanted into baskets, bigger pots or the yard. Things are in an embarrassing state. But I think we may finally be through with the rain for awhile -next you'll see me complaining about the heat- and we should be able to get things under control a bit. The sky gave us a promise with our last rainstorm, anyway...

Bring the Animals Two by Two

We've had a wetter than normal spring, so much so that we have yet to get the vegetable garden planted. Two thirds of the garden has been- quite literally- underwater, a state which normally isn't true, at least after, say, mid-April. When Tim rototilled it two weeks ago, the tiller got stuck and couldn't be pulled out by hand or by ATV - it took the tractor. Not a lawnmower type garden tractor, either. A bulldozer type tractor, albeit a fairly small one, was necessary. I have this bad feeling that once it stops raining, the ruts from that will harden instantly into concrete and stay that way until next winter's freeze/thaw cycles loosens it up again.

We did get the peas in today (they are transplants, not seeds) and some of the brocolli and cabbage. It's very late to be planting those things. The normal mode here is to go from rainy and cold to 90 F within a few days, and the cool weather crops will start suffering. It's even been too muddy to get much weeding done in the flower garden, while the well-watered interlopers have grown like, well, weeds. I don't want to fertilize until the weeds are pulled.

As you can figure out, all these means that when the weather clears, we will be weeding, planting and fertilizing on fast forward, not just in our yard but in the yards of customers whose jobs keep getting put off because of rain. Stay tuned to see if we survive!