Phew. We are officially at the point of questioning our life choices. Getting in a huge garden is so much work! With it being our official last frost date, that means it’s “go, go, go” time!
The last two days we spent preparing our container gardens allowed us to make significant progress today. We are now very much ahead of the game. Our greenhouse is almost done (minus trellising), our deck container garden is at least prepared to receive plants and we’ve also got almost our entire flower container gardens in, too. Oh, and our seedlings have officially been kicked out of the greenhouse!
We had to hold off on some of our more cold sensitive plants until today as our lows were still flirting with mid to high 30’s up until last night. But, we pulled the trigger on them today as we’re looking confident that we’re seeing the end of those extra chilly nights. And even if we’re wrong about that, at least our plants will only have to deal with it a little bit.
I hadn’t mentioned this previously, but our garden is large enough that we have to take time off from work to get it all done. We sometimes think of our gardens as our second job because this “time off” has hardly been relaxing. Minimum 10 hour days, all of it demanding, physical labor.
We’ve been seeing some of the “new” things we’ve worked on this year really coming together. We’ll have future posts about these, but we implemented quite a few “quality of life” solutions this year and they are really paying for themselves. We try to put a little focus each season on “How can we make this easier or faster?”
Looking at our weather, our pepper garden will be stuck indoors for at least another week. We’re still seeing low 40’s Fahrenheit into the next 10 days, so unfortunately our deck container garden is for now just growing some lonely artichoke. But, this is why we up-pot our peppers in mid-May, it gives us flexibility to plant later if we need to.
But, for now, I have a Double Tall Gin & Tonic (or two) in my future and a date with a chair on my deck. It’s all coming together and we’ll eventually get to marvel at our accomplishments!
