A Day of Mothering--plants.

Mother's Day, and I'm busily trying to get plants to produce offspring. We put in the entire garden today, planting:

• Leeks
• Summer squash
• Cucumbers
• popcorn
• sunflowers
• other flowers and herbs
• two avocado pits in pots (since we had guacamole for dinner)

transplanting:

• Fennel
• peppers
• herbs
• tomatoes (34 plants in the ground and in pots)

Also discovered the joy of stewed rhubarb this weekend. SO GOOD.

In comparing notes with other midwesterners, we are lucky to be close to the lake, and west of it. It has a moderating effect on the weather--it is supposed to get to 38 degrees tonight, but it is freezing elesewhere. We've been harvesting kale for two weeks. The Rhubarb is hearty and producing well. The tomatoes we transplanted earlier this week are thriving. Will be interesting to see what this does over the years, if it changes, etc.

At any rate, a good day of gardening.

Kitty Assistant

This got edited out by blogger yesterday, and rather than re-post the entire entry, I will give you here a solo photo of our curious kitty, ready to help with the planting. He's the best kitty in the world, and he loves gardening. He hangs out in the garden when we are out there, loves to sidle up and rub against us when we're working. I'd grow a whole garden full of cats if I could be guaranteed that they'd all be so perfect!

Starting

We are using the guidance of this site to begin our seedlings this year:
http://www.yougrowgirl.com/
Here's our seed collection. These are from Victory Seed Company (all heirlooms):

These we bought at the local Stein's Garden Center.

There's a seed starting calculator somewhere on the site http://www.yougrowgirl.com/ but I can't locate it just now. It told us to plant this weekend, so we did.

Then I went to the farmer's market on Saturday and was told it was way too early to be planting seedlings by a very experienced gardener. Sigh. I'm sure it will be fine, and seed pots are enjoying their time in the laundry room on top of the warm, sunny and vibrating dryer (spouse/botanist says that the jiggling strengthens the growing plants. We'll see).