And we’re back with more gardening!

Whew! With our painting project over, we are glad to return this weekend to regular garden work. And boy, do we have plenty to do. The pictures below are about a week-and-a-half old — all the bed are now showing seedlings, which is great.

We added two new raised beds (front) and have to clean up the ones in the back that we put up last year.

And here’s a portion of our new long bed ready for lettuce and wax beans. (The part under plastic will be prepared in a weekend or two for transplants, sunflowers, and corn.)

By the by, last week I mentioned our poor, poor, tomatoes. Well, the story is a simple one. A couple weeks ago we transplanted our tomato seedlings into larger pots (homemade ones, actually, courtesy of the Potmaker and our collection of Sunday newspapers!) Since we had so many, we decided to place 15 of them in various beds, hoping that they’d take off…but they didn’t. We were a bit too eager, yes, but the weather was no help either. After planting them, we hit a cold, rainy spell, which did all of them in. Of the remaining transplants, we placed half of them in our greenhouse and half indoors as part an experiment to see where they thrived better. The answer: indoors. Again, we were much too eager – the ones outside didn’t survive more than a few days. When we revisited them, we only had a couple left standing that were holding on for dear life. They’re inside now and doing much better. Of our original 72 seedlings, we’ve got 30 left. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also, we guess, part of the ups and downs of gardening. Now we know and can prepare better next year.

Alas poor tomatoes, we knew ye well.

Beyond the tomato unpleasantries, everything is currently doing very well. While last year we just sorta stuck stuff in the ground and hoped for the best. This year we are handling our planting more systematically.

You can click on the image to make it larger, but this is a portion of our 2013 garden spreadsheet. Here we’re keeping track of everything that we’ve planted or will be planting — from the type and variety to each plants’ progress over the course of 6 months. Right now it contains 41 line-items. Seems like a lot, but given what happened to the tomatoes, we’re glad to have gone a little by overboard. In addition to this page concerning the vegetables, we have another one for the flowers and another one for the transplants.

So things are coming along well, but it’s been incredible damp recently which has put a “damp”-er on things lately. (Haha, except it’s not that funny). And the fact that we’re in for another week of rain doesn’t help matters any. However, the things that we have successfully planted  are doing really well. So far, we have beans, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, zucchini, peas, carrots, onions, and herbs that are well on their way. And a couple of out flower beds are flourishing! And all the rain does make for easy watering, and that’s a good thing.