HOLY GARDEN-TASTIC-STRAVAGANZA-YAHOO WEEKEND!

Wow, where to start? Lately I always seem to lead in with a statement about the weather. This has not been on purpose. Until now. To be fair, weather is kind of a huge thing for us gardeners. If our soil is depleted of nutrients, we can add some compost and fertilizer. There are many other things like this that we can somewhat control. The weather on a day to day basis is not one of those things. Oh sure, you can grow in a greenhouse but I don't have one of those damn it. Though, if you want to donate one or build me one I would not turn that down. I digress. Back to weather. I'm just going to keep it real for everyone. Shit's been pretty cold in Michigan, yo. I mean, yeah, we've had a few 70 degree days. But overall? The winter has been followed up by a really sluggish spring. Tulips are slow to grow let alone bloom. I imagine the people with the Tulip Festival in Holland, Michigan are freaking out a bit considering that is coming up in a week or so. A large portion of the Great Lakes still have ice covering them. And it's going to be May this week.

The point of all this is to say gardening has been slow going thus far. But as of a few days ago my gardening calendar EXPLODED. It was blowin' up, as the kids say. I had already scheduled this weekend to enlist my dad's help in building some raised bed boxes for my front yard. And then I got a message from Nicole, a nice woman at the Ingham County Land Bank Garden Program, that my spring crop vegetable starts were in. And then I got a message from a good man named John (through the same program) that my raspberry and strawberry plants that I had ordered were in. Hot damn. So my weekend was committed to gardening (minus the Lugnuts minor league baseball game I attended Friday night). What choice did I have?

We will start with the cute. My kids love digging in the dirt with me. Jack will now spend a good chunk of his time outside digging in the garden. And I love it.

And so we move from one kind of young sprouts to another. 

Radish sprouts! Even these that tend to be pretty cold tolerant have been slow to take off. 

And here we have pea sprouts. I should have gotten new pictures of these because since the few days since this has been taken there has been a real surge in the number of pea sprouts and their rate of growth. 

The garlic bed is looking quite right

Oh hey look. Another cute pic made it in here. Filling some trucks up with dirt. 

Spinach sprout. 

So this is where I am so far. Things have been starting to come on. And then my spring batch of starts came in. And this is what they look like.

What we have here are leeks, storage onions, red onions, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage (red and green), and a metric shit ton of Brussels sprouts. 64 of them to be exact. I like Brussels sprouts. What of it? 

Those starts are currently being hardened off. If you are not familiar with hardening off, it is the process of slowing getting sprouts who have spent their lives inside, used to the elements and temperatures outside. This takes 5-7 days generally. Each subsequent day, you leave them out a little bit longer. Moving on...

Time to plant some raspberries! I must admit, the fruit sector of gardening intimidates me a bit. I am not familiar with it in terms of hands on experience. I've read up on it and studied it a fair bit but as the saying goes, there is no substitute for experience. I already have planted 4 Mammoth Red Raspberries along a bed. This weekend I also planted Anne raspberry canes and Bristol black raspberries. But even before I planted them, my wife and I worked on taking down a chain link fence and also clearing out some of the most stubborn grape vines I've ever met. Which is, you know, presumably not a lot.

Anne raspberry canes in their new home. 

Bristol raspberry canes. 

After I had planted out the raspberries and took a lunch break, I went back out to plant the leeks and onions. The following are some pictures of their placements.

Today (Sunday) brought a new gardening day. A day in which the strawberries would need to be planted. But first, we would need to build their new homes. Raised bed boxes.

Jack enjoyed playing in them

Clearly

 Also my wife, Maggie, took some shots of me while I was filling the boxes with topsoil. Because, you know, chicks love a dude who can fill a box. HEY-O! (I apologize for the inappropriateness but then again, this is my blog and that is my sense of humor)

And the finished product. Well, the two finished products. The other boxes will get dirt in them in due time. But my main concern was getting those two boxes finished so I could get the strawberries in. 

I apologize for not having pictures of the strawberries finally planted. I blanked out on that one and now it's almost 10:00pm. But, to be fair, there isn't much to look at other than the crowns of the strawberries poking up from the dirt.

Also not to be lost is the fact that I planted out a second round of seeds for spinach, lettuce, carrots and mini purple bulbing onions.

 So there it is. A weekend of work. It seems like so little when put down in this blog but has been much longer and more work than I can relate in words. I am hoping that it will be worth it.