Happy Spring!

It's begun! The many garden books and seed catalogs I drool over say you can begin to plant many vegetables "as soon as the ground can be worked," but how unpleasant it can be to be out in the cold, wet dirt in early spring as the snow finally begins to reveal some soil!

So it's a bit hard to get started. That said, this year we've begun planting more than a month earlier than last and I'm so excited!!!

To begin this year, some of the children of the church, Andrea R, and I planted peas in the old raised bed on Palms Sunday. They were peeking out of the ground within a couple days of Easter!

Thank you to Liz Danner for this beautiful photo!

I have half-formed ideas of a more free-form Children's Garden in this area. Any ideas?

We have also been given some new perennials by a friend of First Church and the Baskettes. These are being replanted in various locations, but you'll see a number of new things in the Children's Garden (shown above), a small plot of herbs in the corner of the vegetable bed and, most strikingly, a big bunch of thyme and creeping phlox on the Francesca side of the big raised bed. It needs to have a little more weeding and time to look as gorgeous as its full potential, but it should be beautiful soon!

Last, but certainly not least, Elizabeth F and I have planted a bunch of vegetable seeds and tiny seedlings from my collection in the giant raised vegetable bed. We have planted many, many things including arugula (see the first picture posted), lettuce, radishes, carrots, collards, three kinds of kale, beets, celery, scallions, broccoli, and baby bok choi. On All-Church Work Day, the warm-weather crops we will plan the warm-weather crops (including, of course, a whole bunch of tomatoes). Hope to see you there!