Yes it’s my favorite time of the year again, time to plant the garden! Greenhouses open up, full of all sorts of flowers and vegetable plants just waiting to be bought and planted. I love roaming up and down the aisles looking at all the different varieties of plants while mentally planning what I want to try growing for the year. I like researching new things I haven’t tried before and choosing a few of them to grow.

Oh, and then there’s planning out the garden and figuring out what to plant where… all the fun stuff. Once all the plants are chosen and gathered, the garden is planned out, the work begins… which is the not so fun stuff.  Not saying I don’t enjoy planting the garden, because I really do, it’s just a lot of work. All the bending, squatting, digging, hoeing, staking, lifting, and mulching make me pretty slow at getting around for a few weeks. But once everything is in and mulched, and my muscles quit hurting, gardening turns fun again and all is good.

We decided to plant an entire row of onions this year. Between my mom and us, we go through the onions. They’re so good, especially in salads or eaten with fried potatoes, fresh from the garden. Last year we planted all bulbs, but this year we’re planting both bulbs and plants, so we’re hoping to have some large ones to harvest later.

I had my little helper planting them with me for a while. Planting onions is one of her favorite things to plant because it involves mud and anything to do with messing in the mud, she’s game for. It took us several days to get them all planted because we kept running out of onions and had to get more. It felt like we planted and planted… and planted more, but we finally got the row filled.

The first ones planted are already starting to grow!

The next day Brooke and I planted tomatoes. This year we ended up getting forty-two tomato plants, which is about twelve or so more than we got last year.

I still wanted to keep them all within the three rows we had them last year so we planted them closer together. We’re trying a few new varieties and are trying a new way of planting them, which I will tell you about in another post. We managed to get all but two planted with in those rows so I’ll have to figure out another spot to put them. We remembered we forgot to get a couple of Sun Gold tomato plants, which are a variety of yellow cherry tomatoes that we like to plant each year.  We’ll get one or two of those and put them with the two we still need to plant. Once we get that done, we’ll be done with tomato planting for this year, at least I hope.

Earlier on I planted cabbage, kale and broccoli. I didn’t pay attention to the weather forecast, so I didn’t get them covered when we had a frost. The broccoli and the kale didn’t make it, and I thought the cabbage didn’t either. So I got new cabbage and planted it in between the cabbage I already had. It looks like all the cabbage is going to survive so we may end up with a lot of overly crowded cabbage. Oh well, it’s better to have lots of overly crowded cabbage than no cabbage.

At the end of the row, instead of replacing the kale and broccoli, I planted some red leaf romaine and some type of head lettuce. I don’t know yet if I will get more broccoli and kale, will have to see.

And…just as I’m typing up this post, the weather radio goes off with an alert of an approaching storm that has the possibility of large hail…

So out we went to scrounge up forty bricks to cover the tomatoes and protect them from the hail…

And then of course, the bricks will have to be removed once the threat of the storm is gone, only to be replaced when a new storm approaches…. doesn’t look like rest for my sore, aching muscles will be happening anytime soon.