Mad, Beautiful Ideas
Gardening Season Begins

Saturday marked the beginning of our Gardening Season with the first public work day at the Pullman Community Gardens. Catherine and I went for a couple of hours and helped clear weeds from the main path, and go through the new gardener's orientation we didn't get last year.

We also discovered to our chagrin that our plot was not where we thought it was, since it turned out our neighbors from last year. Who were good neighbors, didn't have a 20'x20' lot, but rather they were using a 20'x30' lot (not to mention the roughly 5 square foot melon mound in our plot), so we had to remeasure. Luckily, we are getting ground that was worked last year, so aside from the weeds, it's proved fairly easy to work.

Our plan this year is to dig our our beds lower than our paths, so that we can practice flood irrigation on our beds. Our hope is that will make the watering not only easier, but also require less water. However, this is a fairly large change from last year, so it is requiring a fair amount of soil moving. I expect many more days of sore muscles before we're done.

In other Garden News, we've started our first set of seeds in our apartment. Plenty of salad greens and chard, some tomatoes, peppers, a bit of corn, and a few other things. We're hoping to have the salad greens in the dirt before the end of the week, but I'm not sure when we'll get everything out, since frosts can hit at the garden until late March, but even if we can't plant everything, we should have a really good start this year, and once we get the beds built, I think our workload should be fairly light this year, save for waterings.