Planting time

I am absolutely exhausted.

We were blessed with two days of beautiful weather, so I seized the moment and planted our gardens. There are still tomatoes and potatoes to plant, but everything else is in the ground. We are planting in raised beds, because our soil is so rocky that the tiller jams up about every ten seconds if we try to till. And we have two years' worth of composted horse manure that fills the beds very nicely.

I was thinking today as I planted, "What if we were real homesteaders?" I mean, what if our lives depended upon what I was planting today, what if there were no Plan B? I would be totally scared. I don't think my gardening skills are that great. And there are the unexpected things, like cutworms...I planted eight tomato plants in a raised bed, covered with a tunnel of plastic, only to find this morning that four of them were cut off at soil level. I consulted my gardening books, and cutworms were the only thing that matched the symptoms. So dh and I spent a lot of time making "cutworm collars" to try to keep these fiends away.

I am especially proud of my bean tepees that I made this morning, out of hazel stems I cut myself. I planted butternut squashes beneath each one. I am not that artistically inclined, but I think the tepees add something visually to the garden.

Too tired to write more.