Sure, it has been “spring” since March 20th, but everyone around here knows that you shouldn’t go crazy with planting until around May! So here we are, DAYS into the planting insanity.

What are we even going to grow this year, our second real year of the gardening act? Last year, there were too many tomatoes from just two plants, so you know we immediately decided to not only rotate our tomato crop away from that raised bed, but to be more realistic with how many plants we got. But why tell you in this paragraph when I could just include it in a nifty little list of our goals?

• We have five tomato plants this year.
• In an act of community spirit, we have encouraged our neighboring friend, Ben, to plant for himself in another raised bed. He has three tomato plants.
• We tilled ALL FOUR raised beds with intent to use

• Dollissa has seeded broccoli, onions, basil, carrots — none have sprouted for long.
• New crop attempts for this year: strawberries, squash, bell peppers
• We have herbs in containers: rosemary, store-bought basil (not that I don’t have confidence in the basil seeds that Dollissa has been trying), mint — we anticipate more as the weeks wear on
• A coneflower has already bloomed!

• I have installed seeds of marigolds among the tomatoes and cucumbers, and zinnias in the pollinator garden
• Sunflowers, we hope! Several have sprouted, but last year some critter ate all but three.
• We have added more flowers and a new bird bath to the yard

• The rhododendron bloomed!
• No nasturtiums. Not unless they go into a container.
• There are TWO milkweed plants this year!! Maybe next year there will be four!
• After running out of space in our old compost bin, we just literally picked it up and moved it to a new spot. Maybe this new location will magically grant us composting abilities.
• Although we did not plan for one, the garden has already sprouted a new stray cat friend, who will probably not be a stray for long because this is the way life goes for us

And now we have months ahead of us where we will work out our sorrows by weeding between plants, becoming incapacitated by mosquito borne illnesses that we never figure out, and remarking that never in our lives have we experienced summer heat like we are experiencing at that very moment.

We will go into it, though, with more experience than the previous year. We will do our best to get a picnic table, and maybe back porch furniture. We will keep Manny from dying of heat exhaustion this time. We will experiment with frying green tomatoes in new delicious ways. Will we get chickens this year? Wait and see!

We will triumph, in one way or another.