Planting Day

Memorial Day weekend has always been the traditional planting weekend here in Montana, although the cooler-weather crops like lettuce, broccoli, and peas have been in for a few weeks already. I headed out to the garden early yesterday morning to get the tomatoes planted.

We had put several pieces of plastic down in that area last fall, but they’ve been driving me batty ever since the snow melted. My desire to have smooth, unwrinkled fabric apparently extends to the large pieces of plastic in the garden, too. I took up several of the pieces, trimmed them, turned them around, and fitted them back together in a smooth patchwork layout. I also did away with a small raspberry patch; it’s a thorny variety that was spreading aggressively into parts of the garden where I didn’t want it. I went through and cut off all the canes at their bases, then extended the black plastic over that area. We won’t plant there until next year, but hopefully having the black plastic over that spot will kill off the plants. If not, we can always take the backhoe out there and dig them up.

Getting the black plastic straightened out took up the first few hours, but I am very pleased with the results:

The raspberry patch used to be located in the top center of the picture (that’s our neighbor’s property and horse trailer). Getting rid of it opened up quite a bit of extra space.

I put in 46 tomato plants—15 each of Oregon Star paste tomato, Cherokee Purple, and Indian Stripe, as well as the one Dirty Girl grown from seed that my friend Susan gave me. She had given me two seeds but only one germinated. Dirty Girl is an open-pollinated variety of Early Girl, one of the most popular tomatoes in this area. Susan ordered the Dirty Girl seeds from a producer in California and shared them with several of us in the neighborhood. Even though I’ve only got the one plant, it is large and vigorous and I am looking forward to tasting the fruit it produces.

I also put in seven zucchini plants. I’ve been trying to find homes for the rest of them and still have three left if anyone is interested. I have half a dozen of each variety of tomato left, too. I only plant heirloom/open-pollinated varieties in my garden. The zucchini is a variety called “Grey” that I grow every year.

Mother Nature blessed my efforts with a gentle overnight rain. Next to go in will be the cucumbers, watermelons, and cantaloupes. I decided to have the husband go ahead and rototill the one section where the beans will be planted, just because it has all that lovely rotted straw from last year on it.

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While I was out in the garden, the husband was moving more of his stuff from the old garage to the new shop, and now I have a space to work on sewing machines!

I thanked him for leaving me that gallon jug of wood glue, LOL. The lighting here is much better than over the kitchen table, and I can leave my repair projects set up. As soon as the shelving arrives, I plan to move all the machines out here so I have them in one location.

And the peeps got moved out of the brooder box and into their own section of the coop:

We know it’s time to move them when they start trying to escape the brooder box. It was getting crowded in there, too. They have plenty of room to run around now. The rooster came into the coop from the chicken yard as soon as we moved them. He stood there with his head cocked to one side and watched them for a couple of minutes. I am not sure his brain is big enough to grasp the idea that he fathered all of these babies, but he knew something was different.