It’s playing in the dirt time of year, and I’ve been doing a lot of it.

Well, not as much as SOME years, but a decent amount.

A couple few weeks ago was the local high school’s annual plant sale, where most of the local nurseries show up to sell you plants (go fig, what with it being a plant sale and all 😉

That was – well, not the start, but the lion’s share of our plant buying.

We have a bunch of brassicas, some peppers (poblano, mostly), an eggplant, a couple tomatoes, and some sweet potatoes.  Also two kinds of summer squash and four cucumber plants.

The two beds on the south end of our garden were already full — one is a now-permanent perennial bed with asparagus and strawberries, and the other is growing garlic we planted last year. It’s nice to have stuff up and ready to eat while everything else is just barely thinking about being tall enough for the chipmunks to eat.

(The damn pests pulled up my ONE habanada plant!  Killed it!  Again!)

But we had this six-pack of paste tomatoes that had gone blight-looking while still in the pack.  We put them aside, didn’t want to waste garden space on them, but the blighted leaves fell off and the plants seemed to be doing, well, fine, if rootbound in the tiny starter packs.

So we (okay, T did the digging) dug up part of our, ah “we’ve done work on this area but we don’t always plant stuff here” spare bed — usually we just put squash there, since they can sprawl more than in a raised bed and a hill allows for pretty much bringing in your own dirt, the way we do with raised beds — mixed in some peat moss for aeration, and stuck the six plants in the ground.

They’re still alive, so… win?

Oh!

Oh, and we planted the front line of half our property with sunflowers.

We have a long narrow lot, you see.  Like, city-lot deep but over an acre and a half of total land.

And half of it is “meadow” or feral hayfield, which mostly we don’t do anything with.

But we have a mower now!

So we mowed a strip down that half and then planted…

three packets of sunflower seeds.

If even 1/3 of them come up, there’s gonna be a couple few hundred feet of sunflowers greeting the five people a day who drive down our road.

It will be glorious.

Fingers crossed!