Spring garden 2010

It's always a thrill when it's time to start the spring garden!  First the prep work to turn this into something tillable...

 This, my friends, is love!  The poppies I planted last year never came up...but they popped up this spring!  I didn't want to lose them, so Bruce took the time to dig them all up for me so I could transplant them to another area before he tilled the garden. :)

Besides the poppies, we also enjoyed a couple of other surprises when we started digging around in the garden this year.  None of the fall garden seeds I had planted actually took...or so we thought.  They must have come up after I quit watching for them, but we got some carrots!  There was also a bunch of catnip that came up again, too.  We saved one clump to plant in a pot on the deck for the cats and tilled the rest under for now.

A new tiller joined the team this year...the old one gave up the ghost and had to be replaced.  It operates differently than our old one did, and it took Bruce for a run a few times -- rather like an unruly Great Dane on a leash -- until he got it all figured out!  The rest of us had a great laugh or two while we watched!

 I just had to include this picture, too...David's stance is the spitting image of my dad's stance when watching someone else work!  It's so much fun to see these random family traits passed down to the next generation.

 Our very own garden fairy cavorted around in her big ole garden boots while the guys were doing the prep work.  She has come a long way from the infant who wailed if the breeze touched her, to the toddler who HATED being outside, to the little girl who screamed at heat, insects, and any number of things (real and imagined) whenever she was outdoors and begged to go inside, to the little-big girl who was entirely content and happy to be with us outside and to spend hours rolling in the grass and digging in the dirt!

 Due to our equipment issues, the weather, and our crazy schedules, we ended up prepping and planting on two weekday-evenings instead of our usual Saturday.  On the second night, we let both kids stay up to help with the planting.  It was really fun to see the growth in their maturity levels since last year; their attention spans, their interest, and the amount of helpful labor they actually contributed have all increased noticeably.  We're glad the garden is such a family-thing for us!

And here it is today...you can't see it in the picture yet, but all of the seedlings have poked through and are growing exponentially bigger every day...I can already imagine the wonderful produce that's on its way!  Watching this incredible process never ceases to amaze me!