Without these little pop-up greenhouses I’d be a mess. I brought my plants out the basement 11 days ago to harden them off before planting. Since then it’s rained almost every day. Two of those days we had severe weather and I had haul the plants back into the basement and take down the greenhouses to protect them from high winds. Even with the greenhouses it’s been an exhausting seed-starting season.
It rained an inch on Saturday and I was afraid the plants would have to sit on our screen porch for the whole day, but was too tired to move them so I gambled and left them in the greenhouses. Thankfully they stayed dry.
Last year I wrote in my garden journal, “Don’t try to plant all the flowers in one day! Too exhausting!”
Oh I had grand plans to heed that advice and take my sweet time this year and spread the work out over several days, but once again the weather forecast had other ideas. April was our 5th wettest on record and May seems to be taking that as some sort of challenge. This week’s forecast is full of rain chances and even next weekend looks wet. I decided I didn’t want to wait any longer.
On Sunday it was chilly (I wore 3 layers of shirts plus a jacket) and very damp thanks to all that rain the day before, but I was determined to at least get started with my planting. First I tilled up all the beds by hand so the soil could start drying out a little. Then I started on the easiest beds. I make maps ahead of time so I don’t have to make decisions about where everything should go while I’m planting. That just leads to analysis paralysis.
Once I got going I couldn’t stop—I just wanted to be done. Nine hours later every bed was filled with seedlings, and I desperately needed a nap and a masseuse.
Now I just have to battle the digging chipmunks. Let me describe their tenacity. During my planting marathon I took one 10-minute lunch. While I was away on that shortest lunch in recorded history, one of those dastardly critters managed to dig up 3 of my newly-planted flowers. The nerve!
I surround all my flowerbeds with deer fencing for the first couple of weeks, but a critter or two always manages to find a way to sneak in and wreak havoc. I don’t know what they think I’m hiding under all those seedlings, but they are determined to find out!
One benefit of all this rain is that the perennials and shrubs are lush and growing like weeds (sadly the weeds are also growing like weeds). My ‘Great Expectations’ Hosta already has dinner-plate-sized leaves!
