According to my phone (which, of course, knows all), it's going to rain this weekend. Bother! I have things to do outdoors, and a hint of a headcold that needs to go away, and combining those factors with rain will not come out well, I think. I guess it could be worse - that slightly colder, solid stuff - but precipitation of any sort, if it's planning on being here all day, or both days, just says to me, "Stay indoors."
And I have indoor things to do, more of them than I'd like, actually, most of them to do with paint in some way, so I can certainly stay profitably occupied there. But the blueberry stuff is being delivered this weekend - two barrels, compost and peat moss - and the mulch for between the boxes so we'll finally look semi civilized in the garden, and I could get the blueberry bushes planted and the strawberries and TBD berries (black-, rasp-, something of that sort) if the weather would just cooperate a tiny bit.
No progress on the asparagus front, although I got busy the other night and did something I've been meaning to do for about a year - shorten the leaky hoses in that box. They were so long that it was near impossible to set them out evenly, so some parts of the soil were getting a thorough soaking and others left dry. The asparagus probably won't care, but I'm happier. I think, after reading yet more websites on asparagus cultivation, that I'm going to remove the extra dirt from the box and put it aside to add back as they grow, rather than bury them now in order to get things evened out. Maybe it wouldn't matter in the end, but the majority of advice still talks about filling the trench in gradually, and I'd like to eat my own asparagus some day, so I'm not going to rebel. (for the record, cutting raw asparagus into 1" pieces and sauteeing in olive oil with sliced button mushrooms until the mushrooms start to brown makes a seriously wonderful dish.)
Since the peas are all starting to pop up now, I got the trellis wires run between my fence-post stakes. The only worry I have now is that the vines will find the square-foot grid wires first and I'll have to unwind them from there and coax them onto the trellis. Kind of a minor worry, though, really. I've grown peas before and they seem not to get too clingy until they're about the height of the first trellis wire.
Back to my list of outdoor tasks (not all food-garden-related):
- set up blueberry barrels
- buy blueberries, strawberries and other berries and plant them
- mulch around garden boxes
- spray the gravel drive for weeds now before the goats-head thorns mature (worst seedcasing on earth bar none!!!!)
- clean up various perennial beds
- clean out any containers worth preserving (a lot of the terra-cotta ones had frost damage this past winter - I KNEW it was miserably cold this year)
- dig out a couple of bushes which have far overgrown the available space
- paint a place on the front of the garage that was apparently behind a downspout, which has since moved
it goes on...
Well, it's forecast to rain today and it's not currently raining, so maybe, if I'm lucky, the forecast and reality will fail to match up in a similar way tomorrow.
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