My four-day Easter weekend started with a beautiful sunny day, so I asked Brock what I could do in my garden. (How handy, to have my own personal gardening advisor.)
Brock had spaded my kitchen garden a week or two ago, but he wasn’t able to get at the 15′-ish-long row between the two fruit trees. So he suggested I weed it, either using our BCS rototiller or a hoe. (Also handy: to have access to the tractor and tools of a professional farmer.)
The BCS rototiller would have been the most efficient and effective option, but that would require a quick re-teaching from Brock on how to start and drive the thing, and I knew he was busy working. So I opted for a stirrup hoe, and got down to business.
Before:
During:
It was hard. I haven’t done physical work since October, and I could feel it in my shoulders and back. I got sweaty. Short breaks were required.
After:
After all that hard work I wanted to actually plant something in my garden, to celebrate. It’s still a bit early, weather-wise, and the soil isn’t ready in my garden: Brock will till it with the tractor before I do my big plant-out in a week or two.
Luckily, that row between the trees isn’t tractor-tillable, so I could plant something there and it wouldn’t get in the way. I’ve planned to have my few perennials in that spot (mostly herbs). And we had two pots of chives that Graden and Nancy had given us years ago, which had been living in their containers ever since. So those aromatic chives finally found a home in my garden.
I raked off the weed clumps, hoed out the stubborn areas, and dug two holes for my transplants. Ideally I would have forked up the soil to loosen it first, but I couldn’t figure out where Brock had hid the tools so c’est la vie. My chives went in.
I love chives. They are one of the few plants I vividly remember from my mom’s garden, along with honeysuckles and bleeding hearts. And now that we eat mostly food we grow ourselves, I find that there’s a noticeable gap in onion availability in springtime: my chives will add oniony flavour to our grain salads and egg salad sandwiches.
So here’s my updated garden, with its first inhabitants:
