Spring Planting

We've started putting in the tomatoes. The process starts with digging a hole two feet deep and throwing in a fish head and a variety of other amendments. By the time you get to the part where you stick in the little seedling, the day has become very long indeed. To complicate things a bit, we are due for a cold spell, and the little plants do not like to be cold, which explains all that lovely plastic. I'm trying to keep the wind away from the plants and maybe warm up the soil a tad. The wire cages are four feet high, and we will need every bit of that once things get going. Right now there are only eight plants in the ground, with eight more to go. There are a couple of cherry tomatoes, but the rest are Early Girl; they can all be dry farmed, which means that we will not water them at all after they begin to grow. The final complication here is the luscious lingering smell of the fish and the amendments. The creatures that come in the night find this irresistible, and I am hoping that all this tangle discourages them from any digging. Stay tuned. 

In the background you can see that it is a good year for roses, and some of the iris are in bloom too.