Welcome to our spring garden

What with late pregnancy and a nasty cold I've been short on words lately. So I figure I'll let the photographs do the talking for me (well, most of it).

I just tilled in our second cover crop for the season a few weeks ago and let it set. I checked the weather report and saw temps will be up for a week, so I put on my brave hat and planted some corn! I went a little nuts on the different varieties this year and because I don't want them to cross pollinate I'll need to stagger their planting times so they aren't all poofing out pollen at the same time. Hence the early start. If these first crops germinate I'll definitely not have a worry about the old saying about corn which is it should be "knee high by fourth of July" No worries there with an April start!

So this is this years children's garden, enlarged and improved from last years. Click here to see last year's.

Colven helped shape the path through it, I like the tricky little hook he added here at the end (his truck is headed out towards the lawn in the hook there)We had a blast planting the corn together. It's amazing what a difference a year makes! Last year was much more exhausting to "plant" together haha! This year he has been quite the skilled gardener so far.

Here is my new adventure in our fenced garden. This part was previously left wild so I cover cropped it twice this winter and tilled.Tilling, of course, requires fuel and Colven knows just where to find it and can go fetch it for his mom! SWEET!
Freshly tilled and ready for action.

This closest area here has a batch of corn planted in it. The rest will be for a bit of dry farming of peppers and tomatoes.We bought a shade cover to be used on the lawn a few years ago and it worked fabulously. Until we left it out in a wind storm. It blew over our garden fence and into the lower field and the cover ripped to shreds. We stripped the cover off and left the skeleton where it landed until last week when I had a moment of inspiration and decided it would make a fantastic canopy over the summer sand and mud pits for Colven! The whole thing will be planted like mad with beans and morning glories and flowers of all sorts. I strung hemp twine around the entire structure yesterday to give some support to the climbers. I'm really excited to see this in the coming summer. I'm also excited to have a new place to plant the beans as they take up a lot of room in my raised beds.
The warmer weather has sprung some volunteer plants to life so I went gathering and found a few nice poppies, a borage, and some fennel to start the canopy garden entry way. Poppies and borage are both notoriously difficult to transplant because of their long, early tap roots but everyone made it!

Here is one of Colven's favorite pass times in the early mornings: Snail Hunting!

He diligently loads up his truck and delivers them.....

to the chickens of course!

My biggest trouble spot so far is the berry zone. The nanaberries are quite the renegades, and all the strawberry runners that touched down to the ground from their bed have started to bloom. The strawberries I don't mind as much, the nanaberries however are quite the prickly little devils and are proving to be happy enough to be considered invasive. Ut oh. On the far end there are the little baby golden raspberries!