BEDM Day 26 - Planting Out Day 1

Today was the big plant out of the garden.  It was time for the tomatoes and peppers to be put in the ground.  They had been living on the woodbox on the deck for 2 weeks, after their initial start indoors, and were ready to go in the ground.  They told me so themselves, "Please put us in some dirt!  Or are we going to live our whole lives in water?"  So Mom and I headed out to the garden this morning and turned beds, added fertilizer, smoothed out beds, divided the plots into square feet and planted.  See the square feet marked out?

And then each foot gets a plant, be it tomato or pepper...

Then we laid out the soaker hoses, hooked them up to my amazing PVC watering system, tested out the hose (and added extra washers where needed) and then covered the plants with fabric.  I started doing this last year, when the year before I didn't and sun scalded all my tomato plants.  It took a while for them to recover and my harvest was diminished because of it.  I use Gardeners Supply's summer-weight fabric so it transmits only 85% of the sunlight to the plants.  This is a little more than they were getting on the porch under the all-purpose fabric which transmits 70% of the sunlight and when they only were getting morning sun.  With sun on them all day and a little more transmittance they will work their way up to full sun without getting scalded.  The same goes for the peppers, although they still have the all-purpose fabric on them but only because I ran out of the summer-weight.

Things were looking good for the potatoes, onions, peas and carrots we planted out a little earlier this spring.  See spring in the eastern half of Washington state starts off with plenty of nights that still get below freezing.  Our "last frost date" is May 15.  This is when you have a 50-50 chance of it still freezing after that date.  I usually wait until closer to May 30th to plant out because your chances go up to 80% of it not freezing and because in the 4 or so years I've been gardening I would say it still froze (or got close enough to freezing that I went out at 3 AM to put plastic over the tomatoes) on half of those years.  But potatoes, onions, peas and carrots can handle temps that still make it to around freezing, so they went in to the garden in April.  See how big they've gotten!

Also the plants that winter over are doing well.  The strawberries plants have little berries starting to show up and the rhubarb is overachieving as usual...

Look at all that yummy rhubarb!

We turned all the long beds as well which are the ones that usually get the squash, melons, corn, pumpkins, etc.  We didn't think we'd have the energy to seed all of them but they are ready to receive seeds on another day (Thus the "Part 1").  We were right about being very tired and mother nature encouraged us to go in when she turned a passing shower into a mini downpour (or what Seattleites would call "air").

While I've been gardening this spring I've noticed that there are a pair of hawks that have decided that the VERY tall conifer across the street would make an excellent nesting site.  I see them come and go and have wished for a pair of binoculars to see them better.  Well using my fancy 55-300mm lens I got a couple of pictures of them...

Just one...

See how tall that tree is!

And there's a pair!

Looking up hawks in eastern WA I think they might be a pair of Red-Tailed Hawks or American Kestrels.  They have dark heads and light colored chests.  They are very lovely and I appreciate their rodent control as our Mr. Smudge is no longer around to keep them in line.

With one good day of hard labour down there will be another soon to follow...