First Harvest!

The first harvest of 2009 is sitting on my kitchen counter.  Yay!  It's actually the thinnings from the row of spinach and the pot of baby red mix lettuce, but I'm calling it a harvest because I do plan to wash it and then eat it.  I'm trying to keep a running total on the right of the pounds of food harvested from the garden and the dollar amount that it's worth.  Some blogs I've seen have fancy widgets for this, but I can't find one and have no idea how to create one, so you won't find one here.

The rest of the weekend was spent on important but much less exciting gardening tasks.  I chopped down almost all of the rampant honeysuckle behind the back fence, which did not take as long as I expected - a couple of hours was it.  Now comes the exciting part of digging up the roots and dealing with the brush.  Luckily it's all small stuff (2" diameter or less) so I think we can get a chipper from a friend and chip it into mulch.  Mark and my dad started tackling a gate in the back fence today also, so we can actually access the space behind the fence, since at least 5 ft of it is our property.  I plan on "claiming" everything up to the stockade fence for us though, since the commercial development behind us sure isn't going to be landscaping our side of the fence!

I also dug up the front flower bed by the house this weekend and removed the hydrangea that was not so happy (which I am just giving away because I'm tired of "babying" it for little result), and dug out the moonbeam coreopsis that was spreading through the bed.  I'm going to give some of that away also.  I have a crepe myrtle in the corner of the bed that will stay, as will the boxwoods along the house, but I'm kind of starting over with the rest of the bed.  The perennials were all kind of thrown in the summer we moved in just to have something in the bed, and now I'm hoping to actually have some order to the bed.  

A final fun gardening thing for today was to plant the large pot on the front walk full of the annuals for this year - I think I ended up with a green sweet potato vine, a purple heart, a osteopernim, a zonal geranium (Kate's pick) a gerbera daisy and a lantana.  Plus, Kate and I started some sunflower seeds today.  I'm really excited for one of the varieties - it's called "Mammoth" and gets up to 12 ft tall.  Kate is excited because they'll be "taller than Daddy".

I also found 8 volunteer tomato plants coming up in the garden which I transplanted into little pots and will move into the new raised bed once it's done.  Hopefully they're not all cherry tomatoes, but we'll see!