Busy day!

I did a lot in the garden today! Scott helped. :)

• Planted another round of seeds: tomato, pepper, eggplant, lavender and basil
• Majorly thinned the existing seedlings
• Laid cardboard around the perimeter of the new beds and weeded
• Dumped a bag of some natural gardener compost in the rear raised bed
• Watered the cardboard and beds
• Went to the nursery down the road for onions, wandered around admiring and testing* plants for at least a half hour, came home with shallots, 4 strawberry plants, a russian red kale, a lemon thyme, and a lettuce (no onions)
• Went to Home Depot for mulch, found onion sets! Also finally found the soil testing kits!  (Last time I asked, they acted like they had no clue what I was talking about.)
• Mulched over most of the area (need more mulch, plus some good black mulch for on top of the beds)
• Planted everything mentioned above (minus the shallots, need to research!) in the way we were shown in class; gently massaged the roots, made a few pricks with a sharp point where necessary (the thyme plant had some pretty serious roots, but I wanted it too much to not buy it!)
• Watered some more
• Admired the work!

* testing plants:  Paige taught us, while we were planting the bed, how to look for good transplant candidates. If the plant roots are coming out of the bottom, or look like they have completely overtaken the bottom, that's generally a bad sign; the plant will probably take a bit longer to establish itself than one that isn't so root bound. There were a lot of plants like that at the nursery!

The coming weeks should be busy, busy, busy. I plan to get a rainwater collection set up soon, hopefully a DIY/cheap solution. We will be learning about it in class, thankfully! I am also keeping a very close eye on all my plant babies. It's been so nice and warm during the day that they get a lot of time outside. I've moved a few (a tomato, a pepper, a cucumber, and an onion; plus the new strawberry planter) to pots and am keeping them in the greenhouse, sort of as an experiment (but mostly because I have no room for them otherwise!) So far they're still alive, and we're going on day 4 or 5.

I will post photos soon! I just downloaded the Blogger app to my phone; hope it doesn't suck. ;)