A Day of Gardening + Obligatory Comments on the New Post Editor!

So, I was going to create a post mostly about the rather lovely day I spent today catching up on some spring gardening.

However, then I was confronted by this new post editor we have, and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to insert images with right and left justified text wrapping around them. So I guess I'm going to have to play around with that.

It's too bad we don't have a drafts feature here, or some kind of ”sandbox area” where we can test these things before we accidentally send an awkward looking post out into the stream!

I think people around here — that is to say some of the more serious content creators — have been asking for a new text editor for a very long time. The one we've been using so far feels like a very early 2000's message board and certainly very Web 2.0. So on the whole I'm glad to see that we have a new editor! As with all things, it's going to take a little while to get used to this.

But back to the main event:

Gardening Season Begins!

We've been having a few days of particularly nice spring weather around here, and for the first time this year that unpleasantly cold edge seems to have come out of the air.

Aside from the fact that the warmer days mean that the lawn is jumping and needed to be mowed, there were lots of other "spring things" that needed to be done. So I took myself outside in the sunshine, and spent the afternoon picking up dead branches that had come down in winter storms, trimming back some dead growth from last year on various shrubs and bushes, and pulling weeds out of our raised garden beds that we use for vegetables so they will be ready for this year's planting.

Technically speaking, our last expected spring frost is supposed to be by April 24th (with a 90% certainty), but given that this has been a pretty mild winter I'm ready to declare the frosty season over.

Famous last words!

I've had a couple of flats of potatoes sitting in the garage for a few months waiting for them to sprout. Some garden purists say you should only buy potato sets, but I find that it works just as well to buy a couple of bags of organic potatoes from the grocery store and just let them set their own sprouts. And those that don't set sprouts you can always eat!

Organic works best, because they haven't been treated with growth retardant.

We've done a bit of garden planning already, which usually consists of talking about what we'd like to grow and then also taking a closer look at the things from the previous harvest that we ran out of quickly and the things that we still have in pretty good supply in the freezer. For example, we love growing squash but we tend to produce far more than we can eat. And even when Mrs. Denmarkguy gets industrious and bakes lots of zucchini bread — which we also freeze — we still seem to end up with more than we need.

On the other hand, we always seem to run out of broccoli sooner than expected. So that'll be one of the things we're going to grow more of this year. We're also going to be adding a few things we have not grown in previous years, such as parsnips and red beets and maybe some leeks; possibly some green peas. Actually, we're already a bit on the late side for growing leeks but if we buy some sets from the garden centre (rather than depending on seeds) we should still be OK to have some fall leeks.

A major part of my gardening work over the next few weeks will consist of my working on our side yard, which we're going to convert from lawn into more food growing space. That particular area, is mostly going to be used for potatoes (another thing we never have enough of) and a few rows of strawberries.

Whereas we have long enjoyed having a food garden, we indirectly have Covid-19 to thank for increased production. Last year there were so many scares about supermarkets running out of food and the production chain being disturbed, that we decided we needed to be more self sufficient. Regardless of whether Covid is going away or not, we're gonna continue working on that this year. Ideally, we'd like to reach a point where we're 100% self supplying with fresh food except maybe for a few meats, leaving grocery shopping to be exclusively for hard goods and dry goods.

Aside from that, gardening is fun! And it's a good workout too...

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

How about YOU? What do you think of the new editor? Are you finding it easy to use? Do you think it's an improvement over what we had before? On a different topic, do you keep a food garden? If not, does it sound like something you would enjoy doing? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20210417 00:23 PDT
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