Digging, digging, in our garden

We had a patch of a few days without any rain, which meant that it was time to start tilling. You don't want to work the soil when it's too wet, especially when it has a lot of clay in it like ours, so hoping to till in the springtime is a nail-biting experience. I don't know if you've heard, but we get a lot of rain around wintertime here in the Pacific Northwest. If we take good care of the garden beds we're putting in this year, we won't have to till next spring-- I'm already looking forward to it.

The fellow who leases land from us to grow blueberries has a rototiller. Small motors tend to be finicky, and this one has its quirks. It likes to pop out of gear, but it otherwise runs pretty well. It did give me a huge blood blister when I tried to start it the first time, but I choose to think of that as an initiation ceremony. It weighs a ton. Not literally, but it sure seems like it when you're trying to push it around in mud the consistency of peanut butter. (OK, maybe we should have waited for a longer dry spell before tilling.) We marked out a 1600-ft area for our garden, and tilling it really drove home how big of a project gardening it is going to be. It's one thing to draw the layout on grid paper. It's one thing to poke tiny orange flags in between the dandelions. It's entirely another to shove spinning tines through every inch of it to hack the grass to pieces. We didn't even kill all the grass yet. When our next dry spell arrives (keep your fingers crossed), we're going to till the whole thing again, adding amendments to the soil while ringing the death knell of the sod.

In preparation for what I'm sure is going to be a glorious garden plot, once it's tilled and fenced, I've been starting seeds. You may have heard about the time I killed all of my tomato seedlings a few weeks ago. Well, folks, I am proud to announce that all of my new seedlings are alive and well. I've been diligently watering our tomato, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts starts. Yesterday, which was about three weeks away from our statistical last frost date, I started more tomatoes, basil, a whole bunch of squashes, and some melons. Yes, melons! This particular strain was developed in Minnesota, so hopefully we'll get some juicy melons out of our garden even with our short growing season.

Also in preparation for having a glorious garden, I've been brushing up on food preservation. This, of course, is in anticipation of having an overwhelming bounty of homegrown vittles. Specifically, I've been stopping at a farm stand on my way to aerial class twice a week to stock up on whatever they have that's cheapest. Lately, it's been pears for 59 cents a pound. Awesome. Once they're home, they are sliced, soaked in an apple cider vinegar solution to prevent browning, and tossed in the dehydrator, where they stay for about ten hours. (I have the dehydrator plugged into an outlet timer, and I now think I'm the smartest person since Richard Feynman.) Dried pear slices are irresistibly delicious. I fill a half gallon mason jar with them every week, and every week it manages to empty itself just as the next batch is ready.

That half gallon mason jar, by the way, is housed in a beautifully repainted kitchen. The kitchen used to be an atrocious lime green-- countertops, cabinet faces, and wallpaper-- paired with very dark wood paneling. We kept a bit of the dark wood, but mostly the kitchen is now cream and blue, with a stencil for fun. It's lovely. I'll take pictures some day when it's clean.

Oh, and I started aerial class. It's awesome. I am going to be so strong eventually. For now, I'm going to grunt and sweat and whimper. But at least I'm on a trapeze while I'm doing it.