This Easter Sunday we got a start on the vegetable garden. We turned over some of the beds and planted peas, sage, dill, kohlrabi, pac choi, Swiss chard, parsnips, carrots, beets, and different greens. The chickens passed through from time to time, eager to dig around our nicely turned earth looking for worms, so we kept shooing them away.

We covered all the beds with Agribon, protecting them from foraging chickens, giving them added warmth in this changeable weather, and hopefully curtailing some of the pests that plague us each year, like cabbage worm (which decimates the pac choi and cabbage).

We’ve so much to do this spring, pruning fruit trees, weeding the asparagus and rhubarb, preparing the remaining beds…the list seems nearly endless. But getting seeds in the ground is such an accomplishment, we can’t help but feel encouraged. Other seedlings grow upstairs, on a heat mat and under fluorescent lights, and more will be planted over the next month. Summer gardening has begun.