I finished all my coursework at 5 p.m. on Saturday, 6 days ahead of the end-of-semester deadline. I can take the final exam any time after Tuesday, but I think I will hold off until the end of May. This week, my FIL comes for a visit, next week I head to Iowa to teach for the Des Moines guild, and the week after that I have to head over and pick DD#1 up from college. I am supposed to allot 48 hours for the final, and there simply isn't a consecutive free 48 hours in my schedule until the end of the month. Oh well, more time to study.

My wonderful husband spent two days last week fencing the big garden at the other house, and now it looks like this:

Yesterday I planted beets, lettuce, and spinach and moved the rhubarb over the from the other garden. The husband dug a trench and we put in 20 crowns of asparagus. He also wanted potatoes, so he put in a row of Yukon Golds and a row of russets. I've got some six-packs of broccoli, cauliflower, onions, and (yay!) Brussels sprouts hardening off on the back porch. Those will go in today. The peas and beans have to be soaked overnight and rolled in inoculant and then they'll go in. DD#2 (who likes to garden) planted a row of sunflowers before heading off to paint rocks with the names of everything I planted so I will have nice row markers.

I'm starting to think of this as the "my eyes are bigger than my stomach" garden because we're planting so much, but I've never had the luxury of this big a garden and I want to take advantage of it. And I don't know what will do well and what won't, so I want to try everything. There are still a few things yet to be done:

Move some strawberries over from the old garden
Plant tomatoes (I have WaterWalls for them)
Plant zucchini (I have WaterWalls for them, too)
Get some raspberry starts from my friend Susan and put those in

The only bad thing about this garden is the rocks. The soil is actually pretty decent, but we're on glacial till and there are some fairly large patches of rocks in the garden. And of course, once you remove the first layer of rocks, there is a second layer just below. They're smallish rocks, ranging between 1 and 3" with a few 4" ones thrown in for good measure. I'd almost rather just have big rocks.

You can tell I've been spoiled by 15 years of gardening in raised beds.

The husband also made me some nice steel ribs over the old garden so I can put row covers over them. I am leaving a bed of strawberries and a bed of asparagus in the old garden, but I think I'm going to use the rest of the beds as "nursery beds" for stuff that will get transplanted later. I was weeding my lavender bed last night and there were 20 or 30 baby lavender plants in there. I hate to just pull them out, so I am going to move them over to one of the nursery beds and let them get bigger.

I am so glad winter is over. It's been too long.