I got lots of little things done, didn't have enough energy to tackle the big things.

Plantings:

• Three rows of corn
• About a dozen potatoes
• Five ollas (plus threein the trenches between the potatoes, that are still "above" ground).
• Six replacement lettuce (the original didn't come up)
• transplanted two zuchini and a melon
• Two dozen sunflowers (in pots)
• The remaining zinnia from a packet (not sure how many)... only half a dozen packets to go (they were free with the paint we got for the house for some unknown reason)
• A dozen flowering sweet pea (ornamental, not edible)
• Ten parsnips (in toilet roll tubes).
• Half a dozen replacement onions (the originals didn't survive my random watering due to the day job).

Also chopped down more thistles, weeded the corn bed before digging in the manure and planting, Hopefully it's not too late for planting.

And pictures! Here's the "assorted things" beds outside the kitchen last weekend. Clockwise from the front left, we have a turnip which started to gorw a bit too much to eat happily flowering, the enthusiastic garlic is behind that, down the right side we have the struggling peas - none of them seem to be doing well this year, in front of them we have turnips from seed and coming back to the left we have spinich under the oh-so-decorative bottomless plastic juice bottles (which function remarkably well as mini-greenhouses and bug/slug/rabbit prevention).

Next we have before and after pictures of the corn bed. At least I know the manure mix is fertile with all the weeds that sprouted. The little markers are exactly where the corn seeds are, so I can try not to accidentally pull them up when weeding.

Finally we have the potato trenches with the ollas, the third trench is half buried because I forgot that I'd gradually added soil as I mounded the potatoes up last year so when I redug the trenches I didn't actually have enough room. Fortunately as I planted the potatoes the initial mounds were enough to free up room in the third trench.

I'm a week late starting, but that's better than the month or more late I was last year. As we're forcast for a foot of snow today, that doesn't seem too bad. We're technically zone 7 here, unlike the rest of Pennsylvania, which is zone 6 - at least until the climate shifts are taken into account, and then it's anyone's guess.

"Last frost" is supposedly mid-April, which matches last year, which is all I have to go on in personal experience here. That puts me a month earlier than I thought last year (which means I was even later in practice).

So the first round of things listed as "6-8 weeks before last frost" are in little pots in the back room. I'm trying to stage things somewhat this year, so we don't get everything maturing at once. We'll see how that works out.

So today's plantings are:

Flowers

1. forget-me-nots (for the SO, to fill out the bed by the front door which is mostly bare). There's supposedly 100 seeds in the packet, but they are so small, there's no way to seperate them, so I've no idea how many we'll get.
2. Two black-eyed susan vines
3. Six lupine. Last year they didn't do very well, but I planted them directly as it was late. Hopefully they'll do better for being planted indoors first and having better soil, at least for the first few weeks of life.

Vegetables

1. Yellow Onion (x4)
2. Red Onion (x4)
3. Brocolli (x2). Last year the brocolli didn't do well. They were planted too late and bolted before they developed heads of any size. This year they'll go out earlier and have a layer of compost to go on the bed.