Hooray for sporadic rain in the Willamette Valley in April! The rest of the veggie garden's seeds are in (until July or so), and the ground is prepped for the few plants I'll be getting this Friday (it is so awesome, working for a college that has a Horticulture club! Heirloom tomatoes, here I come!)

I'm already developing hopes for the fall -- primarily, that half barrels go on sale decently again (they didn't around here last October) and I can finally complete the square footage I want for these veggies. Having some room to experiment next year without sacrificing space for the stand-bys would be really nice. Three barrels for zucchini and three barrels for tomatoes should be sufficient for our grilling and storage needs this year. I'm so certain I'll meet the goal of not buying salad greens after the first lettuce harvest that I'm setting a zucchini goal, too: no buying zucchini this summer, plus 6 cups of shredded into the freezer for breads during the winter.

I'm trying a new-to-me pumpkin this year, 'winter luxury'. It's billed as the most amazing pumpkin for pie you'll ever find, so I have high hopes. The gourd itself looks pretty unassuming, so I'll be sure to get some jack-o-lantern pumpkins in there, too. (the neighborhood children do have expectations, after all.)

This is not the year for me to branch out to the near-by community garden, though I did consider it. A proper corn/pumpkin/beans patch is somewhere in my future, and it's not at this house. (my soil and my sun are in two different locations.) But if I can get the front yard productive and headed in the right direction (and divested of about 7/8 of the bluebells) that'll make room in the orchard for a proper asparagus patch: an item sorely lacking so far among my perennial foodstuffs.

This lack has brought me to the point of harvesting some fennel shoots to see what they taste like, but not quite all the way to cooking them up. I figure I have only a month or so left to try that this year without hacking down a fennel plant and making it start over. Which might not be a bad plan, in and of itself. My fennel succeed raucously both in the front and in the back yard.

Roses are in bud, irises are in bloom and bluebells are beginning to taper off. What a great time!