Oh the wonders of spring

So yesterday I planted my garden, with the help of my mother.  And as it turns out, I was a real trend-setter.  I planted in the morning, and Grandma and Josiah's mom started planting in the afternoon.

This will be my third year to have a garden, but this year it is in a new location for me.  And hopefully I will be able to keep up with it better than I have the past 2 years.

I planted beans of various sorts (lima, green, roma, yellow), sugar snap peas, onions, cucumbers, watermelon, cantelope, zucchini, tomotoes, peppers, and an eggplant.

First we put newspaper down to help prevent weeds from growing along the rows.  (I'll be very happy if this works because one of the reasons my garden hasn't done well in the past is that it was overrun with weeds)

Then we planted the seeds and plants, after making a shallow trough in the ground, putting the dirt on one edge of the newspaper to temporarily hold it in place.

Pea seeds

Onion

Pepper plant

Eggplant plant

Tomato plant

After covering up the seeds and the plants' roots, we put more newspaper on the other side of the row and put dry grass clippings on top of the newspaper to be an additional guard against weeds.

We also put newspaper and grass clippings around the mounds for the cucumbers.  But then I ran out of grass and had to use composted manure around the watermelon and cantelope mounds. 

So I am excited to see how well everything will work.  I am also writing about my garden on my blog so that I am more motivated to not let it go to waste.  Kind of like my blog is supposed to keep me accountable.

And then this morning I cut some rhubarb and made rhubarb sauce, which is really good to eat with yogurt.  Then I started to mow because our lawn was getting long and it is supposed to rain here for the next 8 or so days.  And while I was mowing, I was sneezing.  And then my one eye got really itchy and of course I had to keep rubbing it, until I couldn't stand it any longer.  I stopped mowing and came inside to see if I could find out if anything was in my eye.  And this is what it looked like.

What a lovely picture, can you guess which eye is swollen?

It looked a little worse than this before it got better.  It just looks sort of like I got in a fight with spring, and I didn't come out on top.

The swelling has almost all gone away now and I am off to do more work.  (Hopefully not any work with grass or hay, they both make me sneeze like crazy!)