Update

Today was a day that begged for outdoor time, but it also rained 2 inches last night. So rather than finishing preparations on the cover crop area which would involve lifting heavy shovelfuls of soil, I focused on surface chores. This garden has a major weed seed problem, so even though landscaping cloth does all kinds of bad things to soil, I've decided to use it this year. It's only practical to put it down under crops that need a lot of space, so today I installed strips of cloth where I plan to plant tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos.

Even though we are still a couple weeks away from our 90% chance of last frost, I went ahead and put the tomatoes and tomatillo plants in. The starts I had been keeping in the house were starting to get really weak looking. They all have one or two true leaves, but they were starting to yellow, and a month of solid grey days left them pretty leggy. I know it's colder than they like, but the landscape cloth should help warm the soil, and we'll protect them if we get frosty temperatures.

Also, and this brings up a bit of a controversial subject, I used miracle grow on them. Up until this year, I was pretty much anti-synthetic anything. Very strictly organic. But over the years I've learned to get a little pickier about my convictions. There are very good reasons to be strictly organic, and I am striving to be so, but I also want a very productive garden this year. I'm putting my all into composting, and I know that in a few years this soil will be really great. For this year, we tried to find a cost-effective and logistically feasible way to import some compost or manure, but failed. Insecticides and herbicides won't touch this garden, but N, P, and K, from both organic and synthetic sources will help give it a jump-start. 

Yesterday I scored a huge load of grass clippings from a neighbor. Those went on the strawberry patch. I hope they don't give me a major slug problem. I've used grass clippings in this way before and had GREAT results. Great weed control, great soil moisture retention, good nitrogen source. We'll see how the berries like it.

And just for documentation's sake, here's the greens garden. The garlic is still the most exciting thing here. The peas are about an inch high, but I had really bad germination on a couple older seed packets. I'll try to infill. The spinach, lettuce, and chinese greens are up, but barely. I hope it's just the cold, grey days we've had. There are a couple kale plants that sprung up from stray roots.