Our soil is clay and sand courtesy of the Dungeness river over eons of flooding. It gets pretty hard and packed, so before we try to roto till, we use a shovel to break it into chunks.















Next, Tom uses our little red tiller to break up the soil to a depth of about 8 inches.

















Finally we spread 3"-4" of "Sequim Gold" (pure cow manure from the Smith Dairy) on the rows and roto till again. Lots of work, but it makes for easy planting and strong healthy plants. It took 3 of us about 4 hours to prep 700 row feet of soil. Tomorrow we will begin to plant out in earnest, for though it's not our 'guaranteed' last frost date yet, warmer weather is predicted for the next 5 days and our seedlings are busting out of their pots in the greenhouse.

We are trying to keep the alstromeria blooms off the walkways this year using orange plastic mesh...we'll see, it looks squished to me!















The German statice is well up and thanks to our intern Marie, it's well weeded too!









It's time to tie up the peonies, we'll just have to make our days longer to get it all done!

u-cut garden prep annual plants

We have lots of volunteer larkspur which will make a nice first crop - of course they will be variable colors, but that will be nice.















Here come the sweet peas, it's been a cold and therefore late spring, so the seedlings are short for May 4th






















The delphinium and valerian are almost 18" tall though and should be ready for cutting by early June.