Welcome back. Glad you survived another year of the greenhouse crazy season. I hope the small ones survived.

We didn't get a toad strangler here. I guess what we got was an ant strangler, but at least rain fell.

In this part of the country, it seems like rain falls in only too amounts---either not enough or too much.

I checked my garden this morning and everything seemed happy. I wish I had put a light mulch around the last tomatoes I planted to keep the soil from splashing up on the plants.

Larry, I thought maybe by now your plants were swimming. I'm glad they look happy. Maybe since it is so early in the season, the soil splash didn't carry any disease microorganisms up onto the leaves.

I tried to mulch each row of tomatoes as soon as they were planted, but with so little rain there's not many grass clippings to use as mulch, so some of the plants have just a small layer of mulch at this point. I was hoping for lots of rain so the grass would grow and give me a lot more mulch. It didn't happen.

Dawn

I put down cardboard last year and then hay. I really liked the way that worked. Barely got them in before the rain.... in the dark...by flashlight...with the cats under my straight line!
So there was definitely no time for mulch or cardboard. Maybe soon.

Tim did a lot of mowing of the back pasture Sunday afternoon, so I was able to add more mulch to every row of tomato plants in the veggie garden---from the first plants that went into the ground in late March to the ones that were planted in mid-April. They all now have at least a couple of inches of grass clipping mulch, and hopefully I'll be adding another layer of mulch next week. The recent rain that has fallen the last couple of weeks is making the grass grow again, which gives me more mulch, so hurray for the rain.

I don't usually put cardboard in the tomato beds because I have lots of companion plants (herbs and flowers to attract beneficial insects) interplanted with them, which is hard to do with lots of cardboard in place. I do use cardboard in pathways and in areas with larger plants more widely spaced like winter squash or okra.