That's exciting. I am hoping to plant both peas and potatoes this week! And asparagus! This morning, it looked like today would be a washout, but it was pleasant this afternoon. I was able to get the new beds ready to add dirt and compost tomorrow. And dig a hole for the redbud tree. It's just a twig really. Apparently, you donate blood, you get a redbud tree currently. My husband brought one home on Friday. I have very little experience with planting trees. I hope I don't kill it.

Redbud trees are tough. I have transplanted several over the years. They have all made it.

I'm glad planting time has arrived for y'all. Planting time is my favorite part of the gardening year, followed closely by harvest time. I planted potatoes immediately after planting onions in mid-February, and then planted peas within a few days of that. We were so warm that it seemed a shame not to take advantage of the early warmth.

The onions and potatoes are doing great. They both really kicked their growth into high gear as soon as the rain started falling last week. The onions are lovely, green and growing like mad and the potatoes, which I planted about 8" down in the soil are popping up out of the ground now.

The peas were not happy from day one. We were too hot and too windy almost every day, they didn't like it and they seemed to just sit there at a couple of inches tall and sulk in the heat (which often was in the upper 70s and lower 80s). After a cool, rainy, cloudy, misty, foggy week with significantly lower temperatures, the peas are looking a great deal happier now and are about 6" tall. They really needed a break from the heat and the dry wind, and I'm glad they got it.

Because I planted early after we warmed up early, we are getting a good early harvest of lettuce, strawberries, green onions and asparagus. The asparagus always gets overly excited when we have hot winter weather and pops up out of the ground much too early, so we've been harvesting a few spears here and there, but now I have to harvest daily, and sometimes twice daily as so many spears are shooting up out of the ground and growing so quickly. The lettuce is growing so fast that we're having a hard time keeping up with it. I likely will feed some lettuce to the chickens today just to give them a treat and to enable me to cut more lettuce than I know we'll eat today. While I hated being stuck indoors last week when it was cool and raining, the garden really responded well to that weather.

Now I'm keeping an eye on the coming cold nights we'll see late this week. Those cold nights probably will keep me from putting any more warm-season plants in the ground because the more that I plant early, the more I have to cover up on late cold nights. I do have a handful of tomato and pepper plants in the ground and some warm-season herbs and flowers. It is going to take a lot of will power today (our forecast high is 84 degrees) to not plant more warm season stuff. I'm going to try to focus on weeding out all the weeds that sprouted during the rain.

We didn't see many bees last week when it was cool and rainy, but they were out in the sunshine in droves yesterday.

Redbuds are easy and are pretty tough. New ones pop up like weeds in our yard and pastures. They're pretty while in bloom, but not so spectacular for the rest of the year so I leave them on the edges of the woodland where we enjoy them while they're blooming and don't pay much attention to them the rest of the year.

Dawn

So far, this has been a great spring for onions. I planted mine two weeks ago and they look wonderful. My transplanted green onions have grown like weeds the last 3 weeks as well. I agree with Dawn though, the cooler weather at the end of the week is keeping me from putting my peppers and onions out in my hoop houses just yet. I think I will take them out to acclimate for the next few days, then take them in this weekend. Or maybe I could just throw a blanket over them.

I started my peas in TP tubes 2/24 and set them out 3/4. They are slower growing than they should be. Potatoes went in 3/6. No signs of sprouts yet. I started things like tatsoi that has not been happy and is bolting from a tiny plant. Onion transplants went in 2/19. They are doing well, but a freeze could make them bolt. I put spinach seedlings in the ground today. I have some chard and kale to do tomorrow. The asparagus is up, which complicates my plans since it was supposed to be moved to a permanent bed and now will have to wait till fall. Some of the sprouts are as big around as my finger, year old plants! Best of all, I have tomato sprouts.

OSUengineer, Those cold nights in the forecast are totally bumming me out. I have to be really careful not to get ahead of myself because our days are so hot---today we hit 86 degrees---and, yet, the nights are not necessarily warm enough. The peas, by the way, were not impressed with having their cool, rainy weather replaced by blazing hot weather.

At our house, the low temperatures the last few weeks often dip down at least 3 degrees lower than forecast, so if my forecast says 36 degrees, I have to assume 33 degrees and frost and will cover up the warm-season plants accordingly. Without those cold nights forecast for the weekend, I'd likely be outside planting corn, beans and cucumbers tomorrow. Instead, I guess I'll be weeding the flower bed at the SE corner of the garden. There should be poppies and larkspur in there, but I'm going to have to pull a lot of weeds to uncover them.

Amy, If it is any consolation, any time I think I have things all figured out and on track, the weather throws it all off. It never fails that if I intend to dig and move soil, widen a path or build a new raised bed, rain falls in copious amounts to delay that plan to another year.

Some of the asparagus is ridiculously big around....as big as my thumb, but my bed is old, not new like yours, so that is not unexpected. My plants must be reacting to last year's rain because they are growing so much faster than other years, and we have had other early heat waves but still didn't get so much asparagus up so big so fast. It is crazy.

Usually it takes several days (maybe a week) of cold weather to make onions bolt after they are large enough, so if you just get some hit-and-run cold weather for a night or two, that shouldn't make them bolt.

I intend to have my warm-season plants covered up well enough that they won't even know we are having a cold night.

Our soil is warm enough that I could do anything I want as long as I am willing to cover things up on the occasional cold night. However, I always try not to get too far ahead of myself until after the traditional Easter freeze. At least Easter is early this year. Okra and southern pea volunteers popped up right and left all weekend, and more popped up today, as did some pepper and moss rose volunteers. Oh, and four o'clocks. And daturas. And, and, and.....oh, zinnias. See a pattern there? All my warmest weather-loving volunteers are up already. Apparently no one told them the night-time temperatures are going to plunge back down into the 30s in a few days. This early heat is reminding me of 2012, and I had a fabulous garden in 2012, so I'm taking all of this to be a good sign.

Dawn

I am so tired! Okay, so other than purchasing a freezer and moving it home, we also purchased soil for 4 beds. It sounds easy enough, right? Until you start shoveling it into the beds.

I'm all paranoid and scared of the asparagus beds. All the planting instructions have you scared to death. "Make sure there are no roots or weeds/grass left in the bed or your asparagus bed is doomed forever"--okay, maybe it didn't say that exactly, but it's how I take it. I KNOW there's probably a root or something in there that isn't supposed to be.

So...I have two asparagus beds. They are 12 inches tall and 4 ft x 8 ft. How many plants would you put into these beds? I have purchased 20--is that too many?--it would be 10 per/bed.

I also have a future cucumber bed ready and the TALL potato bed ready. Just need to plant that one. Unfortunately the pea one isn't ready yet.

BUT my pea seedlings did well today outside. I put the pea, parsley, lettuce, marigold, and nasturtium seedlings out all day. The poor nasturtiums really really need to be put in the ground. I already put them in larger pots--they really grow quickly. Would they do okay sharing a cucumber bed? Like, if I planted them around the edges before the cucumbers, as it's not time yet for cucumbers.

Oh, I also put that black weed blocking cloth down in the pathways between beds--then I put down ceramic tiles. Has anyone used ceramic tiles in the garden? Our church foyer is being remodeled and they were throwing all of this very outdated tile away. I'm not using it in a big way--just in between the 4' x 8' beds--just as a walk way really. I though it would help keep the weeds down.

Okay. One other thing. I was horrified today to find a very short lawn growing in my garden. There is one part of my garden that has 1000s of tiny little blades coming up. These particular things didn't sprout last year and they seem to be congregated around a weed/grass plant that died over the winter. Could it be THIS dead plant that seeded there? I don't know what it is. But there are several of these dead plants in the southeast section of my garden--they all have the tiny blades around them.

Here's what happened. In the fall of 2014 we tilled up a large spot to plant in the spring of 15. We were planning on making raised beds on this tilled up area. However, the grass and weeds started sprouting and I just was able to pull out the weeds/grass in the small amount of the garden we actually was able to plant...and I just left the other areas alone (lack of time). So, a few weeds/grass grew and it died over the winter and is just there dead now. BUT all of these little blades of grass are surrounding them. I would have to use tweezers and burn many hours trying to pull them all up.

Last year was hard in starting new beds. The weather was crazy and wet. Maybe it was too wet for these little "blades"...or maybe they do not sprout every year??? I don't know. But--(this is crazy!)--I just opted to cut the soil out and throw it away. I hate to waste a 1/2 inch or soil, but the roots on these blades are very short, so I just scalped the soil--blades and all.

Did that make any sense?? haha.