rsc

To continue the theme from this post of

jwg's, we dashed up to Gloucester yesterday to get ahead of the two (or more) days of rain forecast, and put the first crop of lettuce seeds in. One of the dangers of ordering from multiple catalogues is that while looking through each one I think "Oh, that looks interesting!" and order it without much reference to what I've ordered elsewhere. The result this year is that I ordered 10 different varieties of lettuce.¹ (From memory, since the seed packets are now elsewhere: Cimarron (bronze romaine), verte de mar, red deer's tongue, oak leaf, red oak leaf, buttercrunch, speckled troutback (another romaine), red fire, and two others.) In addition, one of the seed companies sent a "bonus" packet of a mix of five different lettuces (but the packet doesn't say what they are), which I decided to ignore. So, assuming they all work, we'll get to find out if it's actually possible to taste the difference among 10 different kinds of lettuce (I'm betting it won't be).

We continued our assault on the thicket of blackberries, etc., and made pretty good headway, although I worry about how many "killer vine" roots we've probably left behind. There's at least one more session's worth of work there, plus figuring out how to dispose of the cuttings, plus deciding what to plant there -- it probably gets more sun than many of our official flower beds. (It also contains a lot of day lilies that have somehow managed to survive under all that crap.)

We still haven't dealt with getting the hemlocks sprayed. The peas, unsurprisingly, haven't come up yet.

We need to get the water turned on in a day or two, and on our next trip it'll be time to take the mulch off the strawberries and other perennials, and probably plant beets and more peas.

¹At least this year I didn't order the same thing from two different catalogues, as I did last year with the "Purple Gleam" California poppies. (Instead I ordered some excessive number of different varieties of poppies.)