The Ornamental Vegetable Garden: Spring has finally arrived

In my last post, I was crowing about the Darwin tulips that recovered after the big freeze. Sadly, they were beaten nearly to death a few days later by a hail storm.

That's a quarter on the ground to show the size of the hailstones. The force with which they came down is evidenced in this picture of bare garden ground...

Luckily, due to the delayed warm weather, I hadn't gotten any tender seedlings in the ground. Until today, they were all either in the cellar in my growth chamber:

Or outdoors in my makeshift cold frame which I placed a hard cover over during the hail storm...

A few days ago I planted a long row of peas, and today I planted some seedling flowers, as well as seedling kohlrabi and wasabi.

The straw paths are not nearly as pretty as mulch paths, but they also don't wash away during hard rains or dribble out into the planting areas like the mulch does. And if it does get into the planting areas, it only serves to add organic matter that doesn't interfere with planting.

Little by little I've been hoeing out weeds and turning the soil, which is rich and lovely after 10 years of gardening.

My son and daughter-in-law gave me this great gift for Christmas, and today was the first day I used it. I had looked at these before and thought it might be a pain to move them around, so I've always just used knee pads. This is not at all a pain to move around, and it makes getting up off my knees a snap by offering leverage. Also, knee pads always slip around and soon start irritating from crunching the straps in the folds of the backs of my knees. The ends of this gadget fold down to make it easy to store, and it can turn over and be a bench, as well. It's going on my favorite tools page (link in the menu at the top).