Well, it's been about a week since we planted the forty Beefsteak tomato seeds. The seeds were three years old, so I started them a bit early and planted all of them because I figured they were at the end of their best before date.

Well, so far so good!

Twenty-four of the forty have already popped up, so we are good, even if that's all we get. Provided I don't kill them before harvest. We almost lost a bunch last year, but we were away for a month. We're only leaving for ten days this summer, so the mortality rate is looking even better. I am going to plant some onions and peppers too, so we can preserve a bunch of spaghetti sauce and salsa using all homegrown ingredients. This is going to be our first year of not having to buy cases of tomatoes for canning (hopefully).

Speaking of asparagus, one of the three crowns has shot up a fourth spear.

This excites me. What I find really cool is that you can notice each new spear being larger than the last. I'm contemplating keeping them in containers this year so I can bring them in under lights for the winter. They say not to harvest it until the third year, but if I keep them growing the whole time, it should be good by the second year.

Does anyone have any experience with this? It can't hurt to try, can it?

Oh yeah!

I wanted to ask some advice on raised beds.

We have access to all kinds of free river rock and I was thinking of making some rock wall raised beds, but then wondered if it's too much weight or if there were any other concerns before starting that project.

Also, we are taking down some garbage poplar trees this summer, so we thought maybe throwing a bunch of the logs and brush in the beds as sort of a hugelkultur raised bed would be a good idea, but we've never tried it, so figured we'd ask here to see if there were any ideas.

Anyhow, the snow is melting pretty fast and the excitement is ramping up. There's a couple of pails full of deer poop in the yard, so I'll be making a new worm bin to see how that works, and the deer have been keeping the front compost bin just low enough that we always have a bit of room for more.

We hope your spring is springing,

Chris and Gerri