Leaving my new garden for a few days at the beginning of the planting season made me nervous. For weeks, I’d planned and prepared. I was ready–at least the garden was. Now it was time to hand over the garden. I did a final tour of the land before we left.

Note: The video version of this post gets released on Wednesday, June 5.

It’s so warm. A friend did me a huge favor and trimmed the entire garden for me. I want to give you a little tour of what everything looks like because nothing much is going to change before we leave for the trip and I’m just going to check on things, maybe mulch a little here or there but mostly this is what it’s going to be. And then we’re gonna deal with it, so let me show you what everything looks like.

Leaving my new garden for a few days at the beginning of the planting season made me nervous. For weeks, I’d planned and prepared. I was ready–at least the garden was.

This part of the garden is still an overgrown mess, but I still really, really, really like the look of it.

I mean, the trees are beautiful. And have a look over here. Yes, look at it. Fruit. There will be strawberries.

And also… There will most definitely be currant.

The rhubarb is growing in so well. In some places, those flowers are coming back, but I’ll just keep on top of those until the rhubarb wins.

Like I’ve said, in here I have cleaned up a lot. The trimmer still needs some attention, and there are some tools that still need to be moved places. But look at this. There’s so much more room now.

Yeah, I know. I’ve added a start of a fence to the rain barrel of doom.

All trimmed. Look at it. All trimmed.

The last days before we left were stormy. Not a single chance to get a view from above for you. We’d catch up on aerial footage after our return.

Look at it. There is beautiful comfrey already here. Dandelion, you don’t belong here. What’s really cool is that you can actually eat this. I like things that you can eat.

It’s getting really, really windy so I’m probably going to have to voice over this, but I still want to show you what I planted yesterday.

We have some lemon balm here that I planted a couple of days ago. Then one of the tomatoes I planted yesterday that should be a Tarasenko. There’s some labels somewhere.

Nope, actually it is a Bloody Butcher.

What I’ve actually been doing here is I’ve been weeding into these planters and then whenever I get here the next time, whatever I did the time before has fully dried. I can keep filling these planters and at some point there will be soil in the planters. For now they’re just here to mark the outline because my friend isn’t fully done trimming and I don’t want him to accidentally kill the strawberries.

But it looks so different. There’s so much done. I am so excited to see what this looks like when I get back.

My neighbors and I had harvested almost all of last year’s carrots before they rot. Looks like Pepper found some more. He learned this last year after watching the previous owner pull carrots for him here.

I think I planted about a hundred peas in these beds, mostly just to see what would happen .And so far I’ve found one pea plant, but that’s totally fine.

There will be beds where peas are the priority. This was just to add some green. Oh no, there’s some, there’s a few. There’s a few in between. Look at that.

Garden neighbors had left more grass trimmings, so I decided to mulch the first potato beds. A thin layer of grass for the first few beds was all I currently had. We’ll get more mulch once we are back.

I needed some soil, so I worked on the path a bit. I flattened the incline while getting some soil for where I needed it in the garden.

I’d started this bed before winter but never finished it. It won’t be done today but at least it won’t be lost in grass.

Whenever there was time to spare, I continued freeing up more strawberries in the regrown bed. Without thinking of rain, I kept adding the weeds to the planters for drying out.

Most of what grew around the strawberries was easy to pull. I could even do some with my right hand. I still made sure to favor the hand and give it plenty of rest. I’ll have sore muscles in my left hand for days.

Pepper gave the seedlings a final check–and didn’t even sit on any this time. Mixed mulch makes the plants harder to see. I’m surprised he sees them at all.

I added a tiny nasturtium plant to the front of the strawberry bed and used the dried weeds as mulch. I hope you’ll like it here, little strawberries.

The rescued raspberries were not looking good at all. But I had hopes for their roots and regrowth.

A few seedlings would stay in their trays in the care of my neighbors. I didn’t have bed space and they were tiny. The melons will stay inside.

I watered them all well to see how much water they’d lose over two days, then called it a day.

The day before we left, I refreshed my kombucha a final time. I gave the sourdough a final feeding and placed it in the fridge to rest there for the week.

The day we left, the mosquitoes arrived in the garden. I was almost happy to flee.

So long, and thanks for being here.