Early crop second planting

Hedgehog (my six-year-old daughter) helped in the garden on Sunday, and we both learned a few things. One of my lessons for the day was "do your research". In my zeal to find exotic salad greens I had picked up a packet of "mesclun" seeds. Boy did I feel dumb when I dumped the packet into a bowl and found six different kinds of seeds all mixed together. It turns out that "mesclun" is a fancy name for the meatloaf of the gardening set. Still, I am determined to get my dollar's worth, so we planted a row anyway.

In addition to the whatchagot salad greens we planted five cabbages and three short rows of a heat-tolerant variety of spinach. Later in the season we will plant more of each, but that's enough for now.

Hedgehog also got a chance to plant seedling starters.

I pulled out the spice jars so she could smell each herb as she planted oregano, rosemary, dill, sage, Italian parsley, lavender, and three varieties of basil. We are also trying to grow lemons, grapefruit and kumquats. Collective wisdom is that citrus trees are best done through some kind of grafting process, but we'll give it a try anyway. I just cannot get behind growing one tree just to lop its top off and replace it with the top of another tree -- sounds like something from a horror movie.