Mistress Talia: a sadistic domme

In early March, I began more seeds... a whole bunch of different types of cabbages.

Bok choy, napa cabbage, an early cabbage and a savoy cabbage. All the varieities I plant are open-pollinated and many are heirlooms. This year, I went with Pac Choi and Michili for the oriental cabbages and Danish Ballhead and Drumhead for the ordinary cabbages.

I also started to work on the strawberry bed. My first year growing strawberries, I had an invasion of birds who got most of them. Last year, I put in netting, but it just got to be a mess, making working in the garden near impossible.

So this year, I took a bunch of 12 inch chunks of 2x2, swiped off the end with an ax so there'd be a point, then hammered them into the ground, all around the ten by ten area that is my strawberry bed. I draped the netting over my stakes, stapling it down on one side, then just throwing a couple big rocks on the other end. This keeps the whole bed covered, but by lifting the rocks, I can easily fold the netting back to work in the bed,

Of course, after doing all that, I was too tired to hoe and weed the bed, so that still remains to be done.

I also need to get to the other garden to do an experiment. My smaller garden consists of 8 raised beds, each 4 by 4 foot, where I do Square Foot Gardening (SFG). When I built the beds, I put down piles of cardboard under them to kill off the sod, then piled soil and compsot in them. I also tilled the area between the squares and threw down straw. In spite of all this, I have grass growing as a weed in my squares, coming up from underneath, and it's a bitch to get the roots out. So my idea for an experiment is this... till the area between the squares and plant clover. I'm thinking the clover will act as a mulch, and hopefully keep the grass at bay, Plus it fixes nitrogen, so it will help the fertility.

I'm also thinking to actually plant one of the squares with clover, and then transplant plants directly into it. I'm unsure if this will work or not, but I figure it;s worth a shot. If it does work, it will save a lot of work weeding.

But the real point of this post is... I am writing it instead of either cleaning up the strawberry bed or tilling the SFG. After setting up the netting, I'm too tired to do much more than talk about gardening at this point.