One of the hardest things, I think, about gardening is planning what you want to grow, where you want to grow it and how much of each thing you want to grow.

As we move into our growing season here, there isn’t much time left to make these final decisions and often I find it left up to me to do the fun work of calculating how many plants of each variety we’re going to (attempt to) grow while the hubs is really good at working on the where to plant it thing.

Sometimes, despite our careful planning, things just happen. Like these surprise potatoes that grew in the compost we bought from our local nursery last year.

We’re trying to keep our gardening all in one general area, mostly in front of and behind the poultry pens. This year we may even plant inside the pen we’ve used for ducks the last few years (where the quail are now) just to have a nice, covered area for the chickens to forage in when the growing season is over.

It’s definitely a good place to try and grow my black and white pumpkins!

This morning I was thinking about lettuce, though, and trying to decide what to do about that particular crop. We don’t need a whole lot of it, but we do love to grow it and eat it all summer, and it did really well in the long, skinny beds on the right side of the chicken coop last year.

Those beds are going to be full of flowers this year, though, so I was thinking of planting my lettuce over next to the asparagus this time, which just happens to be right in front of the pen where we keep Fred and his girls on one side and the pheasant on the other side.

Of course then I have to worry about sharing some of it with the birds, who can stretch out their necks quite a ways into those beds if they try. Unless, of course, we put up some wire with smaller holes in it to stop that from happening.

I also read that they don’t like onions and garlic, so I’ll probably plant a row of each on the back side, behind the lettuce, to help protect it from them and also from the bugs who want to snack on my leafy greens. It worked really well last year to plant the onions in with the lettuce and carrots and tomatoes for that purpose so this year I’ll do the same but throw some garlic in there, too.

Both of the beds near the asparagus are just about ready to plant now…

But it will still be a few weeks until we can do that since we live in Siberia and our last frost isn’t until the end of May. 😣

No hurries, though. There will be plenty of time for gardening.

In the meantime, I think I’ll enjoy the lazy dog days of early spring for a little while longer…