Garden in Spring

I just went out and took a few pictures of my garden and you can see the 4 raised beds to the left that I cleaned up/out yesterday well you can see 3 out of 4 anyway. Here are the 4 all cleaned up...

We used rolled roofing between the beds to keep the weeds from becoming a problem. We need some more to put down between the beds we added last year but it's not a financial priority so I will just have to keep after the weeds better by hand. The green you see in the beds toward the top of the photo are of Scott's garlic. Most of it is hard neck garlic and thats what we really like to use the most as the flavor is SO MUCH better than the soft necked garlic you get at the grocery store. Scott has found a couple sites that sell gourmet hard neck garlic and we plan to order some for next year.  Here is a close-up of some of the hard neck garlic...

I still have a lot of work to do out there but it will have to wait until Friday when I am off from work again. Scott and I are trying to decided where to plant some tomatoes where they would get a bit of shade as our garden gets FULL sun constantly and our harvests haven't been too great the past couple of years. I've even toyed with the idea of putting a frame over every other row with lattice across the top to create some dappled shade for our poor plants. And I need to amend the beds with more organic matter or clay so that they will hold water a little better.  It's all a work in progress and I love the smell of the earth when it's fertile ... most of my raised beds don't have that REAL Earthy smell yet.... COMPOST! I've got to find more organic matter that comes from yards that aren't chemical happy.... no fertilizers, bug killers, weed killers and the like. People don't understand that all those chemicals kill beneficial plants and bugs too. We will never control Nature; we must learn to PARTNER with her.