Happy May Day! We sent our oldest to preschool this morning with a bouquet of backyard flowers to decorate the May Pole. The teachers were busy attaching streamers to the pole and it brought me back to fond memories of my own preschool May Days. After dancing around the may pole, we’d fill a basket with flowers and excitedly run across the street to leave on the neighbors front porch, ring the bell, then quickly dash away giggling. As Julie and I discussed the other day, its a lost holiday these days. Its too bad, what a nice uncommercial cheerful day to celebrate.

On the left side of the garden, to wrap up our tour, I thought we’d start at the back. In our back bed we keep an odd assortment of herbs, garlic and chard. These chive flowers are fairytale like this time of year. I keep expecting a Peter Cottontail to come along and nibble on these.

And the garlic? It looks like long graceful limbs of dancers in this light.

In front of them is our potato trench. We dig a deep trench (notice I use the royal we here, actually Scott digs a deep trench) about 18″ deep and plant the potatoes there, then as they grow and sprout we keep filling the hole over the plant to encourage new potatoes to grow until the ‘trench’ becomes ground level. These are yukon golds:

In front of the potatoes is a bed with currently two peppers and two eggplants with basil seeds just sprouting. Oh, and what else is that you see in the picture? Oh, yes, that would be even *more* wonder berries and amaranth!

Ahead of the ‘mediterranean bed’ is an entire bed devoted to strawberries which in hopefully another week will be bright red and ready to eat.

And at the very front of the left side is a bed of onions and leeks:

Notice how much bigger these are than the garlic in back? Planted on the same day too. The magic of raised beds, I tell you!