Here at the farm, Memorial Day weekend is all about planting. With shovels and planting charts, wheelbarrows and baby plants we celebrate that its finally the moment when it is safe to plant out the frost sensitive plants.

We started late last week by putting in the more cold tolerant brassicas, leeks, and parsley.

Then Emily and Katherine, a friend of Emily who has come to spend her summer here, spent yesterday morning weeding in preparation for planting out the more frost sensitive plants like tomato and basil. Note garden assistant Riley has gotten his summer clip. MayMay seems to have decided to forgo the trim. Maybe another heat wave like last week will change her mind.

While right now the transplants occupy a weed free zone, weeding is going to be a serious preoccupation here this summer. The Angels asked us to forgo our deep mulch system this summer. This is something we’ve used to enrich the soil and keep down the weeds for the last twenty seasons. While there are many reasons for this direction, one reason for the different approach is to lessen our slug population. You may recall that the slug situation was so bad last year we had to protect each Red Shiso plant with its own plastic cup. Without the mulch, our hoes are going to become our steady companions!

Yesterday afternoon saw us transplanting those tender vegetables as well as many Flowers that have been waiting in the cold frames and greenhouse. The transplants always look a bit limp and scraggly when first planted. It doesn’t help that its been very dry. We’ve had to work hard to keep the transplants watered, but today a wonderful rain is falling on all that we planted and this job is being done for us!

Tomorrow we will plant the Red Shiso then plant more Flowers and vegetables. The greenhouse is completely empty, but the cold frames still hold a lot of babies waiting for our attention.

Amidst all this, we still visit with Agnes Rose. In the last few days many more Roses, Peonies and Iris have joined her in the gardens. Next time it’s sunny, I will take more photos to post of all the blooming beauties. Such a magic, beautiful and BUSY time of year!

As we plant out all the annuals, we stop to smell the Roses beginning with Agnes.

Yesterday was one of those days when I felt like I was in an ‘I Love Lucy” episode, maybe the one at the candy factory. The day began with Reina getting unexpectedly tangled in the electrical cords under all our desks in a manner that abruptly pulled all the wires free from their jacks and outlets. We have so many things I do not understand going on under the desks- things like ethernet connections, rollover phone hook ups, something called GreenHopeOffice that networks the computers to name but a few- and poor Reina had unhinged them all.

Nothing worked. And not surprisingly, crawling around on our hands and knees under the desks looking at all the wires we didn’t understand made no difference. No did hand wringing.

We were sans phone, sans internet, sans network, sans sanity.

To add to the melange of techno meltdowns, the UPS computer that lives across the room in its own PC realm was once more on the fritz. It had imploded for the second time in a month and all our UPS systems were down again.

By the time we jury rigged our phone system into some semblance of operation and got onto email and our computer network ( thanks of course to Ben who took time between teaching his history classes to come up and help save us), we had a day of catch up ahead with a freaky amount of Next Day Air orders and no back up plan for how to launch them.

I would have gone to ground in the gardens, pleading pressing weeds in the Venus Garden, but it was about as hot as it gets in New Hampshire. Thinking about pulling a weed was enough to break us all into a sweat, well all of us except, of course, Lynn.

Whenever we have one of these mid-Atlantic type heat waves, we watch in awe as Lynn remains cool and crisp in her Bermudian summer wardrobe. One would not think that believing that “horses sweat, men perspire, but a woman only glows” would make ANY difference, but with Lynn the belief has morphed into fact. When we broke from the chaos in the office to take the dogs for a lunchtime walk, Lynn remained fresh as a daisy while the rest of us grew progressively more bedraggled as we force marched the dogs and ourselves from watering hole to watering hole.

But just like an ‘I Love Lucy’ episode, the good thing about melodramatic technology implosions is that they only last just so long. This one did last more than the thirty minutes of a TV episode, but we did salvage the day. As we closed up shop for the night, all the orders had been launched, thanks to former staffer Liz Taylor who sent off our UPS packages from her family’s smokehouse. We even managed to get the order off to the woman who had to spell her name for me eight times because, well, when the wires got unplugged under the desks, this seemed to have affected my brain as well.

As the day cooled and evening arrived, we went out into the garden to savor the first Rose blossoms and watch the amazing array of birds in the garden this spring. As the sun set, the light flashed off the pair of baltimore orioles and a papa bluebird, and we could hear two male cardinal birds singing. Not a bad way to finish the day.

And now a good night’s sleep leaves me ready for today’s episode. First things first, I need to go visit with the Agnes Rose justing starting to bloom, then its off to the races!