I recently visited The Garden In the Woods, near Framingham, MA - it's a combination botanical garden and native plant store. Wonderful place, I highly recommend it to anyone in the area. I came home with a Serviceberry bush that I planted where one of the hedge/tree conifer things on the edge of my yard had died.

In the annual garden my flour corn is coming up - planted it a bit late, so hopefully it'll have enough time. I'm a little behind on everything except the peas this year, tbh, but it's nice to see things finally start to take off.

My native garden is still very much a work in progress. I think the birds always get to the seeds, because I've never had a problem with growing plants until I decided to grow a native garden. Luckily, there are some already native pre annual plants on my property. My goldenrods have came back, and my dogwood tree is growing back shoots after a fungus killed the mature parts of the tree.

I sprinkled some Joe Pye Weed and Black Eyed Susan seeds and I think they may have sprouted this time? 🤞🏾 Pic below is where I think planted them 😅.

We finally got a lot of rain after a month of sunny days.

I got an order of 100 ladybug larvae in, but only counted about 30 that hatched and were alive. I put them out in jute bags and coffee filters because my small cherry tree is absolutely infested with aphids this year. It also grew like 50 cherries instead of its normal 3 or so, but they are all very tiny and ripening and a few are blackening.

Maybe next year...

Most everything on my property is perennial. So, not planting anything lately. Just trying to reduce the amount of lawn mowing by laying down landscaping fabric and covering that with bark mulch. I'll come back next year and plant more perennials in those areas. Probably fruit-bearing bushes like gooseberries and elderberries.

My sage is doing great, everything else is ok except my rose bush that died on me very suddenly :(

I've unfortunately been busy this year and haven't been as productive as I wish I had.

That being said, I have a decent sized patch of various lettuces, and the artichoke I planted last year is producing!

I just got a bunch of other things in the ground like beans and pepper starts, we'll see how they do!

The weather has slowly been warming up so the most I've been able to do is prep the gardens with compost and used mulch from the mushroom farm nearby.

I am trying to start my seeds with some compressed soil blocks I made. I used some backyard soil, compose, mulch and a bunch of crushed eggshells from my parents. I managed to get a couple peas and beans started with my first attempt before remaking the remainder to be less soil dense. We'll see how it goes the second time around.

My collard green from last year survived this long winter. Happy to see it thriving.

I can't wait for a stretch of warm weather. I'm too lazy to properly compost so I've been burying all the veggie scraps in my garden beds all winter and spring. I know once it's warm it'll break down real quick but for now it's just kinda there...