Earth Day!

Well, its Earth Day/Holy Saturday! :) I've been off all week and had been hoping to get outside way more than I did since I came down with an annoying head cold that pretty much kicked my ass. But I have started some yard work, thanks mostly to John's muscles.  We have 3 terraced little squares, each maybe 6 feet by six feet-ish. He helped me to rake them out, turn the soil, eradicate these annoying magenta weeds.  My seedlings were started inside a few weeks ago and I am excited to see that some of them are actually sprouting.  It has been a miserably rainy spring so far. Hence the delay in the rest of them sprouting. (One can only hope...)  I'm seeing my mesclun mix, beets, beans, chard, cilantro, chives.... but no sign of the peas, cucumbers, cantaloupe, eggplant, basil, parsley, or tomatoes.  I am especially sad/worried about the tomatoes.  They are seeds of an Italian heirloom variety from a friend of John's. Why, o why, aren't they sprouting?? Is it too cold?? I usually end up buying some plants from Home Depot or Walmart but I was looking forward to starting a bunch from seed this year.  The compost is breaking down but I needed to add more brown/nitrogen to it yesterday. During the winter, our long, awful, snowy winter... I was not able to get to any browns so I just kept adding the kitchen waste, so its a little slimy and smelly and unusable right now.  So I added leaves and twigs in layers and hopefully in the next few weeks this starts to correct itself.  In the meantime, I did find a very cool article online about companion planting.  When I was in Baja two summers ago, I learned about the traditional three sisters of beans, corn, and tomatoes. (or squash..) So apparently there are lots of vegs that work well together and some that really don;t do well together.  Keeping this is mind, I have sketched out a plan for all the plants that I have growing this year, assuming that they all do sprout.  I'll take a pic of the space and my plans for what needs to grow next to what in the next few days ...