Cool, then you can plant snow peas.
My Japanese Snow Bushes sure have done well this year. I love the year 'round color although, ironically, they’re not entirely cold hardy.
Today I planted a 406 cell tray with Shirley poppies, the 7 Buffalo Nut tomato seeds from Oslo Ostragoth, and 19 pots of Caladium. My 98 cell tray of seeded border dahlia started to emerge a couple days ago. My partial tray of lettuce is all up and the remander of annual phlox is starting to emerge. My border dahlas I’ve grown for the last decade rotted last fall, so I have to start seedlings this year.
I wouldn’t call Zone 9 minimum cold hardy at all, actually.
I call Zone 9 plants annuals. 
If you go the route of renting a tiller, be aware that it’s a hellacious upper body workout.
I rented a Honda tiller from Home Depot one time in graduate school, back when I lifted weight 2-3x per week, and I’m a fairly big, strong guy anyway.
That tiller kicked my ass wholesale! I was sore for days.
Okay, so I’ll be hiring someone to go over my garden.
Is it just me, or does that sound vaguely dirty to anyone else? 
I’m thinking now that I’ll just bite the bullet and haul all of the sod material back to the compost heap, one wheelbarrow at a time. 
My experience with them and Lowes is that if you know what you want and where it is the workers all all over the place, constantly asking you if you need help. Then when you need help you can’t find one anywhere and all you see are tumbleweeds blowing through the aisles.
They definitely need better Garden Center workers, at least…
I have much better luck with Lowes, although for awhile there it was even steven. I think HD had better name recognition and Lowes had to do something to boost their profits, so they figured they could whup them in the customer service department. Works for me.
I planted out tomatoes without hardening them off enough, and they don’t seem to be growing. However, I still had some seedlings left over, and hardened those off along with the bell peppers, and have planted the new hardened-off seedlings alongside the previous not-growing ones. Only the strongest will survive! (Because I will thin the rest.)
I have green and red leaf lettuce seedlings coming up, carrots coming up, and the sugar snap peas are starting to climb the trellis nicely. I also just planted out all of the pepper seedlings (orange bell, yellow bell, “Chocolate Beauty” bell, and habanero).
Best of all, we’re harvesting asparagus every 2 days. This is our first year of harvesting, and all of the patience and waiting has really paid off. Fresh asparagus every 2 days! I am pleased.
I’ve been planting things in the yard and crossing my fingers - I know it’s still a couple of weeks early here. I’ve planted most of them close to the house, and they seem to be doing okay. It’s perfect weather for digging, though, so that’s what I do - making new beds. I mowed our steep hill of a front yard yesterday for the first time, and that grass really has to go.
Terrace it? With retaining walls? If you do stone, you could have a really nice alpine/rock garden. Even timbers would make it a lot easier to landscape than a steep hill (unless you just plan to cover it with spreading juniper or something like that).
Got my first radishes out of the garden today. Looks like the husband already slurped them up (which is just fine, since we mainly grow them for snack food for him).
Thinned out my beets, turnips, lettuce, spinach, bok choy, and chard.
Planted cucumbers and corn yesterday. It’s a tad earlier than I thought I would this year, but I’m convinced we’re now warm enough and not going to get any more frost. Worst that happens is I have to replant.
We thought about terracing it, but we’re going with any number of beds instead - we put the first large bed in last summer, and will put another one or two in this summer. Terracing looks nice, but that’s A LOT of work and expense to get it done properly. I think the large beds will be a good compromise (and the rest will be clover lawn, if the damned clover would come up already).
Last July, I bought my wife some potted stargazer lilies for her birthday. After the blooms were done, I followed instructions, and placed the pot out in the back yard in indirect sunlight. Then I pretty much forgot about it and left it to its own devices for the fall and winter.
Although I live in sunny SoCal, those devices appear to have provided the plant with an appropriate amount of sunlight, warmth, moisture and coolness, because last week, I noticed that the pot now had, in addition to several dry stalks (that came put with the slightest pull), three or four tall stems (9-15 inches) with dense leaves that look JUST like the leaves on the Easter Lily I have on the table in front of me as I type.
So, by dint of my diligent efforts to get the hell out of its way, I have successfully propagated a group of bulbs. I’m so proud. I’m also a bit apprehensive about what I should do (or not do) next. Or expect next. The pot is about 14 inches deep, with a diameter of 8-10 inches; I can’t imagine the family being happy and healthy in there indefinitely. Should I be planning on transplanting the bulbs/plants before it’s time for them to flower again (remembering that these last flowered in July)?
Can I hope for them to flower again? What’s the care and feeding regimen on an exotic (and possibly proprietary) specimen such as this?
And I am insanely jealous. Where I grew up, we had asparagus beds that were maybe 50 years old, so no worries getting some production. Nowadays, I’m not sure it would be worth the trouble to get some beds started.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Stargazers (and a lot of lilies) are not all that exotic - I can grow them in my Zone 3 yard. It’s an Oriental lily, and they’re not quite as hardy as the Asiatics, but still a tough specimen (as you’re seeing). I’d find a nice spot for it and plant it - I’m not going to worry about propagating things I buy from greenhouses (in spite of the warnings) until the Garden Police show up in my yard. 
MsWhatsit, I might try growing asparagus some day - my parents never had any luck with it in Saskatchewan, but maybe they have different varieties now.
Well, if you had to burst my bubble, I’d prefer that you do it by disabusing me of the notion that it’s exotic, rather than by telling me that I can’t expect any blooms from these new plants (anyway, they have a nice fragrance, and for me that’s plenty exotic in these days of florists with the attitude of Farben uber alles).
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much we’re getting. We’ve devoted a 10’x3’ bed to the asparagus, with ten plants in the bed. The first and second years, we didn’t harvest at all, just let them branch and fern out. This is the third year, and the harvest has been pretty spectacular, really. I’m getting probably 6-10 stalks every two days. MrWhatsit and I are considering planting a third row down the middle, which would give us a total of fifteen plants, and that would be enough for veg side dish for our family of 5 every time we harvest.
The asparagus is great because it comes up well before anything else does, so it really extends the length of time that we are harvesting fresh vegetables. The snap peas won’t start producing for another couple of weeks at least, and the tomatoes and bell peppers are obviously nowhere near ready either.