plan my garden

We finally got the entire garden cleaned out and tilled today. It’s time for the fun part… picking out what I’m planting this year. I love spring. :-D

My husband and an old high school friend, Joe, have a kind of exchange of services thing going on. My husband is a mechanic on the side and works on the guys car every once in a while. Joe has his own plant nursery. Every spring/early summer Joe drops off a ton of plants. I have never been so happy about my husbands talents. :-D I wonder what goodies we’ll get this year?

I have two main plots that are a mess right now. One is where I usually plant vegetables, and the other is my flower garden. I let the flower garden go last year and it’s a disaster. Why is it that the plants that you want to grow take forever to establish themselves, but the weeds grow into monsters in a blink? The vegetable garden is almost solid dandelions. Ick. Lots of work to do and it’s already half past May.

Right now i’m just concentrating on one sectino in the backyard, but I need to build an overall plan that includes the rest of the backyard and the front of the house.

My parents came today with the garden boxes, compost, peat moss, and seeds. We went to Gardener’s Supply and bought tomato and pepper plants. I also planted carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, chives, and morning glory from seed. Hooray!

Painted the boxes this weekend, I’m pretty pleased with the finished result. They weren’t dry enough to bring back to VT last night, but I can’t plant anything yet anyway.
My dad and I tilled my folks’ massive compost pile, next we need to rake out the stuff that’s not broken down yet. Hopefully it’ll be balanced enough that I’ll be able to fill the two boxes with material just from the pile! He and Mom might come to the Bur for Mother’s Day, so they’d bring the boxes up then. Hooray, I can’t wait!

My mom is loaning me 2-3 planter boxes to put on the porch of my apartment building. I need to get them from her in NH, paint them, and pick what to plant. I want to grow veggies that will produce throughout the summer. So far I’m thinking tomatoes, lettuce, maybe peas? Exciting!!

We planned a little, bought a few plants, planned a little more, bought a few plants (because we were trying not to miss garden club plants sales in our town & nearby towns). But now we’ve finally finished all our planning and we can indulge ourselves at garden centers! Yay!

gardened a lot Saturday, and pretty much all day Sunday. Love it! This was all prep work-getting the various beds ready for planting, expanding the size of some, etc. And we moved around a few plants. And rocks. Lots of rocks. And then some more rocks. But anyway, seeing it all looking so good-and so ready for plants—was really inspiring, and as we worked we talked about what we wanted to put in. Then later, we started listing and planning on paper a bit. More to do, but I’m feeling very satisfied with our progress. Yay!

Last year, the brussels sprouts got ridiculously huge. They crowded out the beets. They made thick, thick trunks that are taking forever to decompose in the compost pile. Plus they were hard to find in the garden centers to begin with. And after all that, we got maybe two meals worth out of it all. We’ve decided that they aren’t worth it in our particular garden. So, we won’t plant brussels sprouts this year. Once decision made!