Our vegetable garden sort of consumed me for the last couple of weeks. Funny thing is, this year I am not pregnant. This year, I don’t have a newborn. This year, I do have a playfence set up in the yard.
So that means this year, I can get out to the garden! Woot!
I don’t really know what the big deal is, but it is sort of an obsession. I think it starts when the seed catalogs arrive during the long cold winter. Those seed and bulb seller’s sure know their business. Getting us all worked up when there are months and months left of snow. Only this year, the weather didn’t cooperate with their plans. It’s been so unseasonably wonderful that we could actually get out and do yard work in early spring, which is usually impossible because the ground is still frozen. Well, anyways, with the early green and the cold snaps still happening at night, my hubby, being a cautious man, decided we would wait to plant.
Wait to plant? I got a boatload of seeds I have been wanting to plant since last year when I realized, once again, that mothering a newborn and my regular crew just didn’t equate to doing a lot of gardening and then dealing with the rewards from those labors…I got this boatload of seeds! I want to walk out and plop them in the ground and let them do their thing.
Only thing is, I didn’t realize what neglecting a garden for a year, or more, means. How the crab grass and dandelions and stinging nettle take over. How projects left unattended for many years get buried in discarded weeds and such.
So one morning at the bus stop our neighbor pipes up and says, “You wanna borrow my tiller?”
It was like spark to fire. Before I knew what I was getting myself into, I exclaimed, “Yes!” As I brought my prize home, struggling to keep it in line, I thought of all the flower beds that would be made ready for my seeds and the garden beds that would be ready for starts from the garden center (our neighbor) and the paths in the garden all cleared and paved. I imagined myself, a cup of tea in hand, in the afternoon, all dressed up in a cute frock and my hair wisping in the breeze as I lazily tugged at a weed and nibbled on fresh green beans and caressed plump tomatoes and the birds were singing and a the butterflies landed on my hand…well I think I even heard the angels singing.
That weekend I bought work gloves for myself and all the kids. I gathered all the tools and headed to the garden. And my bubble burst.
The paths were so bad you could break an ankle walking down them. You see we had planned to repave them with a different kind of paver and well, that didn’t work out and so there was a haphazard pile of broken pavers and rocks and weeds all tangled together. So we pulled out all the pavers and rocks and broken bits and this is what the pile looked like…
I tried to notate this…maybe if you click on it, you can see my random notes.
Once the kidlets and I pulled out all the debris, we focused on pulling some flowers out of one of the raised beds. When the city did the road, we lost some gardens but I knew someday I wanted to replant the flowers, so I saved them in the bed. I was able to save iris’s, daylilies, a hosta or two and a sedum. That meant that I had to have a spot to put them, so we tilled a front border for the garden. Dave took the first pass, and then it was my turn. I should have know that he would make it look easy. I took my turn and thought I was going to take out the fence and my children and that it would eat off my leg. But, thankfully none of that happened. And thankfully David took over for the raised beds. Especially thankful that I wasn’t the one who sent eight little bunnies off to meet their makers and had to keep the tiller running so the children nearby wouldn’t hear them screaming.
After the flowers were planted (a day or two, it rained and I was sore from my first round with the tiller) I weeded around the rhubarb and then decide to completely move them to another area and move my strawberries to the area the rhubarb were. Then I mulched them with newspaper and compost and prayed over them and am hoping for the best.
the bed they were in was so overrun with crabgrass that I had to almost tweeze it away from the roots. It will be a miracle to see strawberries come from these!
My next plan for inside the garden is to weed all the paths and figure out something to put down…not sure if I want pavers again or what, but we will figure it out. For now, the dandelions, crabgrass and stinging nettle and overgrown raspberry plants must go. Once it is all tidy, then we can plant *squee*!!! I can hardly contain my excitement.
Our grapevine, planted two years ago…
Next up, in the storytelling, trees and raspberries.
Lovies,DJ
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