Wednesday, April 13, 2011

My Favorite Winter Hobby: Neglecting the Yard

I am a fair weather gardener. I LOVE to be outside digging and planting and weeding and watering and fussing when it is over 60 degrees. Rainy and cold? Forget about it. And forget about trying to get my husband out in the yard on a regular basis unless it is over 70.

So in the winter I tend to be an "ignore it and it will go away" type of gardener.

We used to have planter boxes for the vegetable garden and after about 5 years they rotted and fell apart and then the last 2 years I decided to do mounds instead of boxes but I didn't really give myself enough space to work in the rows and it ended up a bit of a disaster. When I made the mounded beds I used a mulch-like soil that was too "hot" for a lot of my veggies and didn't drain so well. Also, we have a cat that absolutely thinks the best thing in the world is to poop in my garden. Hence the deer fencing-- I do not want to eat kitty poop covered veggies. It is a problem spot to say the least.

I am determined to solve all of these problems this year. First, I have to weed everything. Next, I am going to build some new garden beds and fill it with some nice potting soil. Finally, I am going to make some fencing that is easy to take down in sections depending on which garden bed I am working on. Hopefully that will fix the cat problem.

The ornamental areas weren't looking as bad as the veggie area but it turned out that most of the English Lavender didn't make it through our extra cold winter this year.

It is starting to look pretty good in the ornamental section but pretty empty since I had to tear out 4 lavenders.

Here is the bed ready for its new boxes. That twig in the center is our fig tree. I am also worried that it didn't survive. There are buds on it but they look dead to me so I am just going to wait and see what happens with the poor thing and try again if it is dead.
Okay, I was planning on making the planters today but unlike the sunny day we had yesterday, it is raining today and I would rather stay in and felt!

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