Spring Thoughts

In the garden this spring, my first big activity of the year has been to edge the gardens by chopping through the grass on the outside of the brick edging. Jeff has been kind and helped me with this quite a bit. Once the chopping is done, I'm going back and pulling up each brick and pulling out the grass that has grown in the cracks and snuck into official garden space. It's not taking too long, and I'm nearly done. The parts of the yard that are done already look great, and this will be a really good start to the gardening year.

Once that job is done, I want to go back and start doing some actual gardening. Trim the rose bush, dig out a couple shrubs that died over the winter, move a big hosta that gets crowded by the Annabelle, and the tough job of digging up my purple loosestrife and pulling all the crabgrass out before replanting. I want to get some new plants too, so I need to spend some time researching good new perennial options. My problem is that I only have my memories of how the garden looked last year, so it's hard to figure out which colors and bloom times I should get in my new plants.

To help with that in the future, this year I'm on a plan to take pictures of the gardens every two weeks. I've done it twice in April, and already I'm excited about printing them out and putting them in envelopes, and then next winter pulling out the envelopes and laying them out on the floor and seeing how the garden looked throughout the summer and making plans for improving it. Actually, I want to do that already this summer, and use the pictures for planning my bulb planting this fall. Even though I planted about 700 bulbs last fall, I think I could do that again this year. Maybe mix in some tulips this time, and hyacinths, even though I really do love the daffodils.

There is something very consistent and soothing about having all daffodils blooming, with their cheerful yellow and white, and the nice smoothness it lends to the garden to have all the same types of flowers. I planted a good variety of early, mid, and late-season bloomers, and have had flowers blooming now for at least four weeks. The King Alfreds were up first, bright yellow and cheering after the long dull winter. After them has come quite a variety with carnation-like flowers and trumpet flowers and others that are in-between. I'm not sure I did a good job of tracking which variety I planted where, which may be too bad, but so far I love them all so it doesn't really matter. There are a few straggling tulips out there now, but they are definitely few and far between. Orange is the color I think I want out there now, more orange tulips. Note to self, I need to remember that come time to order bulbs!