2013

Every year, I mean to update this, and I do for a while, and then I stop when I get too busy. So here we are in 2013, and I'm not guaranteeing it won't happen again!

The well went dry last August, after a long and droughty, hot summer. Boy did that suck, and the garden suffered for it, especially since I stopped watering ornamentals long before the well went dry. So the garden is a bit more of a mess this year than usual. Then, later in the fall, the hose bib broke. It was almost time to turn it off for the winter anyway, to keep it from freezing, so we didn't make fixing it a priority, but now it's spring and I still have no outdoor water source! So that's high on the priority list.

The strawberries appear to be gone. I don't see a single one out there. I have no idea what happened to them, since they've been there and spreading for years, but I guess it'll just be a mystery. So this seems like a good year to open that bed back up for veggies. I'm going to transplant the perennial herbs out of it, and then get Himself to rototill the whole thing, then put it back into regular planting circulation.

As of today, the veggie beds are all weeded and rototilled (except what was formerly the strawberry/herb garden, there's still at least some chives, oregano, rosemary, and fennel in there that I need to pull out once I decide where I want to put it.

It looks like I got tired of posting right around the time we were converting our grass garden paths to mulch. We'd gotten a big load of bagged leaves from someone who didn't want to pay to dump them, and I figured I'd just dump them in the compost piles, but when I pulled the first one open, I saw that it had black walnut leaves in it. So much for composting. So we ended up spreading them over all the garden paths, then putting a layer of weed barrier fabric down, and covering it with mulch. Niiiiiiiice... We got about 3/4 of the garden paths done last year, and we'll finish the rest this year. I always loved the idea of "grass" paths, but the truth is that they were never practical and usually overgrown with weeds by midsummer because the mower didn't fit. The mulched paths were super easy to clean up this spring, though, and if we top dress them with a little fresh mulch, they'll look like a million bucks.

My whisky barrels had mint in them, but only one has been coming back year after year. And it's coming back again this year. I'm debating whether to put the same mint in the other barrels, or put something different in. I could even put the almost homeless perennial herbs in there, I guess, at least temporarily.

Everything is definitely getting a much slower start this year. Every day until the past two days has been too cold, too windy, and often pouring rain or snowing. When I look at my photos from last year, cannas were already well out of the ground by now - hope that doesn't mean they didn't make it this year. The plum had already bloomed and finished, and this year it's still in buds. I'm hoping it didn't snow at the exactly wrong time, since it was also in bud when we got 4 inches of snow last week.

The biggest unmentioned news is that we got 4 chickens last summer! I'm looking forward to letting them "free" range in the garden. I can't actually set them loose, because my husband would have a conniption, but I plan to let them into some temporary enclosures in the garden to allow them to forage. I may even have time to do that tomorrow, over one or more of the freshly tilled beds.

So there's the first update of 2013.