Never fear – Spring will be here!!

I used to look forward to winter a little bit. Things slowed down some, there was the possibility of snow days from work or school, the cold weather forced us to spend time inside on the couch relaxing… None of that is true anymore.

Yeah, maybe we’re not running as much as we do in the summer with camping trips and get togethers, but it doesn’t really slow down as far as things to do. The same household chores are still here. Worse even. Snow and dirt tracked through the house = more sweeping (I don’t even bother mopping most of the time). Bulky winter clothes = filling up the washer faster so it feels like we’re doing more laundry (2 or 3 sweatshirts take up as much room as a whole week’s worth of shorts LOL). Spending time on the couch = snacks and dirty dishes. And on cold mornings it probably takes me 50% longer to feed animals…bundle up in extra layers, tromp through the snow or mud, breaking up ice and hauling around a bucket of water for the smaller animals, then carefully stripping off those extra layers of clothes so I don’t get my socks wet from the ends of my coveralls or from stepping in the snow that I tracked into the garage on my boots. Add that to the fact that I feel like I just move slower in the cold and I feel like I’m always doing but never getting anything done. That’s if I’m motivated to do anything. The cold just does that to me and I know I’m not alone. It’s not that I dislike winter because I don’t really. Winter is beautiful and it’s supposed to give us/nature/everything a chance to reset. Maybe my reset button only needs six weeks of this instead of 12 or 15…

So I NEED the air to warm up. I NEED that Vitamin D from the sun. I NEED the hustle and bustle of spring to get me going and get my blood pumping. (Literal pause here as I grab my wearable blanket because I’m cold. This thing is amazingly soft and warm by the way.) I NEED to be busy.

Garden Plans

I started my garden planning the other day which is something that definitely goes better in the winter. Hopefully I can stick to the plan better this year. If I wait too long to plan then I tend to let the excitement of spring and the garden itself overpower my abilities and time. I buy entirely too many plants and seeds for what we have room for. The garden ends up being bigger than we can handle with our schedules and I squeeze things together more than they should be in an effort to make it look as small as possible when Ed rolls his eyes at me when he sees how crazy I’ve let my ideas get again.

Last year we tried out raised beds. Ed built two beds out of landscaping timbers, 4′ x 8′, and they worked out amazingly better than planting straight into the ground. Except for the onions- I think we waited too long to harvest them and they didn’t dry out at the right time or something, so out of like 30 sets I think we only ended up with three or four edible onions. That’s okay, I don’t like onions anyway. I just liked the idea of growing them and all the things I could do with them other than eating fresh onions. Anyways…this year the plan is to build two more beds and allow enough room for the mower to pass between them. After about week two or three of gardening we get horribly lazy with the weed removal. The raised beds helped break that weeding down into manageable areas. I could go out one day and pull weeds in one bed and it’d take me about five minutes. The next day I could focus on the other bed. Even if we skipped a day because something else was going on, it never really got out of hand like before. Now, around the tomato cages that were outside of the boxes….those were a different story. Or the same old story, depending on how you look at it I guess.

Watering is always an important thing to keep in mind too. The green flat soaker hoses we used before suck. The sprinkler ends up watering all the weeds around my plants. This year we’re going to use the black soaker hoses. One short soaker hose curled through each bed that we can leave there. They’ll attach to a short piece of regular garden hose that will go from the bed down to a “Y” connector between the beds. That “Y” connector will attach to the long hose that comes off the spigot. We can water both side by side beds at once or shut one off if needed. Then simply unconnect the “Y” and move the long hose down to the next pair of beds with the same setup. Hopefully we can get into the system of watering two beds while we weed the other two and then the opposite the next day. Obviously some of that will depend on our natural rainfall, but I’m planning ahead and that’s the point LOL

One bed of green beans should give us plenty to eat fresh and still have some to can in jars. The bush beans do better for us and I need to look back and see what variety we planted last year. A second bed will be zucchini and cucumber. We grow zucchini really well here somehow and always have more than enough to grill or saute. They seem to go from picking size to gigantic overnight so we have a lot that goes into relish too! Bed number three will be tomatoes. I don’t like doing the whole graph paper garden planning thing with measurements and what-not so I won’t know how many will fit in there until I actually put cages in and visualize the spacing. The rest of the plants will go outside the boxes again. Bed four is going to be my strawberry bed. We have a few planted up against the house but it stays too wet for them to thrive. They need a place where they won’t get mowed over or plowed under since they’re perennials, and I think a raised bed would be perfect and will give room for runners and new plants. We want to try something new every year so I think I’ll try planting some greens – spinach, maybe a couple varieties of lettuce. Timing wise I think I can do that in my green bean bed. Plant and harvest before the green beans start coming up too much. I’ll give it a try.

So when June rolls around and I start posting about garden headaches because I managed to talk myself into getting 6 extra tomato plants, snap peas, carrots, cabbage, and whatever else and we have 30′ x 20′ weed patch…