Monday, March 15, 2010

Yes! A vegetable garden

The weekdays last week had very nice weather, much blue sky and temperatures into 10 degrees celcius; last week I was at work - inside - 5 days in a row, watching all this good weather. Saturday it was down to 3 celcius, rainy and really windy. Sunday wasn't great weather, but I spent the afternoon in a meeting. Overall, I missed gardening time.

I know it's early, but now that the house is ours even thinking about gardening is different.

On the cold, wet, windy Saturday, Chris and I went exploring the vegetable beds and herb garden. We have lettuce, swiss chard, spinach and kale wintered over and growing quite nicely. Chris dug through snow in the herb garden to see what was happening: there are green plants! He just can't remember which ones are which! And the signs which we were supposed to put in ... well, this year we'll do that. There is a lot of feverfew coming up. In the flower beds we've got winter aconite and snowdrops in bloom, and scylla poking through the flat space at the back of the house - an area which could be called lawn if it had a higher percentage of grass amongst its many types of plants :-). We are going to have quite a lot of peachleaf bellflower front and back of the house, the valerian has a thriving clump of leaves, the Provence blue lavender (started from seed last year) have wintered through nicely; there's tansy coming back, garlic shoots coming up in odd places where I tucked in bulbs, multiplier onions, and parsley. I'm getting the flower and veg beds mixed up. Or, rather, there's more crossover than there used to be ... and there'll be more over the next few years as we move the place to have even more variety of food plants and multi-use plants (use for us and for insects and critters). Oh! And there's going to be a bumper crop of chamomile. I've always had it in one of the vegetable beds (figuring I grow it as a crop) but it's extending to 15-18 square feet and I'll have to pot up some to give away. And did I mention there are two rutabagas that weren't picked last year and they have green new growth on the leaves and I bet I'll get seeds.

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