Beginnings

How often do you find a post about gardening that is linked to Rick Springfield? Never? Yeah, I thought so. :-) But I just can't resist mentioning the great Rickster, as his very first album was titled, "Beginnings." I used to own said album, but somewhere over the years and the many moves, it's been lost or destroyed. So sad! It even had an error on the LP for the title of one of the songs. Instead of "Mother Can You Carry Me?" my album said, "Mother Can You Marry Me?" That always cracked me up! But, I digress....this is, after all, a gardening post, right?

The photo above is of my garden. It's significantly smaller than what I attempted to "farm" last year, but I think it will be more than adequate! It's still about 500 square feet. When I got up this morning, it was a grass-infested mess and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed about getting it ready to grow (hehe).

This morning, however, I got out my handy-dandy cultivator. We bought it last year, but it had never been out of the box. After studying the instructions, I thought I could handle it, so off to the garden we went. It took me a little while to get the hang of it, but then it became great fun to turn those irritating grass patches into mulched soil! I spent almost 2 hours out there between tilling and moving mulch around. DH had made mulch out of all of our fall leaves and piled it in there - it made quite a heavy layer of nice mulch that I turned into the ground.

As a result of my labors (and my sore back and arms that I know I will feel even more tomorrow!), the above photo is what I have now. It actually looks pretty good! And I think I have just enough mulch. The newspapers we laid down last year to prevent grass and weeds are a bit annoying, as I thought they would have decomposed more by now, but I'll deal with them. I almost feel like I have the beginnings of a modified lasagna garden. Whatever you want to call it, it's going to work for me!

I'm hoping tomorrow to do some planting. My inside seedlings have taken off like wild and are already outgrowing their tiny pots after not quite 2 weeks. Crazy! I also need to buy tomato plants, as I've never had luck bringing those up from seed. What is nice is that I learned today that a mall gift card we received for Christmas (to a mall we never visit!) is actually good at anyplace that takes American Express. Woohoo!! I'm going to use it tomorrow for garden stuff! That will at least help a little.

I will keep everyone posted as to the progress of my garden this year. I'm hoping for a more successful season than last year, and I'm also going to be using a lot of the seeds I received from Hometown Seeds. So far, so good...I will keep you up-to-date. Happy gardening, all!!!!