Dreaming of A Garden

 This last Saturday the weather was really nice and warm.  My sister came out with the twins for the weekend.  We managed to steal a couple of hours and do some work on my garden.  I've got big plans for my garden. 

You see, we have 31 acres. When we first moved out here, I wanted to landscape everything.  I wanted to cut down a lot of trees, redo all the flower beds, put in new flowers, brush hog the entire place, etc.  It took me about 2 years to realize a few things.  First, we live basically in a forest, which includes all sorts of animals and plants.  Cutting back everything would destroy the very reason we wanted to move out here:  nature.  Second, we don't have the equipment to landscape all of this place.  Third, we don't have the time to landscape all of this place.  My conclusion was to focus on small areas.  Instead of doing little bits here and there and never making a dent in anything, I would focus on one area, fix it up, and move on to the next.  I also made peace with the wilderness.  I don't like it being right outside my window (as is the case behind my house), but I realize that for now keeping it under control is the most I can do. 

Since it's the dead of winter, I spend my time indoors dreaming about all the flowers and vegetables I'm going to grow.  I try not to think about all the plants I've managed to kill over the years.  I've read a few gardening magazines and gotten some books out of the library.  I scroll through the UofA Agriculture website.  I get my soil tested (will soon anyways).  And I plan my garden.

This one section of yard outside my house has been a slow project.  It's been hard to figure out what to do with it.  When we bought this place, it had a 6-ft fence around it to keep in the chickens (which didn't work), along with loads of trees and unkempt bushes.  There were some vague flower beds, but everything was planted randomly.  This area is right off a nice big deck that we have, so getting this area looking nice is a priority for me. 

We tore down most of the fence and cut down two trees in 2009, which brought in a lot of sunshine and opened things up a lot.  I dug up a lot of shrubs and forsythia plants.  Forsythias are really pretty and very easy to maintain.  Since they flower on the previous year's growth, if you don't touch them at all they will flower like crazy.  Unfortunately, not pruning them means they look pretty wild and unkempt.  I have enough things that look like that, so I dug them all up.  Last year I tried to plant some gladiolas and dahlias.  They all came up, but the gladiolas never flowered and the dahlias never filled out.  This was probably due to the water issue.  While this garden area is right next to my house, the outside tap is on the other side of the house.  I was trying to water with a garden pail, but I had a newborn and I just wasn't that consistent.  To solve this problem, we got a longer garden hose and I also have a garden sprayer.  Eventually I would like to do a natural irrigation system using rainwater, but I realize that part might be a little further down the road.

Last September a friend of mine gave me some gorgeous iris bulbs and several other variety of flowers, including some blue balloons:

 

Obviously these are not my actual flowers, but a picture I got off the web.  Hopefully they will fill out the flower beds in the next couple of years.  I also want some of these:

Baptisia australis.

For now, though, in the dead of winter, my garden looks like this:

 We're going to tear down the rest of the wooden fence and cut down a maple tree to give the garden more sunlight. The rock flower beds and the bed against the fence will mainly have flowers; all the flowers my friend gave me, along with the gladiolas and dahlias (hopefully), and I'll also add in some four o'clocks, scarlet runner beans, and zinnias.  To replace the wooden fence, we're going to build a fence that will hopefully one day look like this one:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/pioneerwoman/5318626524/  Sorry that I can't post the picture.  It will use our natural resources (read: free) and will hopefully blend in with the surroundings well.

In the meantime, my sister came out and helped me work on building some vegetable beds.  While we have a few vegetable beds further out that we share with my sister-in-law and her family, I wanted some closer at hand.  Then I can grow some kind of crazy vegetable that no one will ever eat besides me and not worry about taking up space in the community garden. 

I forgot to take a before picture of what this looked like, but it had a dog house/chicken coop and a shelf that ran right under the blue paint.  We tore it all down and cleared it out, then I gathered rocks from the creek while my sister built a bed out of them.  She did an awesome job, if you ask me.  Now we have to dig out the soil and fill it with a layer of rock, leaves, and creek loam and then put the soil back in.  I seem to know what I'm talking about, but I won't be surprised if it doesn't grow a darn thing.  We're using rocks because they're free and make pretty beds, plus if I haul a few of them around I might actually lose the rest of the baby weight.  Christian and I have one more vegetable bed to build around the Redbud tree, and that should be it. 

I can't wait for green leaves and warmer weather so I can dig in the garden and plant all sorts of things that I will probably end up killing.  It has to be one of life's greatest joys (the planting, not the killing).