Mutiny In the Garden: Circles are Tougher than Squares

Garden inspection this morning! The ground is still really cold but the tulip leaves are finally up and we have our first daffodil. The forsythia looks like it might burst into bud just in a day or too. The magnolia buds will hopefully hold off a bit since the cold is coming back. We lose the buds about every fourth year due to freezes. Hopefully this won't be one of those years.

The lettuce is looking happy considering the recent cold. No rows here. These are in a mixed garden, perennials, evergreens, vegetables are all mixed together. Rows look out of place to me in a set-up like this. Blobs of plants, even if they are for eating look nicer in my opinion. Productivity probably suffers doing it this way, but this garden needs to do double duty, please my eyes and please my palate.

This morning I checked out a new source for manure. The last place only had really fresh stuff. Today, however was different. I scored some great poo! A stable in Wheaton composts it and gives it free to gardeners. This stuff was really nice, fully done and very rich. I had to slog through six inches of muck to get to it since the field was still really wet but slogging is good for the thighs and good poo is worth it. I just read through the last sentence to myself. Good grief-what have I become? Oh right, one obsessed gardener.

Most of the day was spent making hard rectangles into the shape of something resembling a circle. During this process the bed that was originally supposed to be six feet wide somehow morphed into one that was nine feet wide. A happy error or part of my secret plot to slowly take over the yard? I'll never tell. This is the best spot to grow things in my heavily shaded yard, and it slopes to catch the sun! Lara helped me plant peas in this bed today. She wanted more to do so I let her transplant the last couple of broccoli transplants. Hers are sitting better than mine! I need to convince her to muck around with me more often!

The dog was so excited to see the kids outside running around he completed his first plant kill of the season. He ran thru a flat of impatien seedlings at full speed. I think I heard them scream.

My little pyro's helped with a bit of multi-tasking this afternoon. We stacked a few bricks to make a fire pit and they burned more sticks. Doing this cleaned up the stick ridden yard from the last wind storm, helped kill the grass in the new bed and made less of a log for us to eventually split and move.