First Day of Spring

This seems an especially auspicious day to begin this blog--at least by looking at the calendar. If you look out my window, not so much. We won't be doing anything that remotely resembles gardening today as the ground is covered in a beautiful (not so deep) blanket of snow. That is Wisconsin. We were actually graced with several days of 60+ degree weather this week--just a tease, but I did spend a few hours in gardening activity.

Our garden is only a year old. Well, not even a year old. We finished building the raised beds last May. All around the raised beds we laid mulch to cover the paths. Big paths. Wide paths. Paths an elephant could lumber through. We erroneously believed we would need to wheel a gargantuan cart throughout our garden and therefore, created the paths to accomodate this beast. I never used it. Jim (hubby extraordinaire) used it at the very end of the season during the clean up phase.

Anyhoo (this was one of my mom's cute words) we are making the paths smaller this year. This entails more work than you might imagine. First, we have to rake the mulch off all the paths. Then we are going to remove all of the fieldstones that were laid last spring to create the raised beds. Jim is then going to till in some compost all over. We will then lay landscaping cloth in all of the new path areas (I am hoping to drastically minimize weed growth) and cover it with the previously raked mulch. Finally we will build up all of the new garden beds, fill them with additional earth and cover with straw.

"Not so bad", you say.
"The garden is 40 feet by 60 feet", I say.

Not so bad. And then the fun begins. I am always humbled by the whole process of seed to fruit. This itty bitty speck of a thing that you place into the ground grows into an entire plant with multiple hunks of food to eat. It's mind-boggling and beautiful. Can't wait to get started. The first day of spring may officially be today, but our real spring is just around the corner.