Planting gardens

Flowers and veggies and trees, oh my. It's that time of year again. Spring is here. Now it’s time to consider what to plant in the garden. Well need flowers for the flower bed in the front yard, veggies for the garden in the back yard. Then there’s the question of berries, fruit trees, and other assorted perennials. Now is the time for preparing and planting.

We picked up several packages of flower seeds at the store to plant in the front flower bed. I prefer the perennial flowers, daisies, tulips, irises, etc. They’re nice, because you plant them once, and they come back year after year after year. You just have to find the ones that’ll work for your weather, soil, and watering conditions. The problem I have is keeping the grass out. So I’ve had to dig up quite a bit of the flower garden to get the grass and weeds out. The dandelions and thistles have been a big problem the last several years also. But I think between the weeding and the seed packets we’ll be good this year, then the perennials can expand out in the next several years. I’m hoping we can have a lot of fresh cut flowers decorating the table this summer and fall. We only did so-so last year. The year before we had more than we could possibly use from a very small flower bed. We’ll see how things go this year.

We also picked up a bunch of veggie seed packets, to plant in the back veggie garden. That’s more of an iffy proposition though. Every year we plant veggies. Some years we get a pretty good haul. Some years not so much. The worst year was when we had a bad hail storm in the middle of June. It flattened the entire garden (front and back) and stripped a lot of the leaves off the trees. Everything was ruined. The veggie garden was completely destroyed. The flowers had to regrow themselves, the tree did provide some protection. One year the sprinkler head went out, and we didn’t realize until too late. Last year it was hit or miss. The peas grew fast and wild, and we got a lot of peas out of it. The tomatoes mostly didn’t sprout, as did the peppers, and a few others. What did sprout didn’t do well. The spinach went straight to seed. Didn’t seem worth all the trouble.

Timing planting for the veggies and the flowers is also hard to gauge. Where we live we can have snow and frost through May (though we usually have the last frost around the beginning to middle of May). As long as we cover the plants they generally do okay. We just have to remember to uncover them so they get watered when it rains or the sprinklers run. I hope this year we can get some tomatoes. Fresh from the garden veggies taste so much better than store-bought.

I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.