Gardening

This is the view from where I'm sitting at this moment. It doesn't even begin to convey house thickly the snow is falling. It's pretty to look at.

And what else would you think of when looking at this scene, but gardening? It's such an obvious connection!

Sarah found some of last year's seed catalogs the other day, and we were talking about what we'd like to put in our garden this year. (Disclaimer: I'm not much of a gardener. I don't really like the digging involved, or the weeding. In other words, the work. The harvesting? I can get behind that!)

We came up with a rather long list, including tomatoes, peppers, green beans, peas, potatoes, onions, zucchini, butternut squash, rhubarb, raspberries, apples, and several herbs. Jeff & I would also really like to put some more landscaping in the front of the house, as well as flowers front & back.

I viewed this list as just a wish list, until I got an sale email from Gurney's yesterday. I took the next step and wrote everything down in Excel, then started looking up prices. The total came to well over $200; I don't know how much shipping & handling on all that would be. I started to edit, taking out the rhubarb, onions, dill, mint, and lemon grass. There are already a lot of new things on that list--we don't need to do everything this year.

I'm trying to decide between a lilac and a butterfly bush. Lilac is my favorite floral scent ever, but they bloom for such a short time.

We've also been talking for a few years about putting in an apple tree. Our yard is totally open right now, and for a suburban house, not a bad size. It's also very sunny. Up until a few years ago, neighbors on both sides of us had large trees. The tree on the right shaded half the yard in the morning; the tree on the left shaded the other half in the afternoon. Both neighbors cut the trees down in the same summer. Now our yard gets no shade whatsoever. It's good for the vegetables--I actually had peppers that turned red instead of staying green that summer! But it's not so good for kids playing back there, and the setting sun shines right into our living room window. We'd like to put an apple tree in the path of that setting sun, and eventually getting some apples out of it would be a nice bonus.

It looks like Pixie Crunch would be a good choice, but apparently, apple trees don't self-pollinate, so we'd need to get a second variety to plant as well. I'm going to call them to double check on this, because putting two apple trees and a substantial garden would eat up a lot of yard space. Jeff wouldn't mind losing some lawn--less to mow!

I'll also order peat pots & seed starting mix, because if we're going to get this much stuff, we might as well start from seed. In the past, I've always waited until Memorial Day and gotten seedlings, so I'm a little unsure of how this will go. I guess we'll find out, and I'll have lots more to blog about! The bonus is that we won't use all the seeds this year, so next year's costs will be considerably less.

I'm also hoping that we'll be able to borrow a rototiller from either our neighbor or my stepbrother, because digging out where the garden will go (different area from previous years) is miserable to do by hand.