Garden Fever

So the NY metropolian area was battered with one of the gnarliest winters seen in a long time. I mean I had never seen snow piles that high around our parts. We had close to 50 inches of snow during the month of January alone. Ok I know you mountain folks are laughing at us, and I'm with you laughing. But seriously the locals around here just can't handle it. I remember thinking during February that this snow ain't gonna melt until June. Well now we're in April and you would never had known what went we went through. Well except for the occasional wrecked bush here and there, but now everythings a blooming and spring fever is in high gear.

The weather has been shaping up each and every day, and with each and every day that I don't have to schlep to work I've found myself outside playing around the yard. But here's the catch. Hubby and I live in a teeny tiny apartment on the 1st floor of his parent's square yellow high ranch on a whole whapping tenth of an acre. So for the past several seasons I've been limited to keeping a random container garden on the patio outside our door. It was fun and cute and whenever we would entertain everybody would love it. But then it got lame. In my opinion.

I mean I mostly stuck to hearty flowers like impatiens and lily's because the area is pretty shaded. Here's my patio in the fall with some mums added to the mix. But I wasn't getting a huge reward. I needed more. So I planted some cucumber, string beans, peppers and I attempted a pumpkin. Needless to say I didn't do too hot. Here was my big harvest of 2010.

ooooh wow look at that! And with that I decided that next year its going to be different. So now its next year and I convinced my ma in law to let me take an overgrown and under utilized corner of their yard and let me attempt a real garden. Well lucky me she's into gardening herself so I didn't even need to ask, but figured I probably should. So here's what we started with.

She had the bricks surrounding the entire corner in some horrible unthought out design (sorry ma) and there is an almond tree and a peach tree that she planted many years ago. So we started off by pulling out the bricks and raking up all the leaves and dead stuff that was squashed under mounds of snow all winter. Hubby was awesome and helped out big time.

After we raked the whole area clean, we decided to encircle each tree with a ring of bricks. Yeah its a bit hokie for my liking, but we figure we'll plant some impatiens or some other flowers inside the rings. Besides what else were we to do with all those bricks? Hubs then turned over all the soil and we left the area alone for a week to let the soil have a chance to breath. Then the following weekend I turned everything over again and started digging in the compost pile my ma in law has had going for many years and laying it out on our area.

Yikes I don't even want to know what could be living under there. But it has great compost so I dug down and pulled up bucket loads. Oh and something had burrowed into the side of it over the winter, Hubby was looking in the burrow hole. I tried not too think about what it was or is each time I dug deeper. I then made my hills and spread out heaping amounts of compost over the hills and that pretty much brings me to where I'm at today.

Its been raining a good amount this week so I think that's a good thing. Its giving the compost a chance to work its way into the soil and sort of wash it out a bit. Now I could be totally wrong on my theory, but the hub seems to agree with me on it so that's what we're doing. Which leads to me now. I'm planning on planting a bunch of seeds this weekend, but I'll save that story for another day.