Right Around the Corner

You know it’s spring around here, because winter is doing it’s traditional temper tantrums of regular storms, grasping at straws to stay alive.

(The kids used this last snowfall to pack snow into containers they found in the recycling barrel, and build walls for the purpose of snowball fights.  They seriously get excited each time it snows…still.)

And yet we know it will be gone soon.  The signs are all here.  The ladybugs are showing up in the house again.  Robins are showing up outside the house.  It may snow, but the deep cold is gone.

I feel like we’re standing at the edge of some cliff this time of year.  We peer down into the crazy-ness of the summer, with Knut in the field all the time, and I attempt to organize it all before it overwhelms us.  We know it will be crazy busy, and we have yet to have a garden that doesn’t get overgrown beyond repair by August.  Yet it’s still exciting.  Like bungie-jumping.

Looking at the calendar, I’ve realized that my only opening to paint the cupboards is the month of May. So now I’m contemplating how possible that is, and counting that cost.  I picked up about 50 paint chip samples at the store yesterday.  That sort freaked Knut out.  It somehow moved the project to being talked about to being planned.

We’re still planning on moving our garden to a different location in the yard, and doing more French style beds.  This is a HUGE change.  We can’t bear to replant grass in the old garden, though.  Right now our strawberries and raspberries and asparagus is planted down there and will expand every year.  So I think instead of abandoning that garden, we’re going to transform it into our perennial garden.  I was supposed to thin the strawberries last fall but was unable to.  So this year the strawberries will be very crowded, and I’ll thin them out this fall.

Knut has really been encouraging me to plant a cutting flower garden with the remaining space down there.  I’m planning some huge bulbs, that will multiply over the years.  They won’t take up a ton of space, though this year, so most of the garden will have strawberry popcorn planted, with squash and pumpkins planted in between the rows for weed control.  We’ve never grown popcorn before, and are doing so on a whim.  It’s called strawberry popcorn not because it tastes like strawberries, but because the kernels are red, and can be used as ornamental corn in the fall as well as popcorn.  It just seemed fun.

As for the new French-style beds that we’re starting this year, it will have a crude fence this year to keep the chickens out.  There will be 5 beds in all.  We may expand it to 6 in the future for symmetry.  Silje and I spent a lot of time going through our new gardening book on companion gardening called “Carrots Love Tomatoes.”  The concept of the book is that some plants grow better next to other plants.  Several factors are taken into account, such as root depth diversity, attracting bugs that are good for the neighboring plants, or repel bugs that are bad for the neighboring plants.  We came up with our list of vegetables we plan to grow, and then figured out which bed they belonged in.  We plan to plant less in rows in these beds, and more as a patch, for a denser crop that controls weeds better than the conventional rows.

I’m putting Silje and David each in charge of one of the beds.  I’m hoping in the future that each kid will have a vegetable bed that is “theirs” as far as responsibility goes.  Here’s what our beds are going to look like:

Bed #1 (Silje picked this bed as hers):
Tomatoes
Carrots
Onions
Beets
Garlic
Marigolds

Bed #2:
Potatoes
Sweet Potatoes
Cabbage
Brussel Sprouts
Broccoli
Dill

Bed #3 (David picked this bed as his):
Peas
Cucumbers
Squash

Bed #4
Green Beans
Pie pumpkins

Bed #5
Peppers
Basil
Sunflowers

Old Garden (future only perennial garden):
Raspberries
Strawberries
Asparagus
Cutting flowers
Mint
1 salad row: lettuce, spinach, radishes
strawberry popcorn
(I need to pick some more gourds for weed control in the popcorn)

Whew!  Bungie jumping, right?  Yes, we are crazy.