March Garden

It has been a beautiful day here in Washington!  I went out and did a bit of garden work.  I cleaned out three garden beds and got them ready for planting.  I thought if I started and did a wee bit every day I would be ready when the time comes to plant plants.

Mister T had to give the pea bed his touch too.  You can see his paw prints. 

The first box is the box I plan on having for peas.  I did use this box for peas last year so next year I will swap it out and plant something else.  I added some rock dust and the soil was so warm I decided to go forth and plant my peas!  I am planting seeds from Sustainable Seed this year and some from Hometown Seed.  Both companies have non-hybrid seed which I will use exclusively this year so I will be able to collect seed at the end of the year.  Luke, my five year old neighbor, came and helped me.  He is a good gardener and works very hard.  We turned over the soil, pulled out the few little weeds and traced out some rows.  Luke added the seed. I am going to cover it with clear plastic to keep the ground warm.  We will certainly have some frosts between now and April but it will be ok.

This will be a vegetable box but not squash.

Then I weeded out two more boxes and covered them with black plastic.  Last year I had added more soil and compost to these boxes so they are still filled up pretty good.  The black plastic will keep weeds from growing.  One of the boxes had lots of carrots that I did not dig up.  My mistake!  They are now being eaten by hundreds of earthworms which is a good thing.  Luke and I had fun watching the worms.  Some of them were carefully placed in the compost bin along with the carrots.  None of them were really edible at this point because the worms have really been doing their job well.  I will have to be more careful this year and be sure I harvest them all and not waste any.

Garden Cottage looks kind of dismal this time of year.

I also planted some gladiola bulbs outside the garden shed.  No I want to call it the garden cottage as that sounds better to me.  I hope to have lots more hollyhocks and roses outside the cottage this year and a row of new garden boxes that will be lined with large sunflowers.  I love holly hocks and have some seed I saved last year to plant.  A few have been trying to get established and I am not sure why they don't do better out there.  I have some in the front yard that do really well.  


So that is what I got accomplished out there today.  So much to do and so little time!  lol I used to have some cocktail napkins that had been given to me that said So many men and so little time!  I loved them!  Alas gardening is my focus now a days.  My finger nails have dirt under them and I am happy.