Spring has technically sprung, though you wouldn’t know by looking outside: the snow just melted and there’s more in the forecast.
My wife and I began a tradition some years ago that our children participated in this year. In mid-February Utah seems to have a “pseudo-spring.” The weather turns warm, the skys clear, the ground thaws and even dries out for about a week. This year was no different. Just around St. Valentine’s Day if you drove past my house in Syracuse, Utah, you’d have found my wife, our older two children (5 and 6), and I outside working in the yard (our youngest was “working” too, but not accomplishing much more than having gleeful fun). We trimmed most of our roses, cleared out dead brush from the prior autumn, dressed up a few of the planting sites of some of the new trees I’d planted durning a thaw in November, and raking up yad debris.
We filled two garbage cans and a large box and had to stop — not for lack of stuff to do, but due to having no room to put the mess.
Now, before any of you go flaming me because I didn’t compost the trimmings, I have my reasons. I normally compost everything I can (we even put our banana peels around our rose bushes because I’ve heard they like the extra potassum in the soil). There are, however, a few things that I just can’t compost: rose trimmings and “über-seeders” (flowering plants that put forth gazillions of seeds). Yes, over time even the thorns will degrade, but getting poked with a nearly composted rose thorn makes for a nasty infections. Yes, the heat of the pile should kill off the seeds, but not before they’ve blown all over the yard to become next year’s weeds.
So now that the weather is agin hinting at “true spring” though has been given to our garden. We’ve got some hard-scaping that we’d like to accomplish this year, but the question remains: what to plant.
We’ve got our obligatory square-foot salad garden (4 square feet that provide MUCH more salad “stock” than my family could ever hope to eat). We also have our pumpkins; last year we harvested over 50 pumpkins! I’ve never grown a successful corn crop so we’ve given up on that, and we grow our tomatos inverted (yes, upside-down) in hanging pots.
I’ve considered growning a small sprice garden, but have been veto’d for the time being: “we have so many spices that we’ve purchased, we have to use those up first.”
Then I came across a post at ahoyhoy.org (the blog of a friend of a friend) regarding themed gardens, and since I’ll have four (or more) producing square-foot gardens this year, rather than having one for each person (as we’d originally planned but never implimented in practice) I might just theme them.
