Late Winter
February 23, 2022
While officially it is still winter, spring has been poking its head up lately. Gorgeous sunny days, some a bit cooler than others, have us ready to begin planning the gardens for the year. I’ve sorted my flower seeds as we now have a dedicated flower garden. I’ve been harvesting seeds for the past few years and at the end of last summer one of our wonderful neighbors sent me home with a number of seeds from their extensive gardens. Not only do I love cutting flowers from the garden for the house but this year I’m hoping to grow a few things to dry for tea as well as plants that lend well to making dye for fabrics. We also started our first indoor seeds this week – ground cherries. We’ve never grown them before and we’re excited to see how it goes. While I’ve never had them in our gardens, I certainly enjoy eating them!
Last year we started our orchard with a few apple and cherry trees, and nearby are our three fig trees. This year we need to decide where we are moving our raspberries as well as where we will plant the blueberries and strawberries. Thankfully Scott is wonderful with knowing what each plant needs and I’m happy to follow his lead on where things like that should go on the property.
As for our edible gardens, we are busy planning for this years layout and already buying seeds. One thing I can’t wait to participate in is our island’s seed exchange. People harvest their vegetable seeds and then share them with other island gardeners. Thus this year we are being very particular about which seeds we buy, making sure there are no GMOs so that all of our seeds can be harvested.
When it comes to vegetables we learned a lot last year. Lessons such as “grow no more than TWO zucchini plants and you will still probably get far more zucchini squash than you will need” or “you can NEVER plant too many pea vines” and also “you can definitely plant too many beans unless you plan to preserve them”. But that’s the gorgeous thing about gardening isn’t it- the endless lessons it teaches you through the years. This will be our third year gardening on the little island and with the new gardens Scott built this year we should be able to grow quite a lot of what we need for the summer.