It’s cold… think summer

Those alliums fascinated (and spooked) neighborhood kids

I’m trying to forget winter by thinking about what I’ll plant in the garden this summer. I’ve already done my inventory of leftover seeds and have more tomato seeds than I thought plus lots of all sorts of vegetables and flowers. Not that it will keep me from buying something. Nicotiana for one. And some other heirloom tomato.

Next: plot out the four raised beds (and the fifth that will be built in May and filled with 10-12 tomato plants). I may go a bit overboard once I visit tomatomania (www.tomatomania.com) in May.

So how many days til the first crocus blooms? And then the daffodils and alliums? Signs of spring can’t come soon enough.

Just a few of our hundreds of daffodils, 2008

Hello world!

Welcome to our blog! This hopefully will be a written and visual journal of our central New Jersey/zone six garden.

It is our fourth year playing with the soil, and we have gone from three raised beds to four, and this year will probably be five. We tried the Square Foot Gardening method last year with decent success (and half the time it didn’t work well was probably because I was lazy). The flowers in the front have slept, crept and leapt. Many have been split and others will be split this spring — a good thing as we seem to bump out the beds every fall. This year I think I’ll concentrate on filling in the middle section to overflowing.

We back onto preserved woodland, so deer are a problem. So much for tulips. We also have a groundhog living under our deck, much to my annoyance. I wish both types of animals would eat weeds and leave everything else alone. Somehow the deer haven’t gone for our hostas, planted by the previous owner. Hopefully it will stay that way. But I think the azalea we bought in the fall may have a rougher time.

And then there is this one black squirrel I caught in the strawberry bed with a half-eaten unripe strawberry in his mouth in 2008. I bet he’s the one who ate all those berries I was letting ripen for just a couple more days before picking! The ones we did eat were so delicious that I swore off supermarket berries (not that those are very good anyway).