"Spring" in Minnesota has been miserable. It snowed on the third day of May. Enough said. After a really cold start to the weekend on Saturday morning, the rest of the weekend turned out better than forecasted and we spent time outside. We went for walks, played at the playground and did some yardwork. But what I've really been longing to do is start this season's garden. Our yard looks so depressing right now. The grass is nearly dead from last summer's drought, the gardens are bare and even our window boxes are empty since I'm waiting until planting time to replace the coconut fiber lining. I had gotten a taste of spring when I was in New Jersey last weekend and I was desperate to put some color in my yard.
Soren and I visited our neighborhood nursery and I asked what I could plant this early in the season. I was pointed towards the flowers I could plant next weekend, maybe, and those I could buy now if I brought them onto the porch or into the house in the evening until the nights are reliably warmer. I clarified that I wanted something I could plant now, as in today. I left with enough verbena and ranunculus to fill the four large flower pots on our front steps, which I did as soon as we got home.
Even though my yard is still so dreary, looking at the bright colors displayed in my four potted plants makes me happy. And then today I noticed that my flowers aren't the only signs of spring. I spotted tulips poking up in my neighbor's yard and the first buds on our Royal Star Magnolia. I'm excited the spring may finally be reaching us here in Minnesota.
Kiera, Matteo, Oliver and Soren
Showing posts with label Gardening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gardening. Show all posts
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Mother's Day and Another Planting Season
When Chris asked me what I wanted to do for Mother's Day, I insisted I didn't want to do anything more than start the garden. This pregnancy has taken so much out of me that when Chris heads out of town most Monday mornings, I wonder how I'm going to make it until Friday when he arrives back home. And then despite how much he's worked during the week, Chris puts himself on near full-time Oliver duty on the weekends. He takes him to the zoo, goes on walks and pushes him on the swings at the park. I don't have to be in charge of every snack, meal and clean-up, can go out at nap time and don't have to be home by Oliver's 6:30 p.m. bedtime. For those two days, at least, I remember how much easier and more enjoyable parenting is when you have someone else to trade off responsibilities with. So honestly, I just want Chris to keep doing what he's doing whether the calendar says it's Mother's Day or not.
With my low energy due to both pregnancy and a cold, gardening was a perfect activity. We ended up making two trips to the garden store, and while we're not quite ready yet here in Minnesota to plant anything other than hardy crops, we finally planted some flowers. Our house came with flower boxes lining the length of the porch, but I never got around to planting anything our first summer last year. After getting what turned into a pep talk from an employee at the garden store near our house who pointed us towards annuals that were inexpensive enough to plant and just see what happens, we settled on Impatiens. They look pretty dinky right now in the flower boxes - you can barely see them from the sidewalk - but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that if I can keep them alive, (that's the hard part for me!) they'll be looking beautiful in a few weeks.
As for the rest of the yard, we made the first step in our modest plans for adding color to our small city lot. Although the former owners had done simple and tasteful landscaping, Chris and I were so unfamiliar with plants that once we got behind on maintenance, we lost track of what was a weed and what was not. Last fall, we decided it'd be less stressful to start with a clean slate, even if that meant undoing the work the former owners had put into the yard, and we completely ripped out some of the garden plots. The empty patches of dirt committed us to putting something new there this spring. Whereas I had previously been overwhelmed with all the options for flowers and how to make the garden look good, I realized that something was better than nothing and adopted the strategy of picking plants in varying heights and colors, and like the flower boxes, will just have to see what happens.
I finished planting what I had planned for the weekend before the thunderstorm and downpour started. The rain ended up altering the one official Mother's Day celebration we had planned, a picnic my brother-in-law organized in honor of my mother-in-law and me. Instead, we "picnicked" on my in-law's living room floor (picnic basket, blanket and all). Our indoor location had the advantage of the big-screen TV, on which my father-in-law showed us the videos he had taken of Oliver the last couple of months. It was almost as much fun to watch Oliver watch the videos as it was to watch the videos themselves. I really think Oliver recognized himself! Either way, he enjoyed sitting in Dad's lap and having some rare television time.
With my low energy due to both pregnancy and a cold, gardening was a perfect activity. We ended up making two trips to the garden store, and while we're not quite ready yet here in Minnesota to plant anything other than hardy crops, we finally planted some flowers. Our house came with flower boxes lining the length of the porch, but I never got around to planting anything our first summer last year. After getting what turned into a pep talk from an employee at the garden store near our house who pointed us towards annuals that were inexpensive enough to plant and just see what happens, we settled on Impatiens. They look pretty dinky right now in the flower boxes - you can barely see them from the sidewalk - but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that if I can keep them alive, (that's the hard part for me!) they'll be looking beautiful in a few weeks.
As for the rest of the yard, we made the first step in our modest plans for adding color to our small city lot. Although the former owners had done simple and tasteful landscaping, Chris and I were so unfamiliar with plants that once we got behind on maintenance, we lost track of what was a weed and what was not. Last fall, we decided it'd be less stressful to start with a clean slate, even if that meant undoing the work the former owners had put into the yard, and we completely ripped out some of the garden plots. The empty patches of dirt committed us to putting something new there this spring. Whereas I had previously been overwhelmed with all the options for flowers and how to make the garden look good, I realized that something was better than nothing and adopted the strategy of picking plants in varying heights and colors, and like the flower boxes, will just have to see what happens.
I finished planting what I had planned for the weekend before the thunderstorm and downpour started. The rain ended up altering the one official Mother's Day celebration we had planned, a picnic my brother-in-law organized in honor of my mother-in-law and me. Instead, we "picnicked" on my in-law's living room floor (picnic basket, blanket and all). Our indoor location had the advantage of the big-screen TV, on which my father-in-law showed us the videos he had taken of Oliver the last couple of months. It was almost as much fun to watch Oliver watch the videos as it was to watch the videos themselves. I really think Oliver recognized himself! Either way, he enjoyed sitting in Dad's lap and having some rare television time.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Urban Farming
Now that we have a home with a yard, albeit a standard 40x130 lot dominated by a house with an addition and deck on the back and an over-sized garage, we're skipping the CSA this year and are trying our luck at urban farming. Well, just with a focus on plants and sans the chickens and goats. The former owners left behind two raised garden beds and two planter boxes, so with most of the hard work of the garden prep done for us, we'd have felt really lazy if we didn't at least try to plant something.
So there we were on Mother's Day, a day of blue skies and pleasant temperatures, a respite from an unseasonably cold and dismal May, our happy, little family turning the soil in our first gardening venture. Oliver sat on a blanket in the grass happily gumming the garden hose and watched his parents debate an activity completely outside their standard repertoire. Chris peppered me with questions I couldn't answer, like how wide the rows should be or how close together we should place the seedlings. I had checked out numerous books on gardening from the library with titles like Garden Primer, Edible Gardening for the Midwest, Container Gardening for the Midwest, Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening and so on - practically the whole gardening section - and then found little time to do more than page through them. I decided it would be less stressful to let the books decorate our coffee table and instead just throw down some seed and see what happens. Chris, who strove for perfection in planning and executing the gardens, had claimed the bed on the side of the house as "his garden," and spent the weeks before the last frost planning and building the perfect bunny-proof cedar fence for his small plot. With the perimeter of his garden looking that good, he wanted a planting strategy with proven results and didn't like my laissez faire approach.
Our plantings include the usual tomatoes and zucchini, as well as peanuts and one lone pumpkin plant. I purchased it with visions of carving pumpkins with my son (as if a then 13-month-old is going to be actually doing any carving). Now I'd wished I'd bought more, even at the risk of over-running my garden with what will turn into huge plants, since I'm afraid my one plant could die on me. Chris assured me that come fall, there'll be no shortage of jack-o-lantern-worthy pumpkins I could just buy.
If we experience a complete crop failure, we won't be without other options for locally-grown produce. The revered St. Paul farmer's market is within biking distance and the metro area's most urban "farmer" is utilizing otherwise unused land right in our own neighborhood. Or I can try looking longingly over the fence at my neighbor's well-tended garden bed and hope they take pity on us and share some of their crop.
When I told my grandmother that we'd started on our first garden and how I had no idea how successful we'd be, she hoped Chris and I wouldn't be repeating family history. My grandparents started their family in the rowhouses of Northeast Philadelphia, which sprouted following World War II and stretch block after block for miles. The tuck-under garage on the backside of the house left no yard, so when they moved with my dad and uncle to the suburbs in the late 1950s, my grandfather had big plans for vegetable gardening on his 3/4-acre lot. According to my grandmother, he liked golfing more than tending to his garden and the only vegetables to be grown in any following year on Annasmead Road were my grandmother's tomatoes.
So there we were on Mother's Day, a day of blue skies and pleasant temperatures, a respite from an unseasonably cold and dismal May, our happy, little family turning the soil in our first gardening venture. Oliver sat on a blanket in the grass happily gumming the garden hose and watched his parents debate an activity completely outside their standard repertoire. Chris peppered me with questions I couldn't answer, like how wide the rows should be or how close together we should place the seedlings. I had checked out numerous books on gardening from the library with titles like Garden Primer, Edible Gardening for the Midwest, Container Gardening for the Midwest, Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening and so on - practically the whole gardening section - and then found little time to do more than page through them. I decided it would be less stressful to let the books decorate our coffee table and instead just throw down some seed and see what happens. Chris, who strove for perfection in planning and executing the gardens, had claimed the bed on the side of the house as "his garden," and spent the weeks before the last frost planning and building the perfect bunny-proof cedar fence for his small plot. With the perimeter of his garden looking that good, he wanted a planting strategy with proven results and didn't like my laissez faire approach.
Our plantings include the usual tomatoes and zucchini, as well as peanuts and one lone pumpkin plant. I purchased it with visions of carving pumpkins with my son (as if a then 13-month-old is going to be actually doing any carving). Now I'd wished I'd bought more, even at the risk of over-running my garden with what will turn into huge plants, since I'm afraid my one plant could die on me. Chris assured me that come fall, there'll be no shortage of jack-o-lantern-worthy pumpkins I could just buy.
If we experience a complete crop failure, we won't be without other options for locally-grown produce. The revered St. Paul farmer's market is within biking distance and the metro area's most urban "farmer" is utilizing otherwise unused land right in our own neighborhood. Or I can try looking longingly over the fence at my neighbor's well-tended garden bed and hope they take pity on us and share some of their crop.
When I told my grandmother that we'd started on our first garden and how I had no idea how successful we'd be, she hoped Chris and I wouldn't be repeating family history. My grandparents started their family in the rowhouses of Northeast Philadelphia, which sprouted following World War II and stretch block after block for miles. The tuck-under garage on the backside of the house left no yard, so when they moved with my dad and uncle to the suburbs in the late 1950s, my grandfather had big plans for vegetable gardening on his 3/4-acre lot. According to my grandmother, he liked golfing more than tending to his garden and the only vegetables to be grown in any following year on Annasmead Road were my grandmother's tomatoes.
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