Gardeningfever

I can barely wait to get to work on the garden, but the cold weather and my flu has kept me in. Last year I had my own little "plant" to tend to, so I wasn't thinking about the garden hardly at all (the photo is from last spring, no tulips here yet, instead there were a few snowflakes today :( ), but this year...I've always thought it's the farmers' genes in me that awaken in the spring, but for some reason they just urge me to plant flowers, hardly ever anything "useful", like carrots etc. And this year....I just read anything about plants and gardens I can get my hands on and watch all the programs until I can get my hands in the dirt myself (maybe D will become a gardener, I force him to read and watch as well...)! My father was always upset with me for "wasting my time" with flowers, and more than once he managed to flatten a bed of lovingly tended plants with a tractorwheel or something similar...still I persisted, and in the past years I've really let myself loose. That is my therapy, to absorb myself in the world of soil and plants. I'm not too fond of mowing the lawn, so instead I've converted most of the lawn into flowerbeds, much easier with perennial plants, they more or less take care of themselves! Of course now there is a new "inspiration" - the garden has to be practical for the little one as well.

I have all kinds of plans - more roses, don't have many of those. Maybe an arch-kind of thing, I mean where you pass through and somekind of plant (rose I'm thinking) will grow on it. (Er, that's not for the little one...that's only for me :). Then it would be fun to maybe make some wooden flowerpots, and paint them in strong colors...and also drag old things, like a bike, into some corner and use it as a flowerpot... Like I already mentioned, I'll move some bushes later (they bloom quite early, so I'll let them do that first) and also raspberries, which have moved themselves to better places in the garden, now they'll be put to a good but more suitable spot, in order to create a future footballfield for D :).

An inventory about winterdamage had both good and bad news - a rabbit had eaten the appletree D got for his birthday. I was so upset when I noticed this, especially since it was my own fault. I had protected the trunk, but noticed that because there was so much snow, it didn't reach high enough. At that moment I didn't take the time to cover the tree"baby", and then it was too late. But then my mother said: "well, rabbits need to eat as well", and for some reason it comforted me to think the poor famished furry thing survived the cold thanks to the juicy young treebark...so I'll plant a new D-appletree. And cover it next winter, properly. The good news was that the water-lily in the pond had survived. Since it didn't bloom last year, I didn't bother to take it inside for the winter, even if I new the pond is not deep enough and will freeze to the bottom in the winter. But maybe because the coldspell was fairly short, the lily had survived. Now I gave it a bit of soil and hope it'll give us a beautiful, out-of-this-world-white flower in the summer!