The One Notebook Principle

It’s about that time of year when it’s too warm and too late for early spring gardening work and, normally, I start to panic a little. I convince myself that I’m somehow a failure if I don’t get lots of seeds into the ground and/or go buy out the plant patio at Lowes and my local farm store. My mother and I, because my husband leaves the gardening up to me unless it deals with landscaping, get into her van and go spend lots of money on the promise of a garden I’ll actually keep up with this year.

Some years I do better than others, but last year something ate the bean plants and we ended up with tomato worms. It was not a good year for the garden. Last year I was also able to start seedlings in the greenhouse, but that wasn’t possible this year. We had a large winter storm that dropped, according to the news reporters, “concrete-like snow” and, rather predictably, it was too much for some of the branches and trees in our yard. The greenhouse ended up with one broken window, and several holes in the roof, that have yet to be repaired. It’s being used as a storage shed more than anything else right now, but is definitely not suitable for seedlings with the cooler temperatures we’ve had the past couple of weeks.

With the title including the phrase “What I’m Not Doing,” and with all of my talk of good intentions, you can probably see where this is going. Truthfully, I’m just not going to worry much about the garden this year. There’s just too much yardwork and landscaping to do, as well as the repairs, to really try and have a garden. I might buy a few tomato plants and hope the worms don’t come back (last year was the first of four years that we had them), but I also just signed up for a CSA box at the farm store so fresh, local, organic veg and fruit are still an option.

I’m not going to touch too much on the other summer projects, but they involve (hopefully) the greenhouse repairs, finally finishing the stairs (I started sanding them last spring and I’m still procrastinating on finishing the sanding), and a whole bunch of painting. My husband says we’re repainting the house one room at a time and he’s not wrong. This summer I hope to add on two more spaces to our repainted list. I have other, not house-related things going on as well this summer so, even without a garden, it should be a quick and busy summer overall.

I hope you’re all having a wonderful May! I’ll try to post sooner next time.