February 27, 2011 - Pre-Spring Cleaning

Today was abnormally warm and sunny.  It was nice be able to get down to the garden and see what the winter has done to it.  Turns out it looked a mess - worse than these pictures do justice.

 

Before:

After:

I was able to clean up a lot of the brush and weeds around the grapes, berries, and the annex.  It's looking a lot better, but I feel that here are several hours worth of clean up work left. I also have to figure out to do with two large piles of debris...

In addition to the clean up I took a look at the soil and it doesn't look good.  I need to get rid of these rocks. 

I'm thinking about building a little sieve out of some 2x4s and chicken wire to sift them out, but we'll see how that goes.  I have some more pressing issues.  If needed I may just try and run the tiller over it and see what happens.  The stones are soft and flaky consisting mostly of mica schist, and I suppose they will grind down or maybe improve drainage if not (trying to be positive).
 

The hose situation is pretty dire too.  The post on which the hose array was mounted had rotted through, and two of the three hoses no longer function with all the holes in them (I have no idea where the operational hose goes.  All I know it doesn't go anywhere near where I need it to).  All of this means if I want to utilize the soaker-hoses, I need to get this fixed before the season gets underway.  I don't even want to mention the state of the electric fence- I'll save that for another day. I'm hopeful it won't be too big of a deal.

I started some flower seeds for Stacey, 75 peat pots plus another 20 lavender plants should about fill the deck!  I'm also trying out some basil from seed this year to see how that goes.  I have 25 peat pots going with the hope I can have an enormous basil crop for an endless pesto supply this summer for sandwiches and pasta.  I'm not sure if I'll be planting them in the ground or have a large part of the deck covered in sweet basil - it'll probably be half and half to see which does best.

Stacey planted some flower bulbs last year and they're starting to break though the soil.  I can't wait to see some color down here!!