preparing the new beds

Jed and I often talk about how little time we spend tending our garden.  We seem to be more of the pick, water, and pray kind of gardeners.  This has been a very conscious decision on my part.  I am a firm believer of putting a lot of work in at the front end so that the majority of our time can be spent admiring and eating from our garden, rather than feeling like we always have chores waiting for us outside.  When we were looking at houses, high on our list was no turf.  We didn't like the idea of having to spend time each week mowing something just for the sake of having something green.  We knew that if we bought grass, we would eventually end up replacing it and that seemed like a lot of work.  When we found this house, we knew we had struck gold in so many respects.  It was at the end of a cul de sac in a quiet part of town, all the neighbors knew each other, we were within biking distance of the library and downtown and, best of all, it had a fully functioning (and irrigated!) garden.   We've slowly added our own plants to the mix- taking out some water-hogs and replacing them with natives, adding new vegetable beds here and there.  But our gardening schedule has remained the same every year- sometime in the fall cut back all of the native sages and butterfly bushes, sometime in the winter mulch and add compost, sometime in the spring plant some seeds or seedlings- repeat this last one every month or so until the fall- and repeat yearly.  All told, I would say we spend about 10-20 days a year doing actual 'gardening.'  The rest are spent enjoying our garden. 

Well, it is officially 'sometime in winter' as I spent a fantastic (truly!) day spreading many hundreds of pounds of compost over our new beds as well as old beds and fruit trees.  It was tough work.  And it felt fantastic. I love a garden right after the compost has been laid.  There is so much potential.  It's perfectly clean- a blank slate for the greens and grays of new growth to peek out of.  This year I had some fantastic helpers who enjoyed giving each other tips on how best to rake the compost, got the biggest kick out of the fact that they were pushing around horse poop, and did a darn good job of keeping (most) of the compost in its designated area. 

Our next big job is chipping the trees we cut down and hauling that down to cover the new beds.  Actually, even before that, I'll have to lay down my new irrigation.  Oh, and maybe the seeds?  Haven't really thought through this next phase but I'm sure it'll all come to me.  Winter really is my favorite season, especially when it looks and acts more like spring :)