Thinking

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately. Yes, I know, that'll get me in trouble. Still.

I think about garden. I need to fence the garden so the chickens don't eat everything, and I want it done soon because once it is fenced, I can move the netting out of the way and get the trellises up for the beans. Oh right, I need to build the trellises for the beans. Should I use teepees this year, or string? I am leaning towards teepees. I have lots of long saplings that would make good supports, and I'm planning on moving the raised bed next year, so I don't want to go to much trouble making permanent supports where it is.

If I am putting in fencing, how big should I make the garden area? I need to make it big enough to enclose all of what I want to grow. So, what do I want to grow? Well, some berry bushes, maybe a crabapple tree in the northeast corner, more raised beds, and an arbour to hang things from (like tomatoes in buckets). Oh, if I put up an arbour I could put the compost piles under the arbour, if I put some supports around the sides to hold things in. That'd be convenient. I could make a few piles, and if I put it right next to the fence, dumping kitchen waste into it would be simple.

Mulch ... right, I need to mulch around the garden beds. I have some mulch around the potatoes (the potatoes are doing wonderfully well, especially given that they were started from store bought taters that grew eyes sitting in the storage bin for too long). Bunny Bedding makes really good mulch: it's mostly wood shavings, with some nice bunny manure added for fertilizer. Perfect!

Now if I could mulch the entire area I plan to enclose, I can kill off the grass and not have to fight it in the new beds I make for next year. I made a deal with The Boy to haul waste hay over to use for mulch - I'll pay him $1.50 per full barrowload of hay, plus after ten barrowloads, he gets a box of Life Cereal that he can eat any time he wants. Normally he can only have it for breakfast, so the opportunity to eat it for snacks too was a key factor in his agreeing to haul hay.

Ah, the garden. Things are coming up nicely. The tomatoes aren't growing very fast, but they are growing. Maybe I'll move some into buckets ... once I have the arbor up. Then I'll have more empty squares. Come to think of it, the garden has some empty squares now, where things didn't take ... what should I plant there? I think I'll need more carrots. Oh, and if I remember to buy some onion sets, I could plant those. I wonder if I should try growing wheat in a square? I suppose the chickens would like to eat it, even if we don't grind it up for ourselves. I could harvest it in the fall and feed it to them over the winter.

Once the fence is in, I want to plant morning glories along the outside of it. I love morning glories. I know my grandfather said they were only meant to grow up the side of an outhouse, but I think they're pretty. I wonder if the chickens will eat them if they are growing on the fence.

Yes, this is what it's like in my mind these days. I do a lot of garden-stream-of-consciousness thinking.

It must be a sign of spring. :)