Spring Garden Update

We're leaning into the chaos this year

I know you’ve all been absolutely champing at the bit to find out what is going on with my garden this year. Has she planted early? Did she make a better plan than all previous years? Is she stressed out? I know, I know, it’s all anyone can talk about ;0)

Well, my friends, I’m happy to report that the sun was out the other weekend, plants are officially in the ground, and I did not stress this year. I have not, however, made any particular grand plans about the garden. In the last days of our plant sale, I decided to buy only tomato plants. And then, I had surgery, where I would not think about the garden until the rain let up last weekend.

Spurred not by guilt (which is the usual for me), but by actual motivation, I used the first dry day to get my hands dirty and get those tomatoes in the ground. I even moved some of the plants I’d kept in pots previously into the new planters we bought on sale last Fall.

With my momentum in full swing, I wanted to plant something in the front yard. Each year, the two garden beds have been blank slates. For the last two seasons, they’ve served as a vessel for my plant sale purchases. And for two seasons, I have almost gotten nothing out of them. Either the plants I put in there weren’t right for the conditions (too sunny or too shady) or I didn’t harvest early enough and they became bitter. It was a frustrating waste.

When I asked my sister what to do, she brought over a bag of perennial flower seeds to scatter in one of them. For the other, not wanting to make much effort tbh, I wondered, should I just dump a bunch of seeds together and see what happens? I googled this as an option and, of course, it’s called chaos gardening. And I was annoyed that I had never even considered this. I wanted to experiment.

So I combined a number of seeds for edible and flowering plants, then spread them throughout the bed.

Admittedly, the planting part is anticlimactic when the initial outcome looks like the same, boring bed. But compared to the previous years, when the best part was really that first planting, and everything went downhill from there, maybe this is the direction I needed to go. I feel like the experiment of it all is the best part. If it fails, I learn something new. But also, I’m just interested to see what it’ll look like in the end.

Seemingly boring bed with the rhody poppin’ in the back!

For now, though, I’m already worried that the seeds aren’t germinating fast enough. But what do I know?

So for all you gardeners, gardener-wannabes, gardening voyeurs, and supporters alike, I hope your gardening season has also started with a bang.