Productive day!

Today was another beautiful sunny day here.  It was almost easy to forget it's only January and pretend it was spring instead!

I took two very long walks with Syd.  Both were nearly an hour.  The morning walk took us on a nice route down to the water, and back up through downtown.  I like walking there on Sunday mornings, because it's pretty quiet.  Syd gets a little goofy if there are a lot of cars and people around.  Our afternoon walk was kind of a silly route, but I really enjoyed it.  This time we walked just over two miles, looping around the northeast neighborhoods.  It was pretty uneventful, which is exactly how I like it!  I did spy a couple of old trailers at parked on a street we haven't been down before.  One was a Terry, and the other was a... crap.  My mind has drawn a blank.  It starts with an S, but is not a Shasta or a Siesta (which we saw yesterday).  It will come back to me - or I will go back to it.  Heh.

After I got home from the first walk, it was so nice out I just had to head to the garden and I'm really glad I did.  Just with the work I did today, I already feel like I'm way ahead of last year!

Behold...





There is an oregano plant buried under that mess, and some hollyhocks.  Things were pretty sloppy around the blueberries as well.

A bit of trimming and pulling, then voilà!  The oregano and hollyhocks can be seen, and the weeds are no longer encroaching the blueberries.  The corner is ready to be forked when it comes time to plant flower seeds.  Also, I'll be able to see if any flowers sprout on their own and keep the weeds down around them.  I usually plant cosmos and sunflowers along the fence.




I wasn't done with just that, so I kept working my way down the fence.  Last year, due to a long wet spring I never really did what I did today - and never got around to clearing this strip at all.  We didn't have any sunflowers!  It was a sad state of affairs, during what was kind of a bummer of a year what with Michael's broken leg.  I am determined not to let that happen again.  We MUST have sunflowers!




By the end of it, I'd cleared quite a bit!  I didn't pull out every last clump of grass, but I'll be able to make a pass through with the pitchfork and it won't feel like I'm clearing a prairie.




In case you're wondering why I bother - here's a picture of the garden from 2011!  The sunflowers look great, and the bees love them.  It's totally worth the work.





I'm really happy to be thinking about the garden again.