I've caught Spring Fever.  Duly inspired by nightly doses of garden makeovers on the BBC America channel, I'm psyched up to get dirt under my fingernails.   

It's amazing the change you can affect after a few rounds in the yard with the weed population, and after putting the mower and tiller to use.  The winner is still undecided in the fight between me and the seed-popping Little Bitter Cress, but I'm determined to knock them out.  Several hours on hands and knees with a big bucket now & then will eventually kill them off. 

Weeding is not a favorite pastime of mine.  But instead of hating every minute of my weeding job, today I decided to enjoy the process.  So I sat on my foam knee pad, set a cup of tea nearby, and enjoyed the sound of birds and my son taking caterpillars for rides in his toy dump truck (in between jackhammer bursts from up the street), while methodically picking every Little Bitter Cress I could find, working my in strips across my beds.  The little buggers blessedly pull right out of the soil.  A right into the garbage they go--NOT in the compost.

This method worked to virtually rid my garden of Crab Grass--or is it Quack Grass?  I always gets the name mixed up--a few years back.  Armed with scissors (an indispensable gardening tool), I cut off the seed heads and squirted each clump with Roundup®. Now, I don't have it in my yard.

Planning for a Dry Gardening Season

The winter mulch is pulled back from my vegetable beds, the compost pile has been started, and the tiller run through, and now I'm gearing up to plant the garden.  But, I need to plan.  Number one consideration is crop rotation, and this year, after the winter we've had, number two is plant sparingly.  What?  Sparingly?  Me?

That's right, I'm planting for a dry summer.  Our summers are quite dry anyway, but when I say "dry," I mean I'm planning for possible watering restrictions.  We can find and plant ornamentals that are drought tolerant, but no vegetable likes to be thirsty.