Gardening...

Even though I was a floral designer for five years, I'm still a complete novice when it comes to gardening!  Last year I had a great time experimenting with my brand new yard, and it was a definite learning experience.  All the snow the last few weeks has made me start to long for Spring, so I'm starting to plan my gardening goals for this year! 

My dad and I built two beautiful raised beds that we put on the rv pad in my back yard.  Last year I used them for a vegetable garden, but this year I'm thinking about shifting at least half of it to a cutting garden.  Since I will be having a baby in May I'm just not sure that I'll pay enough attention to it at the right times to harvest veggies and all that.  If I don't cut the flowers, they'll just be pretty in the yard I think.  So I'm looking into ordering seeds right now.  I do have a good idea of what flowers I like to arrange with, since have done a LOT of that =) 

I already have a few hydrangea bushes, and I planted a peony bush last year that I hope flowers this year, if I didn't kill it yet.  I also had a great crop of larkspur, which goes nicely in a vase. In the fall I planted a variety of tulip bulbs at one end of the raised beds.  I hope to add stock, which is one of my favorite flowers to arrange with because it's not too pricey but it fills a vase very well.  And I like the scent!  My cart at www.burpee.com also includes cosmos and sweet peas.  My plan is to kind of just scatter the seeds and hope they grow, and possibly get one set of little pots to start a few seeds so Serenity can watch them grow. (And so I know what is growing in the ground so I don't pull out flowers with the weeds =)  We'll see how that goes... it may or may not work!  But I'm sure something will come up.

The second raised bed will hopefully still contain strawberries and two blueberry bushes... but I did not take very good care of them last summer so I won't be surprised or alarmed if they didn't survive.  I now know it's good to have a watering plan in place BEFORE you plant a bunch of things.  Especially if your hose doesn't really reach the far end of your raised bed.  I'll post more about the design of my flower beds later, but today I just wanted to think about next year =)

hmm... Poppies and Yarrow might also be nice... I still have some thinking to do.  Good thing there's still snow on the ground.  You can check out my raised beds in the bottom scrapbook pages, plus some pictures of my larkspur and other gardeny things =)