Garden Journal: The 2020 Gardening Season -- Our Earliest Start in New England!

Yesterday--Sunday, February 23--was unseasonably and freakishly warm for Peabody, Massachusetts, with high temps in the mid 50s. And so Mulch Boy and I found ourselves drawn outside to begin some spring cleaning in the backyard. Although we are most certainly doomed to several more months of winter, we managed to get a good bit done AND begin developing the first cunning garden scheme of 2020.

What we did

• Raked backyard leaves.
• Cut down dead perennials.
• Cleaned out the raised vegetable garden beds and the herb bed.
• Emptied the soil from one raised bed to another in preparation for The Cunning Scheme.
• Reset the fencing around the herb and vegetable gardens, as DOGS have recently found their way past the barriers. And then found themselves trapped.
• Stirred and reorganized the compost heap.

What we noticed

• The Montauk daisies were all leafing out. Are you kidding me, Montauk daisies?
• Old dried lemongrass smells amazing!
• Oregano lives even in winter.

The most notable thing was all the big improvements we made last year. I had forgotten just how much work we did in 2019, from creating and edging beds, digging up boulders and building stone walls, and so on and so forth. Everything's a bit messy right now, naturally, but we really improved the bone structure of the entire yard, front and back. I just read back through last year's posts and was surprised and delighted to remember all the things we did. And it inspired us to begin detailed planning of the first Cunning Scheme of 2020.

The First Cunning Scheme of 2020

Two years ago, Mulch Boy built me raised vegetable beds. They are wonderful, and we were finally able to grow vegetables successfully up here in New England. However, they have some problems, and these are of my own making. 

I enjoy planning and building things, but I am not what you would call talented or successful at it, in spite of my often very elaborate and detailed planning. The vegetable garden is an excellent case in point. I measured the area, I planned the size of each bed and the required size of the lumber, I calculated the space needed to walk between the beds. I drew diagrams. We bought the lumber and had it cut according to my specifications. We brought it home and assembled the beds using some nifty corner thingies I bought off the Internet. 

And in the end we had four lovely big beds... and barely room to walk between them. Because I had failed to factor in the thickness of the boards (1.5 inches) and the corner brackets (2 inches) when calculating the beds' width. As a result, our garden aisles were 11.5 inches and 8 inches. It's okay, you can laugh.

After two years of carefully traversing these treacherous little paths, last fall we decided we needed to do something about it. And so I started drawing new diagrams in which I reconfigured the existing beds to make them more walkable.

And then we forgot all about it.

Until this past weekend! Out came the tape measure, again. I have now measured every dimension in this portion of the yard--distances from the house to the edge of the porch, from the porch to the cellar doors, from the cellar doors to the backdoor stair. I've measured the existing beds, each piece of lumber, the current paths, the space between the front of the beds and the current fencing, and the distance from the current fencing to the edge of the porch. Look, I did a lot of measuring!

This is just one of four diagrams.

Anyway, there is a plan:

• To remove the bed closest to the porch and space out the remaining three beds more humanely.
• To use the lumber from the removed bed to create a different bed (square this time) in front of the cellar doors.
• To use more of our found bricks to build a fourth bed in front of the herb bed.
• To enclose the entire area with a gated dog fence in order to keep dogs out and allow easy access for the humans.

Use your imagination, people.

Mulch has (mostly) emptied the bed that's to move, and the dog fence is ordered.

And now we wait for the next unseasonably nice day.