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I don’t know what it’s like in the warmer parts of the world, but up here in the frozen north, this is the time of year we all start to go a little bonkers. I am currently experiencing the worst cabin fever I’ve ever had in my entire life! Montana is on pace to break all sorts of snow related records. There have been very few warm days to give us breaks from the blistering cold. An avid skier friend even told me they were getting tired of skiing. That’s, like, sacrilegious around these parts!
As the days start to get noticeably longer, it doesn’t give me hope. No, no! It makes me maddeningly impatient for spring. And makes me want to sleep like a bear until the weather gets better.
So what’s an impatient girl like me supposed to do while still trapped inside? Well, I guess I’ll just plan all the garden stuff!
So here’s a list of all the things I plan on accomplishing this growing season:
Start My First Vegetable Garden
The hard prep work from last year and winter research has all led to this! I have a garden area selected, rough plans for raised beds drawn up, and all my supplies for starting seeds ready to go. My area’s last frost date is expected to be around June 1st. Montana, amiright?!? So even though all the charts tell me I should be starting seeds around April-ish, I just can’t wait anymore.
I’ll begin planting my seeds in the next week or so fully aware that starting them this early may have interesting results. But I just need some green in my life, like now!
Re-Sodding My Lawn-The Sequel
Have you ever heard a new mom talk about having another baby because they don’t remember the pain of labor? Well, this project is basically the same thing. I am that mom, and lawns are my babies. Nick and I re-sodded our backyard last year by ourselves to keep costs down. It was long, hard work, but I learned a ton. And the end result was so satisfyingly awesome that it made me feel as if I could conquer all lawns everywhere! As Nick recalls, it was brutal, soul-crushing work. It was so bad, in fact, that he has vowed that he won’t help me if I choose to DIY our side lawn this year. So…at the very least that should make for some interesting content, right?
Landscaping My Backyard.Â
Or at least begin to. When I re-sodded last year, I left a perimeter of garden space that follows the house and fences. (I also had sooooooo much river rock from redoing the lawn that I was able to use them as a real pretty garden border!) In my head, it wasn’t going to create that much space. But now that the garden beds are created…well, it’s going to take a while to fill them. Did you know that plants can get expensive quickly? Again, in my head, I knew that, but I didn’t take it to heart as I should have. So the plan this year is to identify my landscaping “big wins”. Like maybe planting a tree or two? Or some big shrubs? We’ll see. But I’m excited to start putting these beds to use!
Finish tidying up around my shed.
I didn’t get to finish this project last summer. Thanks, forest fire smoke! Although one could argue that this shouldn’t have been that big of a project in the first place…
Thanks to an interesting choice of “fence patching” by the previous owners, we have an abundance of river rocks. As we were re-sodding the lawn, we decided to stack the rocks behind our shed and figure out what to do with them later. And now that the lawn is looking beautiful, it’s time to clean up the eyesore that is the shed.
So I’ll be finishing rock relocation, fixing the fence, leveling out the ground, putting in a few plants, and laying down smaller rocks to create a path around the shed.
On paper, it doesn’t look like much, but these four projects ought to be enough to keep me busy for a while. Now if the snow would just go away so I can get started…