It's spring! Yay! But if we SHEs (Sidetracked Home Executives) aren't careful and plan ahead, we can get into a lot of trouble at the nursery. All the more reason to be organized not just with housecleaning, but with gardening. This time of year the nurseries are teaming with flowers that beseech us like friendly puppies at the Humane Society to take them home. And we are like busy bees around those beautiful flowers. After all, we survived winter and we’re sick of gray and ready for sunny colors.
A good rule of your green thumb is Plan, Prepare, Purchase, Plant. If you try to prepare and plant at the same time, you’ll poop out and then those plants that you’ve taken into your care face possible death. Of course it’s not premeditated, but the plants will be just as dead.
Death by good intention
Have you ever seen a honey bee that’s got so much pollen on her feet and thighs that she can barely fly? I often wonder if some of them never make it back to their hives they’re so overloaded.
But like those bees, we can get carried away buying more than we can plant. We fly home with our trunks full of flats of flowers and the optimism we’ll plant them all in a day. But so often we poop out in the middle of the plant and the remaining purchase is at the mercy of our next planting mood which can easily result in death of the remaining purchase. Death by good intention.
4 Keys all start with a P
Key 1 Plan~
Divide your yard into zones. When you divide up a project into manageable parts you won’t get overwhelmed. Figure out what you’d like to have brighten each zone and write down how many of each plant you want. It’ll be like a grocery list. Don’t plan another zone until you’ve finished planting one you’ve planned. I like to add at least one perennial each year (those are the plants that come back) in each of my zones.
Key 2 Prepare~
Prepare the soil and even dig the holes before you head to the nursery
Key 3 Purchase~
Take your list and limit what you buy to the amount of holes you’ve already dug. Don’t be tempted while you’re in the beauty of all the colors and fragrances. You don’t have to stick to the exact kind of flowers on your list, just the number of plants.
Key 4 Plant~
When you actually get to plant, (which is as soon as you get home from buying the plants since you have already prepared where you want to plant them) you’ll be so happy with yourself for doing all the hard work first. And you won’t have the guilt that comes with unintentionally killing innocent life by leaving those beautiful plants out in the sun without water.
This year I’ve turned one of my pet peeves into an advantage. We have a big meadow and every spring the moles convene like they’re at a mole convention. Their underground social network rivals Face Book. They seem to converge on our meadow about when the grass starts growing. As I walked through the grass and inspected the hills I noticed how rich the dirt was and I thought, ‘I should use it when planting flowers in the beds that have a great deal of clay.’ I went to my local nursery and asked what I could add to the dirt to make it as good as a potting soil.
You won’t want miss the video where I show how to turn mole hills into potting soil
Love,
P.S. Just so you know I'm not perfect, here's a blog you should read. http://blog.cluborganized.com/last-week-we-showed-me-planting-a-vegetable-garden