Inch by inch, row by row…

Spring is here again and so began the second year of my backyard garden. The lawn is still infested with weeds because, really, no matter how hard we try, there is no way we could beat the frickin’ weeds. But eh, if you can’t beat ’em, you embrace ’em, and that’s what we’re doing. We only weed out the weeds from the flower beds/vegetable patch. The lawn can fend for itself. Troy did reseed the lawn to overcrowd it just because we had some grass seeds sitting around doing nothing. Will the overcrowding work to reduce the weeds? Only time will tell. In the meantime, I’m not going to sweat it. Life’s too short to fuss over the lawn. So the next door neighbour has a perfect lawn. Good for them!

Our purpleleaf sand cherry tree is in bloom. The young elm tree in the front yard is no longer naked. The magnolia is still as small as ever, but it produced some really huge flowers while it lasted. The chives Troy picked up from a roadside plant sale last year have been producing a lot of flower buds. The chives we picked up from a nursery, however, didn’t show any signs of flowering even though they’re coming back with a vengeance. I thought I had killed the tiny clematis I had last year, but surprise, surprise, it’s grown back and it keeps growing every day. Will we see some clematis flowers this year? Once again, only time will tell.

And the honeysuckle! The honeysuckle is so pretty. Even without the flowers, it looks so pretty. But it’s showing some flower buds already. Soon it will look glorious. The Sweet Woodruff in the shady corner of our garden is also growing like crazy. I hope it will fill that whole otherwise dull corner. We even got some ferns growing in the shadiest corner of the garden. I planted three varieties last year. I guess having one out of three coming back is not bad since I heard ferns are rather particular about the type of soil in which they grow.

To put it shortly, all the perennials are coming back. We planted some cherry tomatoes last year and already we got some volunteers growing. Not sure what to do about them. We’ll probably just let them grow because we’re lazy that way. Plus that way we get to save a couple of bucks because we won’t have to buy any vegetable seedlings to plant in the vegetable patch.

Last year I was beating myself for not picking up a peony plant at a plant sale. To make up for it, I picked up not one, but two peonies from a nursery a couple of weeks ago. They’re two different varieties. I’m actually thinking of picking up another. I just love the look of peony flowers. So pretty. Can’t wait to see them bloom. One of them already has some flower buds when we bought it. The other one still has some growing to do.

Last weekend we saw that the two honour-system, roadside plant sale stands on the road between Waterloo and Stratford were back! We stopped at both but only bought a couple of plants from one because the other one hasn’t got too many varieties out. Mostly just strawberries. I do need some strawberry plants for my brand new strawberry planter (it’s the one with some funny pockets all over it) but I need to decide the varieties I’d like to have first. Anyway, I love roadside plant sales. They make me happy.

So, how is your garden growing? Do you have a gardening song? My gardening song is appropriately called The Garden Song. Check this out:

I actually heard the song for the first time during our honeymoon in Nova Scotia. We went to a ceilidh in Pictou and one of the performers sang this song and the song gets stuck in my head every now and then, especially when I’m gardening.

Another gardening song of mine is Sarah Harmer’s cover of Nanci Griffith’s “Trouble in the Fields”, which is a rather depressing song, but I’m a sucker for depressing songs. I couldn’t find a video of it on YouTube but you can download the song to listen to from this blog if you’re interested.

So, hello again!