Spring Fever: Garden planning begins

Today, I slept in. It was glorious and I'm sure I'll be wishing I could for the next few days with all the driving I'll be doing, but that's okay. I need to keep playing in the Symphony just to keep music a part of my life, otherwise it's too easy to just let it slide.

It's a beautiful day, considering it's winter in South Dakota. It's a nice 40 degrees and sunny, so we should melt off a bunch of the snow we got last week. We got lots. It was ridiculous. This is my new deck, which was dry the previous day, and there's a 6-inch flowerpot on one of the steps (with a winterizing clove of garlic in it). Kudos if you can find it. :P More snow fell after this, for a total of 10-11 inches or so at my house.

To say we have some spring fever around here would be an understatement. The cats are nutty, Mom has a bad case of SAD (as do the rest of us, I'm sure), and every time more snow falls I get a little more stabby. I made peace with the first snowfall last week because I had just put down some grass seed on my bare hill and was glad to see it covered up so it would get a good root system started and so the birds wouldn't eat it all, but now I'm over it. The snow is still deep and my car is short.

Our first attempt at making spring happen was to start planning the gardens today. I live in my own place but I'm on the family property in the country, so Mom and I can pool our resources for gardening and such. We started by taking stock of what seeds we had and making a list of what we wanted to do and what containers we'd need. I don't have the dirt work done at my house well enough for garden beds yet and Mom can't handle the tilling anymore, so we're gardening in containers this year. She did it last year and loved it and I may as well do that while I have a nice deck and dirt work to be done. I'm only feeding me, so I don't need a huge vegetable garden.

My plan: salad greens, herbs, garlic, mint (to dehydrate for tea), cherry/grape tomatoes, strawberries, beans, and probably peas. I have a general idea for some flowers too but I need to get some measurements and planning done for the terrace and mudroom first. My little trailer house is much nicer on the inside than it used to be, but the outside still needs a lot of help so that's probably the main focus for the summer.

We got some stuff planted and into the greenhouse, so now we wait. And plan some more.