Gardening!

Hi All!

The weather has been dry for a few days here in normally rainy January, which inspires all us Northwest gardeners to kick the dry mud off our rubber boots and get outside and see whats going on.

And I'm so glad that I did! Last weekend while waiting for dinner to cook (Jonah does the cooking, I do the waiting, its awesome) I started planning this year's garden. I started with some seed catalogs with pretty pictures, and moved onto veggie garden diagrams. Jonah got into it too, getting excited about the approximately million different varieties of tomatoes a person could grow. He wants a Brandywine, I said as long as the tomatoes actually GROW this year, I don't care what kind they are! Last year was a sad sad one for gardeners in Oregon. A mere handful of tasteless, pathetic tomatoes.

I got in the garden for a few hours on Thursday, after my wonderful dad and I (hi dad!) installed a new starter in my Subi. It was so pretty outside I almost couldn't stand it! I mostly just cut things back and threw out random decaying garden art, but it felt GOOD.

Today I got back out there, but this time I was armed with my garden plan that I came up with this morning. I knew what I wanted to move, and where (mostly). It felt great to get a bed cleared out, and everything happy in their new places.

One of the things I am most excited about (and most nervous about) was moving my hops plant. I had planted it two years ago on the trellis that held my espaliered pear trees because I had run out of room elsewhere. It was a stopgap measure, and I was going to move it last spring, but well, once a hops starts growing it doesn't stop, and it got going before I got around to moving it. So it stayed were it was planted, and grew HUGE, and threatened to take over the pears. It grew from the trellis into the nearby sunflowers, it attacked people as they got out of cars, and it produced three gallon bags worth of hop flowers. It was amazing.

I noticed that had started budding new shoots out of the ground already. So I decided to take the plunge, and dig it up! The roots spread in three feet in all directions. I had to trim it back, I hope the root pruning doesn't make it too unhappy. Also, some of those roots had budded, so I've planted them along the side of the greenhouse in the hopes that they also grow. We'll see. I just hope I didn't kill it!

So yeah, I'm really excited for the garden this year. I have the feeling that its gonna be good! Also, teaching an interested and untrained boyfriend in the arts of vegetable maintenance will be fun!