When I moved here I had huge plans to build a big garden. I wanted the garden rooms that you see in the magazines. But I quickly outgrew both my talent and enthusiasm for gardening. My main motivation to even think about gardening was to have a use for all the horse manure so you can see how it might be easy to overwhelm me with the amount of work involved.

Last year I didn’t do anything with the garden. It ran totally wild and mostly weeds took over. But some things still lived. After doing the Eat Local Challenge last year I wanted to work on planting some edible items in my garden.

This week I’ve been working on simplifing. I’m compacting all the surviving shrubs into one long bed. Sedum loves to grow here so I’m moving that too. While digging a sedum out today I found something else growing. It is from a bulb and I can’t quite identify it yet. It got a new home too. I was actually able to mow down the first old bed that I removed everything of value from today. It is such a freeing feeling. Sort of like cleaning house and getting rid of the clutter.

I’m going to have another area for edible plants. In the original plan it was a herb area. When cleaning it out I found chocolate mint growing wonderfully well. I’m planning on doing some watermelon, peppers, peas, eggplant, and beans. Keep it small is my mantra for this year. I have a tendancy to try to grow everything and so I end up with nothing.