Gardening!

OK - so before I start writing this post in earnest, I'll make a full disclosure:  I'm not the world's best gardener.  Nor am I the world's most consistent gardener.  And if that isn't enough to frighten you away from reading this post further, I should tell you that one of my favorite games is to take people who are WAAAAAY more knowledgeable about gardening into my back yard where we play a rousing game of "Is that a weed or did I plant that?"

So having said all of that, I'll be blunt:  I love gardening.  I am an overly enthusiastic, TERRIBLY amateur gardener who has enough of a green thumb to be dangerous to the ecosystem.

So in the spirit of broadening this blog, I'm going to post occasional updates regarding my garden experiments and failures.  But the biggest news I have in my gardening world are the inclusion of two new items in my backyard.  A brand, spankin' new fence!  And the raised garden bed that my hubby built for me.  This picture shows both marvelously:

Fence by The Fence Pros, raised garden bed by my hubby

Those of you who are familiar with Casa de Mahannah might recognize that the raised garden bed is now located where we had a gigantic pine tree.  In fact, I can show you a before picture:

Backyard pre-fence and pre-tree removal - Summer 2010

What the before picture doesn't show you are the other items that were removed from our backyard: an old shed that was hastily assembled and rotting, a walnut tree and a lilac tree.  The removal of these items weren't something that we took lightly, but now that all of these things are gone and we've been rewarded with such awesome, useable space - I wonder what took us so long.

So ... I have a palette.  The husband and I have a lot of projects we're hoping to squeeze in before the bean is born.  And right now, I have a lot of optimism that we'll continue what we started five years ago when we first bought this place: Constant and steady improvement.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple of gardening blogs / resources that I follow:

University of Minnesota Extension website - I have them bookmarked.  And I visit this site.  Often.  Best part?  It's written by experts and it's free and pretty easy to navigate.

East of Weedin' - my old coworker and friend Emily writes this blog.  It's usually guaranteed to make me chuckle.

Frugally Sustainable recently had this article about creating a gardening binder.  I'm not quite at this point yet, but I've been keeping a Word document that journals what I planted, when I planted and will be used to record my observations ... (i.e. - is it bad that I planted some pea seeds that I bought in 2010?  Oh - and I should have planted these about a month ago?  OK ... good to know.).

Wherever you are located, I hope that the sun is warm, rain is plentiful, and that we all have good gardening this year!