I'm Dreaming of a Green Garden...

Dang, it's still January. January has always been my least favorite month. The excitement of the holidays are over, the Chiefs are usually not in the playoffs, and spring is still so distant and the world so dreary it seems impossible that things will ever be green again. I don't usually mind winter, but this year I'm dreaming of spring earlier than ever. I'm chomping at the bit to get settled in our new place in Little Rock, and paranoid I'll be too busy during the most important gardening time to get anything done. Every time I open the freezer I smile at the heirloom seeds sleeping in there, thinking of their potential...but now worry that we'll be in the middle of transition when they need to be in the ground, doing their thing.

Right now is when I should be building raised beds, and the fact that I can't just yet is making me extremely antsy. I'm totally addicted to raised-bed gardening, and the thought of going back to conventional gardening isn't appealing at all. My only other alternative, if I'm not able to get beds built in time and filled with decent dirt, is to improvise with what's available. Container gardening can be productive. I've also considered planting veggies in the existing flower beds. Likely if I'm going to have a garden this year, I'll be resorting to all three - maybe build a couple of beds, plant in containers, and utilize the flower beds.

Even after moving to the city, I still plan on continuing our quest to eat/preserve more of what we grow ourselves, as well as trying to eat more locally grown items. And actually, this might even be easier with better access to larger farmer's markets as well as small grocery stores that carry locally grown items. My chicken flock was decimated by a marauding raccoon this fall, so I'll be starting all over on that front, too.

The bottom line is that I won't have my dream garden this year. Even though I'm basically starting from scratch again, I can look at the bright side - my experiences in the last couple of years here have taught me what works and what doesn't, and that the process is where the enjoyment is...and until spring, I'll keep dreaming of something that looks like this: