March's garden at The Red Clover Keep

It's been a long and obnoxious Winter and to say that I'm ready to fully embrace Spring would be a gross understatement. I want to dive back into our yard with a vengeance!

One of the projects I'm eager to complete is growing potatoes above ground! I first saw the idea here and it called to me in a big way. The soil in our yard is pretty hard packed and not super healthy and the idea of building more raised beds or moving our current ones is... less than appealing. So instead we popped into the dollar store to pick up a couple of small baskets and then grabbed some of the gnarliest looking potatoes we could find (2 Red, 2 Yukon Gold). Once those suckers start sprouting, I'm going to hack them into a few pieces each (as long as each piece has eyes on it, this is supposed to work) and shove them into the mixture of dirt and compost that we filled the baskets with. Then as they grow, I will gradually add more soil on top. I'm crossing my fingers that this works. Up until now I've avoided growing any food because the pressure was just TOO MUCH. I might kill the plants, or worse... poison my family. I'm now realizing that these fears are a bit silly and unfounded, much like all of my other crippling fears.

We'll have been living in our home for 2 years this June and in that time I have planted several flowering perennials. Unfortunately, I didn't think to keep track of what I put in what spots, so now I don't know the name of anything or any special care instructions (thankfully, I was diligent about planting things in places that made sense for the amount of sunlight they need) . I basically just water things and try not to kill them. You can see why I was nervous about growing food! Things are starting to flower again here and there, which makes me think they must be alive and kicking. As things warm up, we'll see just how competent I really am.

I've got more random landscaping I want to do, to tidy things up and make them look, well, purposeful. We didn't get as much done last year as we wanted to and it left a lot of areas feeling unfinished and messy. I'm perfectly alright with things being unfinished and messy when that's the desired effect, but this is not the case for most of our yard. I'm going to have to thrift a lot of cheap white bedsheets and buy many more bags of wood chips and sawdust before I feel like this yard really suits us.