July — finally! With the rush of another June over, I can return to my gardens and planting new perennials.

Most of my spare time the past few weeks has been focused on my library garden. The weather has been abnormally wet for June, which made the soil a lot easier to turn over than I was expecting. I still have a small patch to go, but most of the space has been cleaned up and the horsetail / perennial grass has been removed. Or, at least, as much of it has been removed as I could reasonably get to (some always escapes). That’s ok! I will get them when they pop up again.

Let’s pick up where we left off last year — how are the new gardens doing? Were there any failures over the crazy, brutal winter?

I’m behind on my writing. Surprise, surprise.

A few weeks ago, I ripped up the garden bed immediately next to the front door of the house. A previous owner had planted an uninspired combination of three upright cedars and four golden false cypress. This particular spot of the house is north facing and slightly under the canopy of a birch tree. It might get, at most, four hours of early morning sunlight during the day.

Lots of planting this week! I took measurements of the garden bed extension I finished preparing last week and came up with the following:

I am happy to report that the soil has been a bit more amenable this week. There was even a significant rainfall Saturday morning, which means I am off the hook for watering until this evening (wonderful!).

Well, so much for my plans from last time! The extended heat and humidity — and my attempts at taking some time off to do some camping — quickly dashed my earlier intentions. The ground turned so solid that it wasn’t worthwhile to struggle and turn it over.

While this week has been slow as I recover from the flu, I did manage to do some planning for my trial garden. The space itself will be 7m x 4m in size, and broken into 1m x 1m blocks.

I continued my work along the driveway this past week, preparing the space for planting and updating the plan for the section next to the old well.

With the spring rush past us for another year, I have been working on preparing an area in my front yard for a trial garden. I don’t have any plans to share for the trial garden yet, as I’m about 30% finished turning over the soil and removing the volunteer plants currently growing there (it was an old veggie garden bed now fallow).