Garden Dreams

Something must be wrong with me.  It is the middle of January, there is snow on the ground, we are in the middle of a huge home-renovation project (ie, finnishing two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a family room in our basement, not to mention painting the main-floor of the house), and I have a baby due in 6 weeks. Yet for the past month or so, I have not been able to stop dreaming up plans for my garden.  I keep trying to tell myself that I needed to be prepared to go simple in the garden this year.  Last year I added a paver patio, a fire-pit, an herb garden, planted 7 fruit trees, 50 strawberry plants and added about 30 feet of garden space for summer and winter squash to my already existing garden space.  I will have plenty to do with a new little one on my hands, trying to keep up with the work I created for myself last year, but it's never enough. There are projects that I wanted to get to last year that I wasn't able to, like:

building and planting a grape arbor over our sand box,

building a chicken coop

and getting some chickens to go in it,

and starting some back-yard beehives.

To top it all off I just finnished reading this book.

I don't know if you can see the subtitle, but this dangerous little tome is temptingly titled: The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!  I don't know if that title is tempting to anyone else, but to this frustrated would-be Laura Ingles Wilder, living on a quarter acre lot, it sounded like mana from heaven.  Much of the book was just a review of things I already know, and do, or have wanted to do, but I now have a few things I have added to my list like:

growing a hardy kiwi-vine along one open stretch of fence in the backyard,

trying to scrounge up some more space in my yard to grow oats and corn for the future chickens to feed on,

 

and tearing up most of our front garden and replacing existing plants and bushes with some of these:

alpine strawberries

tricolor ornamental peppers,

red currant bushes,

Nanking cherry bushes,

Juneberry trees,

and maybe some beach plum bushes.

That's not too much to try to accomplish in one summer with a newborn baby, is it?  Well, for now I can at least dream about it . . .