Off With A Bang!

Time to fire up the garden blog for this year!

Tonight we sat on the patio (our first full meal of the season sitting outside!) and Dave ate pizza (green chile and red onions) and I tucked into some chicken wings. While we ate we looked over some of what's thriving already on the patio (mint, Jerusalem sage, chives, Russian sage, something called a butterfly bush, the cottonwoods newly planted in their new huge pots) and we plotted over the plan for the patio and the garden. We have a trunk that we bought at an estate sale a few years back and I want to turn it into a planter, so we decided to repot our New Mexico sunflowers into it. We have a mountain of empty pots that I'm tempted to plant lettuce and basil and other herby, useful things in--but I know that the minute we hit the garden center I'll head straight for the showy flowering plants. I know it. Also, there must be marigolds and coleus at least.

After dinner we turned over 2/3 of the shady garden bed and then turned in six bags of mushroom compost. Dave wants to add another six to that part and then another perhaps another ten to the last third.

On the patio we planted a wildflower seed mixture that says it thrives in full sun (Ha! Welcome to New Mexico, little seeds!) in the larger bed near the crab apple tree. In the smaller bed I filled in some of the bare patches in our little ten square inch "lawn" with some more seeds. I added mushroom compost to both bits. We planted oat grass in one of our new, studio-made planters. It's ostensibly for the cats, but they've never touched it in the past.

Last weekend we relocated our two little cottonwoods into larger pots and moved them across the patio to avoid their running into the power line that crosses into the casita.

Pre-planting:




And one of the pots they went into:



I need some post-planting shots of the little ones in their new pots, but for now I'll note that they're doing fine. Of course we had to tear up the whole patio layout  and smash the pots the cottonwoods were in to get them into their new homes, but that's perfectly all right. A little chaos makes for a fine start to a gardening season!