Mercy, this is a busy spring.  Between garb construction, teaching spinning classes, and Gulf Wars prep, I’ve hardly thought about my garden all month, and I really need to be planting.  NOW.

So far, I have set out flats of the standard early spring veg.  However, there’s some bare-root plants that I really want, and I’ve started buying potted plants too, in support of a new little nursery shop called Gaia’s Garden, that’s run by a horticulturist.  (Check that out in Internet Explorer – the Firefox version is not as pretty.)  Brought home two types of lavender, chamomile and thyme the other day.  Also some mushroom compost, and potting soil for starting the tomatoes, which needs to happen TODAY.

(But the cloak lining needs to happen today, too, and…and…and…why do I have a day job, again?  Oh yeah, mortgage.)

I want to put an order in to Aaron’s Nursery, which is only a few hours away, and they have POMEGRANATES.  Also PERSIMMONS, and a really good price on thornless BLACKBERRIES, which  I want to fill my picket fence with.  But not elderberries, for which I apparently have to go to Stark Bros.

Our Meyer lemon is blooming, and it needs to be pollinated – I can’t trust it to do it on its own, as it has bloomed but not set fruit before.  We don’t have a lot of bees, so until I get flowers going, it’ll be Greet with a paintbrush doing the dirty work.  And the grapevines didn’t die!  Amazing – they got SO dry.  The blueberries look better than they ever have before – leaf mulch is the secret – and the one thornless blackberry I brought from the other house is looking better than ever since I whacked out the Cherokee rose that was strangling it.  I still don’t expect fruit from it this year, it’s still so little, but we can try.

I learned a couple of important things from Shelley at Gaia’s.  First, that those labels are writtten for Northern gardens.  (I’d suspected this.)  So "full sun" means 6-8 hours of sun around here, otherwise you’ll cook most plants.  So my hickory trees and oaks and giant camellias can actually be helpful, if I get my act together and plant containers underneath them.  This revelation explains why the two tomatoes that I stuck on the north side of the house last summer actually had fruit.  Shelley said that if it grows in Provence or Italy, you’re probably okay for sun, so that explains why my rosemary did well on my sand dune south of the picket fence, and the lavender should do well there too, if it gets bottom watered.  It doesn’t like its leaves wet, according to Shelley.

Time to play dodge the sprinklers again, I think.  Also time to finally layout the low-pressure tubing that I moved from the townhouse.  I’m going to run a trunk hose down the picket fence to keep the blackberries and lavender happy, and to baby the new plum tree.  (The old plum tree has blossoms on it – I think they’ll get the paintbrush therapy, too.  D’you suppose it’ll work better at night – that’s about the only time I have to do it!)

The rain barrel is a big success, and I need more of them.  The roof has five valleys and no gutters.  I plan to put one rain barrel under each valley.

I also need to distribute the compost back onto the beds and till it (and the fall leaves) in before the oak leaves fall again.   Let’s see, and Alton Brown inspired me to plant a lot more carrots with his show Good Eats last night.  Man, exciting stuff!  (I’m such a nerd.)

Finally, Shelley gave me a good idea of why my soil is so alkaline, despite the fact I’ve got 200+ year old oak trees and 80+ year old hickory trees dumping leaves on it every 6 months.  And azaleas and camellias thriving.  It’s because the Indians who lived here left a bunch of garbage behind – I live on an oyster midden – aka a huge pile of oyster shell.  I know this for sure, because when we’ve dug around for driveways and such, we run into them.  Aha!  She has plans to distribute info on how to mitigate this problem.