Oh Bother.

Gardening really is involved. When you are juggling the life of a young family with gardening, well, I haven't figured out how one is able to effectively blog about it, too.

However, if I want to embrace this whole gardening thing, and I do, I need to get better at record keeping. And while I have simplified my notebook this week so that I can hopefully improve in preserving the nitty-gritty, it occurred to me that even without writing stuff down, I did take copious amounts of pictures, which are date tagged, so going through that should give me a good idea of when I did what last go around.

And truly, is there an easier medium for organizing pictures while making notes on them? I figure I might as well use my blog as a tool.

So I will. And it will be messy. Believe me, this post is a picture heavy MESS. But it is a tool. And if it means I can share some of our adventure with friends and family in the process, all the better!

Now, I did blog about the gardening book, Elements of Garden Design. And I did love it, and it really helped. I can't recall exactly how I applied it to this project at this point. Truly, my husband and I were just talking about how completely shocked we are when we have stumbled across pictures from our garden last year! "Whoa! Did we really do all that?" Because right now, its a bunch of wood chips and cinder-block with some swiss chard and a row of brown asparagus waiting to be cut down.

This time last year, there was nothing. Well, there was a big, leaning tree very much in the way of our plans. And while we share the neurotic fear of westerners that every time we cut down a tree we are somehow complicit in the mass exploitation of the rain forests in South America, we were forced to admit that when it came down, it was an improvement beyond the fact that it allowed our garden.

Then, at the end of February, we had little else except some posts at ten foot intervals that my husband lovingly called the Appian Way. We're pretty sure the neighbors were terrified. I don't have a good picture, but I did take some pictures of some of my early winter sowing experiments a week or so later, and you can see the eery posts in the background.

 As the month of March wore on, my husband was a wonder and brought our vision to life in spite of his host of "helpers."

Meanwhile, I planted seeds in milk jugs and didn't write a single thing down on paper.

We got a bunch of woodchips from the tree that came down, but I think it must have been in this time that I located our source for garden soil and free (!) woodchips.

I'm pretty sure we spent the entire month of April moving woodchips.

Aaaand that brings us up to the point where I planted strawberries.