spring garden work

-cleaning out perrennial beds
-spreading bark mulch
-fertilizing lawns
-preparing vegetable beds

I had a giant pile of bark mulch delivered in my driveway. I'm cleaning out my perrennial beds and then spreading the mulch. A deep brown color. I'm almost finished with this. Today I bought fertilizer for my next yard project. I have several areas of lawns to fertilize. They're thick with dandelions and other weeds so I'm busy pulling weeds before fertilizing. I did soil tests and one area needs lime and phosphate along with nitrogen. Other areas need nitrogen only. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to spread this and water it in. Every thing gets spread separately.

My other project is preparing my vegetable beds. To most, I add 2 inches of compost. I do this every year and turn it under. Beds that will grow beans/peas and root crops (with the exception of onions) don't get compost. That ends up being almost all of my beds. I also have nice winter cover crops growing on beds at my community plot. That gets turned under to with compost. I've started this process and hope to finish this week. I have lots of trays of seedlings ready to plant out soon. The weather and soil have been cool here, but I think it's warming up now. It seems we're about 2 weeks behind the average year this year. I very pleased that I have lots of homemade compost this year. That's a really hard thing to come by. And there's nothing like good old home made!

I hope to show pictures of newly planted seedlings soon!