Spring!

The most amazing thing happened on the weekend – Spring!

Well, one day of it at least. The snow did return yesterday, but that is just part and parcel for living in Canada, eh?

But that one day – goodness, it was good. We spent every last minute outside and enjoying the sunshine (and the mud – check out those boots!)

We started to get the garden all cleaned up for the coming season. Last Fall I did not get it quite as cleaned up as I should have (nothing new), so we have lots to keep us busy in the coming weeks.

I had some little helpers out there, finding worms and showing me said worms again and again. And at  times very, very close up.

I do love having my little ones out in the garden with me. It gets a bit tricky at planting time though. Madeline and Sam are great helpers, but little Ben still steps on things and digs things up. I’m brainstorming ideas to keep him out in the garden with me, but not so much in the garden.

One thing that was missing from the garden was my feathery friends! We made the tough choice to fence the ladies into a pasture this year. At least for a little while. They are not impressed.

Most won’t yet make eye contact with me. Really, it’s not that bad. I keep telling them. They have almost half an acre still – with lots of visitors and chicken snuggle time. Plus all the garden scraps and breakfast/lunch/dinner treats they can handle. But still, they are not impressed.

Sometimes they are very hard to reason with.

We are planting oodles of tiny trees and with the 4 big gardens planned, those ladies would be in the thick of it all.

Four gardens this year! I cannot wait. That day of Spring was enough to get me very excited about them. I will be sharing my plans here, should you be interested, in the coming weeks.

Our vegetable garden will be similar to last year, which I wrote about in this Super foods vegetable garden post. This year, I will be using pole beans around our snap pea trellis fort – so I suppose it will be a pole bean trellis fort. Last year the snap peas only grew 18 inches or so. I’ve got high hopes for these pole beans.

I will be planting a great big lavender patch. Mostly because I adore lavender. I cannot get enough of it. I still have two jars of dried lavender from last year, so the question has been brought up as to if it is really necessary to do a big lavender patch – given the excess from the two plants we had last season. Necessary? Well no — but it will be lovely.

The third garden will be our pumpkin patch. I had huge hopes for our pumpkin patch last year. I had envisioned all of my nieces and nephews and little friends far and wide coming to choose their pumpkins from our patch. But those feathery ladies had other ideas. One weekend away and we came home to big holes pecked in all but two of our pumpkins. So much for my vision — oh those ladies.

The final garden is another one I am so excited about. I will write a post all about my plans for this one in the next few weeks (you know, once I actually have plans). We are going to have a flower-cutting garden. A great big huge garden full of beautiful flowers to cut and bring inside, as well as give to friends and family. Truthfully, this is the first year I have been interested in the idea of flowers. I have always been one for the practical gardening of vegetables. But lately, I have quite taken to making my home pretty. And beautiful, fresh cut flowers in each room sounds very pretty indeed.

All of this planning and we have only had one day of Spring weather! I better pace myself.

I hope you have had some lovely weather your way as well friends.

I’d love to hear – do you have any ideas for having little ones help in the garden?

Or could you share a flower I should put in my flower-cutting garden? I don’t even know where to begin!

Thank you friends, and thank you for reading. I hope you are having a lovely week.