My Chicago Garden

Just a few weeks ago we had snow on the ground and Shorty (because of his short tail, as compared to Fatty Lumpkin who is big and fuzzy) was munching on left over popcorn.

But today was the first full day of working outside in the garden!!  The first bit of manual labor was digging a 75 foot ditch on the south side of the house so I could connect two downspots to a 4" runoff pipe out to the creak.  I hadn’t planned on doing that this morning, but figured I better try and fix that problem before I put in the new raised bed on the south side.  The small patch of dirt on the south side of the house receives nearly 50% of the roof runoff and is perpetually wet year round. I wish I had my rain barrel setup from Kentucky but I don’t have the time this year to set one up. It’s always a soggy mess of mud. Nothing grows back there but creeping charlie and some volunteer sucker trees.   We think this might also have something to do with the VERY high humidity in the bedrooms on the south side of the house. We had to run a dehumidifier nearly full time last summer.

Then my wife and I moved about 400 bricks *ugh*! by hand.  There was a poorly done loose brick patio under the tree house. Actually it was probably nice when the previous owner did it but they choose to put it under a HUGE tree..which of course buckled the bricks and made it a hazard by the time we purchased the house.  Note, never use hard scape near a large tree…mother nature will destroy your work guaranteed. It looked nothing like the nice brick patio Gina just put in over at My Skinny Garden. These were your standard red bricks, but by now they had a slightly weathered look.  Hey! I know what I can do with those!!! We moved about 50% of the bricks around to the other/south side of the house to build a new raised bed. This one will be for the potatoes, and if there is room…some other crops.  I had planned to put in corn, but I can’t justify to myself to put in 4 rows of corn and waste that space on such a cheap produce item. I used two trashcans full of leaves from last year that were laying around in the backyard to fill the bottom of the bed.  I then started filling it with various kinds of compost.  I figure I’ll need another 50 bags of topsoil and a bag of vermiculite before it’s all said and done.  The remaining bricks were pilled up in the back while we wait to figure out what to do with them. Maybe a nice little "forest" path across the back of the house with moss growing between the randomly spaced bricks?

I also took a couple pictures inside the cold frame this afternoon.  The oregano from last year actually over wintered just fine. It took a little bit of damage but that is VERY impressive. It’s already putting out new growth.  Right next to it is my first crop of garlic.  They did just fine over winter as well, with their nice layer of straw.  They are now actively growing.  Both got their first taste of water in nearly 4 months (or at least what wasn’t already in the ground when I shutup the cold frame back in December)

The weather folks are calling for near freezing weather later this week, so it’s probably not safe to put out plants just yet.  Our average last frost date isn’t until around April 15th. Looks like it might be an average year this year.