May gardening

I’ve been outdoors. Trees and bushes are sprouting leaves and flowers, and I can almost hear the perennials growing.

There were numerous days when I worked in the rain drenched to the skin. Rain is really good for transplanting, and if I wait for this weather pattern to change, I think it will be June. 🙂

For the past few years, I’ve used an old indoor workbench as an outdoor potting table. But, in New England, everything that comes out in spring must go back in fall or be covered in feet of snow for several months. After a few years of dragging this bench around, it was literally falling apart.

My husband rebuilt it using as much of the wood as possible and recycling other wood from the barn. We did purchase ten pickets for the back and four casters for the legs which will allow me to move it around much easier.

Once you have the space to pot and divide, you need a place to store them.

A fellow MG had a small, cost-effective greenhouse that she uses for starting plants. She said she’s used it for several years, leaving the frame outdoors but storing the plastic cover in the extreme heat of the summer and the winter months. It required a lot of moving of plants to find a place to anchor it. We purchased heavy-duty anchors from Home Depot so the frame isn’t going anywhere.

Good compost for starting and dividing plants is a real plus but making it can take some time and effort. We have pallet compost bins for leaves, and I’ve had this square black compost bin from Gardeners Supply for a few years. I decided it was time to either move it where it would get more sun or try a new type that you can turn that I saw at a fellow MG’s house last week when we were potting up more plants for the sale.

Have you ever emptied a compost bin that you can’t flip over? I shoveled off the top quarter and moved it to the open compost bins to further decompose.  Throw in an ant colony because the pile was too dry, and you have a job that was not a lot of fun. If you’re a gardener, you love good compost, but I really think I’d like to be able to just flip it over to empty it.

In case you’re wondering if rain is in the forecast for today, the answer would be yes. If you’re wondering if I’ll be out there doing a few jobs, that answer would be yes too. 🙂

The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.    Joel Salatin

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