In and Around the Garden

It’s time to take off the party hats and toss the noise blowers and streamers, and focus on the garden. If I heed my own suggestions, and follow through with the plans below, come springtime it will be party time again–outdoors in sunshine. Here’s what I hope to accomplish this month.

Outdoors:  Now that the ancient oak tree in the perennial garden is naked, I will rake the leafy garments from beneath its giant canopy. The leaves will go in the chicken pasture for mulch and weed control. I experimented with this last year and there were fewer weeds, by half.

Edging my back lawn is a row of thirty-year-old eucalyptus trees, infected with redgum lerp psyllid (Glycaspis brimblecombei). With the exception of white bead-like dots (Hemispherical caps or ‘lerps’ housing nymphs) on the foliage and scattered about the lawn like hail during spring and summer, the trees remain healthy. However, eucalyptus trees are messy, especially during a storm when leaves and branches fly across the yard for ‘you-know-who’ to gather. My husband and I are tired of the clean up and the white chickenpox foliage and grasses so we will be removing most of eucalypti.

Once removed, instead of hauling off debris throughout the year and viewing a wall of westerly trees, we will have less work, more time, and a stunning vista of rolling hills and raging sunsets.

Indoors:  I plan to review last spring’s notes of tasty, prolific, and trouble-free vegetable varieties over unsuccessful ones, mapping out a crop design, as it’s time to rotate them. I’ll sort through seed packets for planting and expiration dates, earmark seed catalogs, and read my January tasks for jobs that I may have forgotten. I’m always forgetting something. If it’s rainy or all my work is complete, I’ll read The Backyard Beekeepers or attend a local event or workshop. If I heed my own suggestions and don’t hibernate like a bear, January will be a busy but productive month.

What do you plan to do first this year in the garden, anything new?