Oh wait, this is still here?!?

I looked at this and said, I should write in here or I should delete this blog. So write in here I did! The growing season is underway and my garden is ready and already growing some cool weather plants. I've got peas (shell and snap) popping up as well as lettuce planted (which will hopefully make an appearance soon). My rhubarb is growing like mad and will need to be cut soon. My fruit trees are all leafing out so I need to keep an eye on them to make sure no beetles/caterpillars eat the leaves.

I just wrote down on paper my plan to completely revamp my front lawn and turn it into a low maintenance perennial garden. It freaked out my husband a little who had visions of me spending the car money on plants and completely decimating his lawn, but after I explained it a bit he understood better my plan. I want to replace the grass entirely on one side of our driveway and some of the grass on the other side. I'm putting in a lot of ground cover to eliminate the need for weeding or mulch. I want to put in drought tolerant perennials, trees and shrubs. I'd like to have a good deal of edible plants. My biggest complaint with lawns is that they're a huge waste of space, time, and money. I spend $9 (thank you Libya...) to fill up the tank of my riding mower, and I have to use almost a whole tank each time I mow thanks to my 3 acres of hayfield, most of which I actually don't mow. Perhaps because I've been mowing it too short (I mow at about 2 inches but apparently that's too short), or perhaps because of our incredibly sandy soil (when they put in our new leach field they didn't have to bring in sand), our grass has large expanses of Sahara like dirt that blows up in my face in great clouds when I "mow" it. So I'm spending $9 to mow a half dead lawn and I really don't want to spend more money to reseed the whole darn thing. My plan was to take everything from the back of my garage forward and turn it into usable garden. I've been researching drought tolerant, edible plants, to prevent the creation of a largely useless perennial garden. A lot of native plants (surprise surprise) are drought tolerant, including a lot of medicinal herbs such as St. John's wort and yarrow. I plan to add a few trees, some edible, some flowering. I want a lot of flowers too for cuttings and to attract bees and butterflies. I plan to do this gradually, adding in some of the features that take longer to establish (trees, ground cover, shrubs) first, then adding in flowers and mulching over time. I would love to leave space for some annuals too, particularly vegetables if I have spots where I need to water anyways.

I'm excited to do a garden, I really want something that isn't just useless lawn. Lawn just takes up my time and it doesn't produce anything useful like flowers or fruit, or attract bees or butterflies. And with my lawn, it isn't even that nice to look at!