How does our garden grow?

Well, up until yesterday afternoon, the answer would have been 'awash in weeds'. Dandelions. Fireweed. Popweed. This fuzzy-stemmed stuff that re-seeds EVERYWHERE. Same with a yellow-flowered weed that is not only invasive, but about impossible to wrangle out of the ground.

I put in three hours of weeding last week, one hour a morning, and managed to fill a 30-gallon green-waste bag with the results of my labors. But David put in about six hours over the weekend, filling another two bags in the process. Some of our work was pruning/thinning (the strawberry patches needed thinning really badly, and the grapevine was begging to be pruned back). He cleared out all of the popweed and grass that had grown between the stepping stones on the various paths down into the garden - a painstaking task that required tremendous patience (which he has, and I definitely do not!). He found a half dozen stepping stones buried in the weeds in one of the garden beds, and used them to fill in the main path that leads down from the gate. That path got pretty treacherous in the rain, especially for a gimp like me, but now there's a safe pathway that even I can manage!

It's still a bit too early to think about new planting, but when we return from Minneapolis in mid-May, I'll start planning for some summer-blooming additions to the garden. For now, we're both enjoying the new, green barrier that surrounds our back yard, blocking out any glimpses of rooftops or the unsightly billboard we can see in the winter months.

Ah, spring!