In between sips of tea, fuzzling cats, and stirring up the chicken casserole I'm working on, I do believe it's time for a ridiculously early garden post!

I made tragically little progress out there this summer, but at least one bed is mostly cleared, as is a little corner shade garden. I should also have a little round patch of workable dirt where I heaped the newspapers I meant to use to make a new garden bed, so I guess I will use that for some sort of impressive shrub type thing. A magnolia, maybe. Then in the fall I can make the bed I was planning around that.

I still have evil schemes to expand the gardening space into the vast straggly sea of grass, but I think my best course of action this year is to focus on getting what I've got cleaned up and sort of in shape. Then I'll expand in the fall, when I can do the whole lasagna garden thing and get composting action to make me beautiful dirt over the winter.

The seed display is out at the grocery store, so I snapped up:

* cosmos
* delphinium
* poppy
* shasta daisy (since I have - gasp - SUN)
* pink pampas grass (since I managed to start some last year, but never got any of it planted)
* morning glories

My biggest challenge in the bed that's been mostly cleared is going to be covering all that boring white fence at the back. Morning glories will be good for that, as will (eventually) the pampas grass and delphs, since they get to be very tall...ooh, and both of those last bloom late, apparently. Excellent. I've also got the honeysuckle going on that side. Otherwise I think I will just endeavour to make this a tangle of all the semi-sun-loving stuff I've been passing up for the last few years, annuals and perennials alike. The Experimental Farm's plant sale is on May 10 this year, and I will be there with a wagon, by god!!

In the shade garden I should get another patch of jacob's ladders going, since they seem to self-propagate nicely. Otherwise I should get some pachysandra or other nice ground cover to fill in with the periwinkle...oh yeah, and some begonias from the market for all-season colour. We'll see how that little corner fills in - it wasn't much to look at in the fall, but I did get a reasonable number of plants in there.

Out front, meanwhile, I'm kind of at a loss. SO MUCH GRASS. Lots and lots of sun, though; the daisies would probably do well out here, and any dry sun loving annuals I feel like going crazy with. (Dry being a keyword...I should probably try mulching out there to see if I can get the soil to retain a bit of water.) I think one of those big buckets of petunias is probably called for, as are those stunning bright red geraniums (I think) that I always admire in the market. I would love to get something climbing up the front of the house around the windows, like the neighbour's got, but I'm not totally sure how to accomplish that, since it's so freakin dry all around the foundation. I suppose I could try planting a clematis a few feet out and then train it up a slanty trellis to get it to the wall. Or maybe a virginia creeper, god knows they'll tolerate just about anything. Also on that note, there is a tree next to the steps that is plainly not getting enough water; it's not huge yet, so I wonder if it's still moveable? Where else would I put it?