5 Goals

I'm setting 5 goals for myself this year in my garden:
(I'm too realistic to set 10)

1. Build a Bean Teepee- like i need a reason to invite my nephews and neice to trapse through my garden... hopefully they'll stick to the path i just put down. I saw this done on a very cool blog and I'm psyched!

2. Start the compost pile- every year I tell myself I'll do it and every year I cringe as i throw away perfectly good food scraps. No more! I will re-eat those scraps as dirt crumbs on the flesh of my freshly picked produce!

3. Invite critters INTO my garden- to eat the other critters in my garden. :) My husband is finishing off our attic and he found a dead bat. It had long since been crushed under a board by, we suspect, the previous owner. Such a waste! I'd love to build a bat house to draw those bats so that they will eat those bugs that eat my produce. Let nature eat itself! Last year my hubby bluggend a groundhog to death (SHUDDER). I can still hear the screams. To be fair to my hubby, we came home and I saw it eating it's way happily through my long row of snap peas. I jumped out of the vehicle yelling "I'm gonna kill it!" My hubby hates to see me sad, even worse sad/angry/weilding a weapon. He took it as permission to protect my garden. I don't know how he'll take the bat house. Maybe I'll tell him it's a bird house. ;)

4. Use collected water- we are on a well, so i don't feel like i'm spending thousands of dollars watering my garden in the summer, but there are so many other places I can get water from. We just drain dish water down the sink and just let the rain water escape to nowhere. Now that I use an environmentally safe, natural dish soap (and not globs of it like I used to; the price of organic products really gets me thinking about waste!) I could spread it around in my garden. I'm not sure yet about water from the roof. I don't know that I trust the water from the shingles to be non toxic. (remember to research that) But My hubby has a large rain barrel lying near our driveway, unused. I'm going to steal it from him. (My poor hubby!!!) Organic Gardening did a great little article this month on rain barrels.

5. BE PATIENT- I cannot for the life of me, wait to eat that yummy sweet vegetable goodness from my garden. I pull up carrots months early when they are stalky and scraggly and bitter, I plant things way to early, (the sooner I plant the sooner I eat, right?) and thus get tiny, undergrown produce, and I will not, will not rip everything out at the end of the season and immediatley jump into next year's designs! I will grown things in places where produce has been harvested. I will get plants throughout the year. I will roll on piles of kale chips and spinach until my birthday (February) And THEN I will start over again.