Speaking of hours, I spent almost all of them today out in the veg garden. First I weeded the horrendously overgrown raised beds, in anticipation of emptying them of soil and re-arranging them (you can see a tarp with a bunch of soil on it on the left side of the veg garden). That took awhile since they were so full of weeds. This mild winter didn’t do the usual killing off, and March’s crazy warm temps gave the weeds a real boost.

You may remember that I was making plans to finally replace the ugly snow fence with a real long-term more attractive fence. Today I sweet-talked my awesome husband into helping me install it. We’re still only partway through this process, so pretend the ugly snow fence is all gone already.

Note: poor Cone Of Shame Dog! He has a scratched cornea so he is coned until tomorrow at the earliest.

The fence goes from the side of the garage to the other side of the yard, and the panel that juts out is the gate, which swings in to provide access to the veg garden. K helped me lay out all the panels, dig out the grass in a channel so we could make sure the fence is level, and install everything.

This fence will be a perfect place for me to grow sun-loving climbers! It is also going to be much better at deterring jumping dogs than the former ugly fence, which they could leap over without even thinking. And it’s much more attractive and sturdy. Side bonus: I will never again trip on the snow fence and almost fall while carrying the kitchen compost container out to the compost pile behind the garage.

As you can see, the final panel (on the far right in the photo below) is at a slight angle. Our yard doesn’t happen to be exactly evenly divisible by the width of these fence panels. Big deal! I have no issue with that panel being at an angle. Eventually the expanse along the side PVC fence will be a perennial garden (come on, weather, and stop frosting/freezing at night! I’ve got ants in the pants to transplant things) so the angled panel will hardly be noticeable. I still need to smother the grass on the inside of the expanded part of the veg garden, and cut back the grass on the yard side so I can plant climbers and some kind of border so that K doesn’t have to mow right up to the fence and the grass doesn’t creep back in. And, obviously, remove the last few posts and snow fence in the veg garden. After I get the perennial garden along the side fence established, that snow fence will also be able to go.

We’re still going back and forth about having the grass in the back yard redone. The yard is lumpy (installing this fence was a lesson in just how lumpy it is – some parts of the fence are even with the level of the ground, and others are way below it) and a hodge podge of a ton of different kinds of grass, crabgrass, and clover. Ideally I’d like to have it all be white dutch clover, since it doesn’t burn when dogs pee on it and is good for pollinators. I’m not sure we can find a commercial place that will do that for us, though, and I’m really not convinced that I’m up for pulling up the sod, leveling the yard, and seeding myself, though. We’ll see.

The first week of March, all my Crocus came up and most of them bloomed almost immediately.

Eventually I would like this entire front border of the garden/yard to be filled with early bloomers. It’s still a little sparse, but they do multiply every year, so I’ll get there eventually.

There was an ant crawling around inside this bloom:

Early onset BUGS is definitely a side effect of this weird-ass weather. There were HUGE swarms of gnats out the other night as I was taking photographs. They were everywhere! Ewwwwww.

By the second week of March, all the Crocus were up and blooming:

as were other early bloomers like Reticulated Iris:

and Siberian Squill (which wasn’t quite blooming yet as of this photo):

Even though the winter was mild, it was wintery enough to destroy the mini gargoyles I accidentally left out.

OOPS. I have a little bit of clean-up left to get all the tiny pieces picked up. That’s what I get from leaving a dollar store item out in the elements, I suppose! As an aside, the chopstick I accidentally left out (used for helping Blythe stand up) was completely unblemished.

The second week of March I started picking up leaf mulch from the garden. It’s really early to do this, but I couldn’t help but want to be out in the garden, and I thought it seemed worth risking. Some of the early bloomers were having trouble poking through all the leaves (I put them on a little too heavy in some spots) and I wanted to free them.

There were also a number of plants starting to sprout under the leaves and it was so neat to see them all green (or in some cases all white due to lack of exposure to the sun – even neater! I love science.) when I unburied them.

Here are some Lamb’s Ears ‘Helene Von Stein’ in the process of being uncovered:

and a week or so later:

By this, the third week of March, the Purple Wintercreeper is going crazy-go-nuts! It budded out earlier in the month and now it’s been growing super fast. It’s really filling in under the red maple tree this year:

The Poppy Anemones are starting to almost bloom now, too.

The Sedum is sprouting, too. I just adore the way this stuff looks at all stages.

Even with last year’s now-not-so-gorgeous growth sticking out, I still like it.

The Artemisia is coming back, too:

I have a few different varieties in the front garden. That one is ‘Powis Castle’ and it’s one of my favorite plants. The ‘Silver Mound’ is also coming up all over (I have it throughout the front garden):

(That Lavender needs a haircut!)

The Vinca is blooming, too:

The blossoms on this plant may be tiny, but they are stunning! I feel like these photos look ‘shopped for color enhancement, but they aren’t. The flower color is just that intense!

The Russian Sage is also sprouting teeny tiny leaves!

Are those not adorable?

It doesn’t look like a whole lot at this stage, but the garden is really coming along.

I think that this year I will have more fully or near-fully developed plants than babies, for the first time. I’m really excited to see how it progresses through the next few months!

This book has a bunch of great projects that are mostly pretty simple to knit and each of which uses two skeins of complementary yarn. I will definitely being using these patterns to do a little stash-busting! My post at CPL has more on this book.