Second Year in my Garden

The second year in my new Garden I found myself wanting to devote more time to working in the garden and patching the bare spots and doing more than just quickie weeding frenzies, which is what the first year was all about. I wanted to "bond" with my garden and make it my own.. instead I felt like a caretaker of the garden.. tending the garden for the previous owner. I wanted to make it my own.

I have moved around many times in my life and almost every place that I have lived, I end up putting in a garden.. a veggie garden; flower gardens are a luxury and can only be put in after the essentials of the garden is taken care of first. This is the mentality of being raised by a parent/ grandparents of the depression era.. so every time I broke ground it was spent preparing and weeding and maintaining a veggie garden, who had time for the enjoyment of flower gardening?

As I spent another year in my new Garden, I realized the yard was already prepared. I had a veggie garden already dug and fenced in.. AND I had flower gardens throughout the yard. It dawned on me what a wonderful place I had taken possession of. The yard had SO MUCH going for it. I wanted to work it and make it mine.

The second year I again planted the veggie garden and tried to keep up with the weeds. And once again I was spending too much time on the river and at my boyfriend's instead of getting time in my garden. I was making notes, mental notes, of what all was in the garden.. the diversity and variety of the micro environments throughout the yard. So much potential. The summer came and went and I was only able to work to keep the weeds at bay and maintain the yard. I tried to put down sod in the backyard but with the dry weather it burned up and died. No such luck with the sod. My first year I put in a concrete patio area and realized it wasn't wide enough to accommodate a patio table/chair set, so this year I added bricks and extended the patio area into an "L" shape.

So I put away my garden tools and once again vowed to spend more time in the yard, next year.