This time of year is always the busiest for me in the garden. And all of the busyness seems to hit at once. I spend the winter sitting around crafting and sewing and watching copious amounts of Netflix, doing a bit of garden planning, spending lots of time in the kitchen, and then BAM! EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DONE IN THE GARDEN NOW! Luckily winter ended a bit early this year and I got a wee jump start on the season, but still, I probably didn’t do as much as I should have, and now the weather is nice and I have a million plants to lug in and out of the house while they harden off, a hundred million pots to clean and fill with dirt, and so many seeds to plant. I’m not complaining – I actually love it. But it is somewhat stressful. Throw in to the mix that I am trying to open up a new Etsy shop, as well as maintain my current one, blog, go to my day job, and do the hundred other things I’ve committed myself to, and yeah, things are a bit crazy.

But things are happening! And that is exciting. In the last week I have visited a few garden centres, bought a few plants (mostly herbs and annual flowers), bought a metric tonne of new pots, bought two metric tonnes of garden soil and manure, ordered a new bistro set for my patio, and planted a few handfuls of seeds. There is really a lot to be done.

I wish I could say this is all of the pots, but it isn’t. And it is also a mess, but gardens aren’t always pretty and are hard work, and I am not one to mask this with only beautiful photos – hence the abandoned gloves, random succulent tray (it’s going to go on my new bistro set!), trash bin, and mountain of soil bags in the back.

Luckily, since I gained a couple of weeks of spring garden season this year, I don’t feel like I’m being rushed. I’ve been spending a couple of hours every afternoon after work in the garden, moving things around and mostly figuring out how I want the garden to look this year. I’ve planted a few garden centre purchases, but most are still living in the greenhouse for a few more days until most of the danger of frost has passed. After all, our official average last day of frost is supposed to be May 23rd, but I usually wait until about a week after that to plant my delicates. It only takes one time of hauling giant pots of snow covered tomatoes in to your kitchen in June to err on the side of caution when it comes to precious plants and average frost dates. Am I being dramatic? Maybe.

So about all of these new pots. I realized a few weeks ago, when I decided late one sleepless night to take an inventory of all of my seedlings, that I was going to need to come up with somewhere new to put all of these seedlings. I already had lots of pots and always use all of them, but I would say that I probably doubled what I normally plant, kind of willy nilly, without a plan, so I needed to come up with a plan other than “oh I’ll just find places for them somewhere”. There were no more places. I don’t have any more room for raised beds in my back yard, so that was pretty much out of the question. So that left either giving away a bunch of seedlings, which I really didn’t want to do, or buying some new containers. I obviously went with the latter solution. And then spent a small fortune. At least a lot of the containers were on clearance, but still, when you’re buying as many as I did at once, it adds up fast. At least problem solved. Hopefully – we’ll see once I start actually planting things.

At the back of my garden I have a few wooden boxes living under my wild rose bush that I’ve seeded with lettuce (pardon the photo taken at a crappy time of day).

So I guess that’s my life in the garden lately. I’m going to continue moving containers around, filling them with dirt, prepping my raised beds for planting, planning the community garden plot (more on that in a later post), setting up my patio area when the new furniture arrives, and getting the greenhouse ready for planting. And of course, continuing to lug one million seedlings in and out of the house every day for another week or so.

I have to leave you with at least one pretty close up! These are the blossoms on my plum tree right now.

Tell me all about your garden in the comments! I’d love to hear what you’re up to, what you’re growing, if you’ve planted anything yet… really, anything! Happy gardening!