Winter gardening

 With winter here in full cold force, I'm fighting spring fever! That restless feeling of being in the house for too long and having the sun shining is teasing me that its really not only 21 degrees, but weeks away from actual planting! No matter, I'm having warm, sunny dreams of planting, prepping, weeding, and harvesting....Oh the smell of sun-warmed dirt!! The Fever has really set in for this girl!
 The photo above is from last summer, it was our first summer here and with the move and getting things settled I didn't plan on putting together a "real" garden, I figured I would at least get the beds built and toss a few seeds in the ground to see how it would go...as you can see, everything I planted grew very well! We have magic soil, as my kids say, because everything we planted lived, and bore produce! You can go back to my earlier post about our garden back in Oct to read all about it.
 The photos below I took this afternoon. Yup, cold, frozen ground. It has been very cold and windy the last few days. So cold my kids collected eggs and some were frozen solid! That's a breakfast surprise for sure!
At  least the sun is out with beautiful blue skies.

This year I'm planning to move some things around. We're going to build 5 more beds, I'm putting the tomatoes in tires to save bed space. and in the photo below in the far right corner by the fence, we're going to have the beehives there. The fire pit is going to be moved to the other side of the yard since we are putting in a few fruit trees. There are 3 multi-grafted trees- pear, apple and cherry. Add those to our little Asian pear and we have a mini orchard!

 The Blueberries are enjoying a shady spot. We raked and baled all the leaves up along the fence, but the chickens love to scratch through it and it comes back down the slope.

 So in the mean time, I get MANY other home-bound things done. This week the kids I and got out the box (and I mean BOX) of veggie and flower seeds, I have saved bakery and and salad plastic tub and clam shell containers to start seeds. They are perfect to start seeds. A cute little mini greenhouse!

The 2 containers to the left are flower mixes. We are starting seeds for a shade flower bed, and also a sunny flower area. We are hoping to get honey bees this spring and those babies have to eat! My girls are excited to grow flowers for the bees, Miss J asked if the honey will taste like our flowers!

I bought plant markers last year at Fred Meyer and they are great to help mark seeds and soon starts.

Spring is around the corner and till then I've got garden beds to build, wood chips and Tagro to spread, and a pantry that needs shelves build....Sooner rather then later!