Plans, or: would you like some cheese with that whine?

Yeah. I know. It's still cold out there. Muddy, to. Down right yucky, in fact.

But. . ..

Even with the dreary weather I can tell that the day's are getting just a tad longer now that the winter solstice has passed. Once more my fingers are itching to dig into the dirt. I want to put some thing down around my little lasagna garden, and also from my front door to my mail box to make a nice walk way. All the idea's I’ve had involve cardboard, or feed sacks with lots of mulch on top.

I keep looking at the North East corner of my front yard. A place where the sun seldom shines except in early spring; and even in late fall, and winter, when the leaves are off the trees, that area only gets filtered sunlight. Oh, do I have plans for that area! But alas, I have little money. A nice little pond with a fountain in it, would be great there. Especially in the hot summer. Hostas and ferns tucked in around it would just add to the cooling cozy-ness of the area I think. Of course I’d also need some patio furniture and some kind of patio like stuff on the ground to keep what little grass and weeds grow there at bay or mow the place a lot.

There's an area out back that would work great as a vegetable garden. But I don't want to plow it up. There's just enough grade to it that plowing could cause the soil to erode faster than I could build it up. Once more I’m thinking of cardboard and feed sacks.

How can cardboard and feed sacks be of any use in a garden you may wonder. Here’s the plan. Use the feed sacks that are made of paper, cut off their bottoms and down each side. That will give me two sheets of just about the right size for a row of veggies, or I could just cut up cardboard boxes to the same width. I lay those down and top them off with some of the super well rotted stuff from my old manure pile. The rows I could lay out perpendicular to the natural flow of the water off of that area and back them up with bricks or some such on the down hill side.

The feed sacks that have more plastic in them, particularly those made with what looks like woven plastic strands, I can cut up the same way as the paper ones and use them between the veggie rows as a path way, maybe even cover them with some kind of mulch.

But what to plant? Obviously stuff I’d like to eat. Perhaps even stuff that I'd just like to see how it grows. I'd definitely like to also get some chickens as well as plants. Maybe some ducks to do garden duty. At least ducks wouldn't peck holes in my tomatoes.

I have goats so there's some more fertilizer for the garden, and if I do get some chickens that would be even more fertilizer.

So what have we got here? Plans for chickens, and ducks, and tomatoes, and corn, and beans, and bell peppers, and banana peppers, and okra, and potatoes, and lettuce, and cabbage, and ferns, and hostas, and. . ..

But, it's cold out there. It's wet out there. My knee hurts when I get up from working on the computer. I don't have the money for nearly half of what I'd have to buy. Stuff like mulch, and pool liners, and sand (if I built that little pool), not to mention the cost of chickens or ducks and what it would cost to fix up a place to keep them safe from varmints.

Sigh. I guess I'll do what I can and just keep dreaming about the rest. Oh, well. Such is life when you ain't rich.