Getting Ready to Garden

Well, it’s a gorgeous day outside. True spring. Well, spring in Boulder, anyway. It’s 83 degrees, but it’s supposed to be 42 and snowing tomorrow. We need the moisture—it’s the driest winter on record at the moment. I can see this summer’s campfires disappearing in front of my eyes… Anyway, Dave and I are inside because we’ve become addicted to computers. We’re at the Goat. I just got a netbook, so I’ve been fooling around with it.

Obviously, it has a camera. Cool. Anyway, I’ve been working out my plans for my garden. It  gets more complicated every year. Needlessly complicated! I’ve decided that the Colorado State University Extension is my resource, so I’m relying on their last frost dates and recommended planting times for vegetables. I’ve combined all that data in a Google Calendar and used Google docs to make notes. My garden may or may not do better than usual, and I may or may not (probably not) be able to follow this intricate planting schedule, but I’ve maximized everything. Would it be better to be outside gardening or enjoying the sunshine? Sort of, but I’m having a lot of fun planning! I’m going to use (shocking, I know…) a piece of paper to plan the actual garden. Last year I put the pumpkins too close to the neighbor’s plot and I had to keep moving the vines.

Paying for the garden was a bit ridiculous. For whatever reason, this Heidi Barrowman woman is the only person at the Bob L. Burger rec center who can handle the paperwork, and she’s only in on weekdays. So when I went on Saturday, the teenagers running the desk suggested that I call Heidi during the week, read her all the info for the forms, and then come in to choose my plot. On a weekday. I left grumbling. Last Monday I stayed home very sick from work. I sounded like a bear awakened from hibernation. But I was out going to the doctor and buying $100 worth of medicine, so I stopped by to see Heidi. The desk people still acted like they’d never heard of anyone wanting to get a plot at the community garden. “Do you want information about the garden?” they asked. “No! I want to sign up and pay for it!” I growled. It turned out that most plots were already taken (leading me to believe they’d already dealt with this a few times…), so I couldn’t get one very close to the pumphouse. You’d think it wouldn’t matter, but you have to screw in your hose, open your sprayer head all the way, turn on the water spigot, go to the pumphouse, and push a button. If the water pressure isn’t high enough—for instance, if your sprayer head is clogged or not open enough or has flipped onto the ground because of the water pressure in the hose—the water stops flowing. Meaning you have to dash back to the pumphouse. So you can see that a plot near the button is a hot commodity. Oh well. I’m sure plot #11 will be a good one, and I’m on line with the pumphouse, so I only have to dash one direction.

We’re sort of planning to go on a bike ride today, but it’s already 3:00 p.m. (we slept in and went to the late service). And Dave promised that we could do some garden stuff—I want to get some fencing to keep the rabbits away from my cool season crops. (What cool season? It’s 83 degrees!) I need some dirt, and some more pots for tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and flowers, all of which I’m planning to grow at home. The tomatoes and peppers did horribly in the garden last year.

These darn weekends are too short. We went rock climbing in the Flatirons yesterday and out to dinner with Ben, Christina, and Jehanne to celebrate Ben’s and my birthday. I still need to go grocery shopping and cook dinner tonight (chicken tiki masala). Plus the bike ride. And maybe the garden stuff. And we’re already back to work tomorrow! Then the next week, starting April 1, I’ll be in Chicago for work.

Hey! We’re leaving! Sunshine, here we come.