Happy New Year

When I said in my last post that I was very behind, I wasn't kidding and things didn't improve all through December. Once Christmas was over with, I kind of hibernated for a week and did almost nothing but nurse a sore back and read. Now I'm ready to get back into the garden, but one hell of a storm has just blown into the bay area and we're expected to get about 3 inches of rain over the next 24 hours. The winds are pretty fierce as well and I expect that I'll have a lot of clean-up to do in the yard when the weather clears. Or maybe the mess will all have blown somewhere else--I'll have to wait and see.

So while I can't be gardening right now, I am thinking about the garden--mostly about what I was able to accomplish last year and what I wasn't, and what I'd like to get done this year.

I did do a major overhaul of the front yard in 2007, getting rid of the lawn and replacing it with three dwarf citrus trees and lots of drought-tolerant plants (details to come soon in a separate post). I successfully grafted two apple trees that will be espaliered against a fence in the back yard. And I learned a lot about propagation--all kinds of propagation.

For this year, I will still need to develop the front yard after I see how things look when they fill in in the spring. I hope to fill in a lot more in the back yard, especially since I moved some plants from the back to the front yard, leaving some conspicuous holes in the back. I'd like to develop more structure in the back and also plant more edibles. I plan to replace the volunteer Kangaroo Apple and its very messy berries, which are edible but not exactly desirable, with some kind of dwarf fruit tree--maybe a plum. I want to expand my fledgling collection of fuchsias on the back deck and try cross-breeding some of them. I'd like to figure out some kind of watering system for the back yard that I can actually afford. And I hope to spend more time sitting back and enjoying my garden this year, not just working it.

So happy new year to all. Here's hoping 2008 is an excellent year in and out of the garden.