I’m making a list of resolutions now. It’s not that I’ve been procrastinating; I just don’t make resolutions in January. I make them now, at the beginning of March, when everything is still possible. My resolutions go like this:
– I won’t buy any plants that I don’t know exactly where they are going to go.
– I will plant the sale plants I bought late last summer, then didn’t get planted ‘cause I didn’t know where to put them.
– I’ll fertilize the rhododendrons–at least once.
Then I start getting more serious:
– I will plant only items that we want to eat.
– We will eat everything I plant.
– I will keep on top of the weeds (I mulch heavily now, so that helps).
– I won’t plant 300 tomato seeds.
Now that last resolution will be hard to keep. Already I am going through the seeds thinking Early Girls, Flamme, Lola, maybe just a few Brandywine and at least four types of cherries-several of each. And enough paste tomatoes to can/freeze for a year of eating and so it goes. But I’m also trying not to get too much of a head start on the seeding, because spring often ends up too cool and my greenhouse just can’t hold them all. So, I’m still in soil building and garden structure mode and that brings up a couple more resolutions:
– I will assemble those cloches I purchased many years ago
– I will finish the main path in the garden
Large barn cloche
Five years ago I ordered some barn cloche frames from England and then paid a fortune to have them shipped to this little island. I immediately purchased glass for one of them and we attempted to assemble one. No such luck. We broke the glass and I put the 10 sets of frames away. Every spring I think about buying glass and trying again. Then before I know it, it is mid summer and what is the point. Last weekend while in town, I stopped in at the glass place and ordered 4 pieces-plus an extra-of glass for one cloche.  I had watched a youtube video several times that made it look so easy to assemble the barn cloche and so we tried. I think it didn’t help that we were attempting to place the glass outside with the wind howling at 80 km. I was tempted to put everything away but instead took all the pieces up to my studio and calmly started to assemble it. And it came together. In fact, it was almost easy. I don’t know what we were doing five years ago, that we ended up breaking the glass, but whatever. One’s done, the rest will be a piece of cake. If I assemble the rest. These cloches are 27 inches at the base, so they are not going to just tuck into the garden somewhere; they demand space. So, maybe just one more for this year.
Now, if only that path were so easy.
A few members of the Cloche family
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