It’s another rainy day, but the call of soil and planting is calling. If your spring has been as cool and wet as mine, you have the urge to be digging in the dirt. But for me, the soil is too wet for any gardening, so it’s time for rainy-day gardening activities.
I cleaned my containers for the patio and made sure they were ready for the new small space garden area. One planter is cracked, but I want to make several Hypertufa planters, and this will be the perfect garden pot to use and a base for making new creative pots. Hypertufa planters look great in a mossy setting or with a mini moss garden and a garden gnome.
I sorted my gardening tools. I keep my old ruined tools for garden art projects or use the good handles to replace other tools with broken ones. I have one garden rake, an old push mower, and a spade that need a new purpose other than garden chores.
I cut the boards I needed for a mini-raised bed. The area is 2-½ feet deep by 8 feet long. I used two boards to get a height of 12 inches. One side has hinges on it, so I can drop the side and use a hoe to rake the soil out. I’ll plant onions, lettuce varieties, cold crops, and flowers in this area. The raised bed frame will be placed near a lattice fence, so I will also use the back of the garden area for planting cucumbers that will trellis up the fence.
At the end of the season, I will drop the front board, remove the soil, and add it to the compost pile to renew its nutrients. I will add layers of composted sawdust, manure, straw shaft, and leaves during the winter. By spring, this will have broken down, and I will add fresh compost, and my garden will be ready to plant. I may even throw old windows on top of this raised bed and use it for a cold frame next spring.
Even though the soil is soggy and too wet to plant, it’s a great time to dig up and separate perennials. The plants pop up off the ground easily, and I just trench or lay them in prepared soil bad until I can report them or put them in a new perennial garden bed. Today I dug up the deep-rooted peonies from the flowerbed I am redoing.
The peonies should have been moved last fall, so they would have flowered this spring, but this garden was not an area I had intended to redo. This garden bed suffered from the cold this winter, and I decided it was time to redo the area – so the peonies will have to be moved. I’ll just mix them in with annual flowers this year, and they will add green texture and form to a flower garden while developing better roots for flower production next year.
And next year, the area I planted the peonies will be a perennial garden area with a bench for reading.
Even on a rainy day, there is always a garden project that can be planned or started. It may be planning, repotting, or creating garden art. But these small tasks are often overlooked on sunny days, so a rainy day makes the perfect time to do mini garden tasks.