The Marigold Potager Diaries

  In gardening, soil is everything.  It's the lifeblood of your plants. They pull their water from it, their nutrients from it. If your soil is unhealthy, so are your plants.  Planting garlic cloves in less than ideal soil our first year here.   When I moved to this new-to-me yard 4 years ago, the soil here was bad. Like... really bad. So hard that I couldn't even get a shovel into it to plant bulbs, flowers, or garlic... It was devoid of nutrients, rocky, dry, hard... well, the above picture shows what it looked like that first year here.  The soil was grey from lack of nutrients.  I have dealt with 'bad' soil many times in the past though, so knew that this was all fixable. Just needs time and lots and lots of organic matter.  Soil doesn't get 'old' and unusable, it just gets hungry.   There is no need to dig it out, no need to double dig, no need to dig at all. While it does not happen immediately, you can rebuild all sandy soil, clay soil...

You know that saying that into each life a little rain must fall? Well, I think we have had more than our fair share. This wheelbarrow was filled up in just two rainfalls.  Welcome to my new blog, a garden diary of sorts, where I will be posting the good, the bad, and the ugly from the gardening seasons. A place for me to keep track of what thrived and flourished, as well as what didn't.... and hopefully, the why.  The 2026 gardening season has started off as a very frustrating garden year. It has been cold, snowy, rainy all the way to the end of June. Gardeners say that their weeds are taking over their gardens with all the rainfall. Luckily, I grow in raised beds so they are much less weedy and the perennial gardens are all mulched up for less weeding, but nevertheless... yuck.  That said.... some seeds rotted in the ground, some plants struggled but came about nicely after all (sweet peas and lettuces), and some veggies, like garlic, actually thrived.  It is go...