Gardens and Sunshine

It's been a really long time since I made a blog post. I've been running and working and spring cleaning with a vengeance! I've also been spending a lot of time ogling the gardening that my SIL has been posting about over at HJ Waxing Moon. She's out in the Portland, OR area and so they are a bit warmer and a bit further along then we are in the Mitten right now. She and Mr. Moon have been doing a fantastic job at getting their garden spaces cleaned up and ready for the year. 

But, enough waxing on about my fab SIL, I've got gardening of my own happening! When we moved into our house there was a sad little raised bed in the front yard with a dead potted evergreen stuck on top of it, and two pseudo-beds on either side of the front door that had some scraggly looking bushes in them planted too close to the house. The two beds at the front of the house have since been reformed by taking one set of bushes out and using them along our south property line to form the beginnings of a hedge. This solved the problem of the bushed being planted too closely to the house, and then my MIL planted some beautiful red tulips in front of the remaining bushes. We also moved a very pretty crabapple tree that was planted a bit too close to the house as well. 
The next phase of the project was to reform the raised bed. The first part of this happened a few summers ago when I had my brother down for some forced labor help in the garden and we discovered that the reason that the raised bed was there was it was hiding an old tree stump that no one had bothered to remove, they just built up far enough around it to put a 3" layer of dirt over it! So I had my brother help me dig out as much of the stump as we could and added more dirt and compost and it became my herb bed for a couple of years. This is phase two. Donald and I are going to remove the old bed (after transplanting some of the herbs that are still alive after winter) and build two new 4'x8' raised beds for vegetable gardening. Tomorrow we are going to build the first of the two beds and then plant into it on Thursday. The second bed will be constructed after I get back from watching my baby brother graduate from Northern Michigan next weekend. So, here's my to-do list for the next two days and the planned layout of the first bed. Hopefully I remember to take pictures as we go so I can post them here!