I had to prune the rosemary. It had grown completely over the thyme and two of the ornamental salvia. Now, they're getting plenty of sun and should be thinking about blooming soon. The rosemary has been in bloom all "winter" long.
Probably the biggest project I've worked on so far has been putting the greenhouse back together and building a flat to start my tomatoes and peppers in. I'm no carpenter, so it was a daunting task. It's probably the most complicated thing I've made since I built my mom a jewelry box over 20 years ago. I've been worried that it's not going to work. This is the first time I've tried to start my seedlings in the greenhouse versus in the closet. I hope it will make for a more smooth transition. They've taken forever to sprout, but the first one came up yesterday and a second one today, so hopefully the rest will be following soon.
Besides that, I've gotten to tackle a couple of other projects. I've been bummed for a couple of years now about this dogwood that died just outside our fence. It's been overgrown with ivy and some sort of thorny vine. There was also a small bush growing up around it that's a type of weed I see a lot in this area. It will quickly grow into a tree if you let it. Anyway, I chopped down most of that dead tree with my machete last weekend. I left about four feet of stump. I discovered that there was a heavenly bamboo growing next to it, and I left that.
This weekend, I also got to prune the fig tree. There were a couple of branches that were growing at awkward angles, making it hard to move around it. I also had to take off some height to keep it growing up into the overhang. I worked in one of the circles in the garden, too. It's the circle with the peppermint. I pruned back the dead growth from it and pulled it up where it was creeping out of its bounds. This seems to be the main area of parsley reseeding. I weeded it completely and thinned the parsley seedlings to a good spacing. Additionally, there are three arugula and a bok choy that have survived the "winter" and are now flowering. I'm going to harvest the seed and then pull them up and use their space for transplanting tomatoes or peppers later. Also in this circle are a few carrots that have been in the ground for over a year now. They are massive! I'm not planning on eating them, but letting them go to seed to collect for later use. Even with all that, there was some space left in the circle, and I used that space to plant garlic. Usually, I plant it in the fall, for a summer harvest, but I never got around to it last year. I thought we had eaten all of what I had grown, but when I was looking through my seeds recently, I found four small bulbs. I planted the nineteen biggest cloves.
