Spring thoughts

I spent much more time today thinking about gardening, specifically spring garden activities for an upcoming program at the NC Arboretum, which I mentioned in this post, than I did thinking about "places of the spirit."  I sat in front of my iMac most of the day, creating the visuals for a new presentation.

Of course, the activities are familiar, but I wanted to provide a bit of a refreshed perspective for these Blue Ridge Eco-Gardener certificate folks.    The title of the program has "tasks" instead of "activities" -- I've fussed before about how I think we should write and talk as gardening as fun -- that's how I've tried to set up my gardening!

So, again, it's more about balancing what's necessary, what's fun, and what's ecological, too.  We're blessed with an abundance of leaves here, so why would we actually buy mulch?  Of course, we have and do, especially for the paths and "decorative" spots, adding pine bark nuggets and locally harvested Eastern white pine needles from nearby parks and streetsides where otherwise they'd just be swept up in street-cleaning or clogging up the storm sewer.

Over 80" of rain at the Asheville airport in 2018 -- twice the "normal" amount

Our naturalistic garden here in the mountains of Western North Carolina is full of things to do, but they're all basically fun, now that we've moved beyond the heavy-duty mulching/soil improvement phase -- all fueled by free wood chip deliveries (and I actually didn't do any of that work -- my gardening companion did all the wood chip-moving).

But the steady rain had me thinking about how MUCH rain we've received.  It was a historic record year in 2018, and we've already had 12 inches in the first two months of 2019.