This week we had a snow and ice storm which means lots of hard ground so no shoveling wheelbarrows full of mulch on the weekend for a change which is nice. Our next door neighbor has been back and forth on fixing the side fence since managed to rip out the poison ivy in our drive way along with all the random brush. Hopefully it will get done by February. Last summer and fall redid the front and sides of our property with “regenerative horticulture” which is a fancy way of saying putting 6-8 inches layer of mulch, then add fertilizer, and wait 2-3 months to put in your favorite plants. So much shoveling of mulch. According to the Amish, adding fertilizer used to mean crop rotation in which they would run pigs or animals on the land after it’s mulched for a week every 6 months, but given we live in a city, you can just go to Lowes and buy 10-10-10 bags of fertilizer for $20-25 back in the lawn and garden section. Wake county has a great mulch delivery system, 10 yards will cover 500 square feet if you’re trying to figure out a rule of thumb in fixing up your property. 98% of the neighborhood either gets mulch/compost from the city or bags from Lowes so if you’re trying to budget, then you can use that. There’s also free or inexpensive mulch services from arborists for FRESH mulch, but it needs to be aged before it can used so it will bring down the cost by several thousand dollars if you’re doing a large landscaping project like 1+ acres, but if you’re only doing a small section…again Lowes.
As mentioned earlier, given how little interesting scifi is scheduled for 2025, going to go explore NC and fix up the property/shop the old fashioned way with sweat so there will be more variety in the posts this year. Haus Page will be less of a theater brand and more of my Ralph Lauren lifestyle roots for now. Good reset. Healing your land takes about a year from January to November according to most resources so we’ll see how fast this goes since we already have a headstart from last year. Obviously having lost 50-60 lbs being more active, my primary reason for learning how to garden is personal health, but Cary Magazine has a lot of fancy houses down there that win awards so that may be your jam. Whatever your reasons, gardening is super fun and hope posting about it will inspire you to consider it for your own place.
If you talk to older gardeners and farmers, January is mostly a reset month with clean-up, mulch, and tool repair followed by the beginning of the planting season in February. Half of NC gardeners seem to like to wait until March given how unpredictable our weather can be, but we’re going to roll the dice and start in February hopefully with smaller seeds. But we all know the saying, “Man makes plans and God laughs.” Well, whatever you’re doing this month, we hope that it’s fun. And if you have property, maybe consider putting in a few plants with us this spring.