Joe and I had our first few hours of garden playtime the other day. We started by planning out our garden layout for the season (it's always funny to look back and see how far we diverged from our blueprint by the end of the year). We've tried to take into account some of the lessons we learned last year, such as it IS possible to have too many sungold tomatoes and ditto on ground cherries until we come up with an efficient way to dry them. We're going to try to focus more on the low maintenance, high producers, good winter keepers such as potatoes, sweet potatoes and butternuts. We'll see how it goes I guess.

It is still a little early to jump in full force, which is good because I don't think I'm ready to yet, but we did spend some time pulling up the remnants of fall crops and some of the tenacious weeds that made it through the winter. I weeded one half of our strawberries, and if all goes well we should be dealing with a ridiculous quantity of berries this year. We planted 200 plants last spring, and they look like they've made it through the winter without any problems.

This winter seemed much shorter and far busier to me than usual, which leaves me facing this spring feeling like I do when waking up to a busy day after a shortened night of sleep. I need the seasonal equivalent of a cup of tea. A vacation maybe? :)