Welcome 2023! This year is shaping up to be one of our most exciting years as a family and for myself as a gardener. Our house construction is underway and that has opened up quite a few potential projects. One of the things I’ve always enjoyed doing instead of New Year resolutions is to create a garden project list of all the items I would like to accomplish in the coming year. I rarely get to everything but it is a starting point for planning the year ahead. The new home project will create new opportunities for gardening as well as necessitate some projects at our current home to prepare for moving our garden. Here’s what we’re looking at in 2023.
The Garden Project List
Simplifying Our Landscape
Our garden has grown quite a lot over the years. When we go to sell the home one foreseeable issue we may have is that people may not want this much work to do. I’ll be going through and simplifying as much of it as possible. That will mean eliminating some garden locations, moving plants, and in general making the landscaping something we can make more appealing to most people.
This will also include updating it with some pretty annuals to dress up bare spots and a good deal of mulching!
Take Down the Vegetable Garden
The vegetable garden situation is much like the rest of our landscape. It’s more work than a lot of people will like. Plus maybe the next owner of our home will want to garden differently. I want to leave them with a clean slate. That will mean taking down the fence posts around the garden. Most of these are cemented in but should be removable. I’ll cut out the cemented part and use the 4×4 posts to create raised beds on our new property. The posts were damaged all over by carpenter bees and won’t be usable as posts again but they are good enough to build some raised beds that will last a couple seasons.
I will also need to transport our metal raised bed. I don’t plan to move the soil, it will stay but will get leveled off in the garden.
The greenhouse will need to be dismantled to be moved. I was hoping to be able to leave the structure up and move it all together to the new house but the width of the greenhouse is wider than my trailer. I think the safer option is to take the structure apart then move it. It’s a Harbor Freight Greenhouse that has lasted quite some time. It’s smaller than I would like it to be, and really only good enough to cheat a hardiness zone with some plants, but it does help. I think it cost about $250 when we bought it. I would say we’ve gotten some good use out of it.
Move Plants
Before the leaves had all fallen off the trees I went around the garden and marked the shrubs and small trees I wanted to dig up and move with us. There are about 10-15 plants that need to be potted up and transported. There are also quite a few perennials I want to divide and bring with us. That list includes hostas, hellebores, heuchera, daylily, irises, daffodils, switchgrass, coneflowers, and probably several more I haven’t though of yet. There’s enough out there to transplant that it will be several days of work in the garden. I don’t have places yet for them to go when we get to our new house so I’ll also need a temporary plant nursery area. Somewhere these plants can be taken care of until they have a new permanent home.
All of these are in addition to some potted plants I already have and need to move that are currently in the vegetable garden area. Hopefully they have weathered the winter cold OK and we will be happy in the new locations.
Start the New Vegetable Garden
We will have to have a new vegetable garden area. This year needs to be about getting established in our new home. The vegetable garden will be a priority. We already planned where it will go and had a frost free faucet installed so we can have good water access to the garden. Some questions we will have to answer are mostly about the layout, structure, and style of the garden. I’m debating between a less formal and more organic style vs a formal style. I think there are merits to each but my problem is I always want to try everything and there just isn’t enough time for it all!
Plant a Magnolia Tree
My wife really wants to have a magnolia tree. The classic southern magnolia is a beautiful evergreen tree that can provide privacy and food for the birds. The cardinals love the seeds! I’m leaning toward the ‘Little Gem’ Southern Magnolia as I want to limit the space it takes up. Southern magnolias can spread outward quite far but the ‘Little Gem’ magnolia is a dwarf variety that will have a much smaller spread.
Build a New Shed
I’m going to need a place to put out mowing equipment. We’re on 7 acres of land and will be using 2 riding mowers to take care of the grounds. I’m hoping we have enough leftover materials from the house build to put together the structure for a new shed. The house framers have used a good deal of lumber for scaffolding while putting up the house so I figured some of that can be used to build a small storage shed. This time the shed won’t be a greenhouse/shed, just a shed. A larger sized greenhouse will come later!
Build a Firepit and Patio area
Our property is blessed (depends on how you look at it) with rock. While a tiller will have issues with it the rock could have some awesome landscaping uses including a patio and firepit area. There is a perfect place on the back side of the house to put a nice firepit with a round patio area surrounding it. I’ll have to make some diagrams and layouts to illustrate our landscaping ideas.
Greenhouse Construction
Of course I’m going to need a bigger greenhouse! This may wait until fall 2023 or even 2024 as we have a lot to do before the greenhouse gets started. I would like to resume propagating some plants for profit and will need some spaces to do that in but I have a lot of planning to do. What kind of greenhouse? How large? Where to put it? I have a lot of questions to answer before I begin to build a greenhouse.
There are lots of sub-lists that could go underneath each of these projects. It’s a pie in the sky sort of list and realistically all these items won’t get completed this year. The first 4 items on this list really have to get done before we list our house to sell. This list doesn’t include actually selling the house which also has quite a few projects to get it ready too! If you’re interested in a home in a great neighborhood in Spring Hill, TN reach out and let me know.