Roll on Spring

Old Man Winter is finally retreating it seems up here in Canada. It’s been a long stretch as the snow came in some 5 months ago, and is still with us but it is diminishing slowly.

Five long months since we packed all the patio furniture cushions up in our new Lifetime Extra Large Storage Box, pressure washed the driveways, pruned the hedges, applied a winterizing fertilizer to the lawns and generally got the yard all “hunkered down” for winter. Five months of bitter cold temperatures, frozen soil, bare trees, and a garden full of dormant perennials.

Roll on spring….

If you’re a keen gardener, winter’s are actually a great time to dream of next year, rejuvenate a little, plan intended changes and best of all, spend countless hours studying colorful garden seed catalogues.

There’s no better way of escaping the winter blahs than a comfortable couch, along with a stack of seed catalogues complete with their splendid photography and promises of the world actually being “alive” again. After many months of dreariness we sometimes need a little reminder that inevitably spring WILL come!

When dreaming of the future, of course thoughts of the past come up, and one that has been haunting me a bit, is that I just know my better half will be enlisting my help in making dozens of hanging baskets to add to the decor of our little piece of paradise; our backyard. Remembering last year, my back almost starts hurting, as the memories of hours of filling baskets with potting soil, applying fertilizer, planting fledgling bedding out plants, all the while bending over a deck that is too low and produces a definite backache in a short while.

That memory of an aching back also spurred me onto finally getting a proper system of planting those baskets, and thanks to my comfy couch, a laptop & Google, a few hours online research led me to purchase a Suncast GC1500B Portable Outdoor Gardening Center that’s designed exactly for that purpose, will hold all my paraphernalia within arms reach, and best of all, is of the correct height so there’ll be no more bending this spring.

Planting those baskets will seem like a breeze this spring!