Taking Advantage Of The Warm Weather - Getting Ahead Of Spring Things

The weather stayed above freezing so I spent a couple of hours in the garden trying to get ahead of next year's garden chores. It gets quite hectic when Winter breaks and the growing season goes full blast in the Spring.

I usually have about 200 plants growing in pots in addition to my beds. I grow beneficial flowers (nasturtium, marigold), tomatoes, peppers, and flowers (petunias, zinnias, coleus, and whatever extra things I have) in the pots.

I'm increasing the bed height of one of my beds by 6 inches. I spend a lot of my time on making good soil so I reuse last year's soil as much as possible.

I dump the contents of the pots into the empty bed. You can see a lot of the soil was frozen. I just pile it up. The natural freezing and thawing process will break the soil apart. You can see very heavy roots in the pots. Sometimes the roots prevent the soil from breaking apart over the Winter. I wait until the Spring to break it up with a shovel.

In the Spring I hand dig the soil and remove whatever vegetation didn't breakdown over the winter. I try to remove weeds now.  Less weeding next year!

One of my many stacks of pots. They are ready to go next year!