January gardening

I tore my knee open on a half-buried metal fence post while working in the garden last weekend.  It's not healing well, and when I showed it to one of my coworkers for a second opinion, they asked, "What the hell were you doing gardening in January anyway?"

Okay, so it sounds weird.  But in my defense, it hasn't been very January-like lately.  We've had a very, very mild winter so far.  And last weekend the temperature outside was in the mid-fifties, with a blue sky, and I was sweating in a t-shirt and overalls whilst laboring in the soil.  The few days we have had below freezing so far this year have been the exception, not the rule. So it's not like I was shoveling snow out of the way to work in the garden.  I'm not THAT crazy.

Also, I'm fighting my way through my seasonal depression.  Physical labor and the smell of soil are two potent anti-depressants for me, and the greenhouse only needs weeding every so often.  And with autumn being such a busy time for us this past year, we pretty much just let the knee-high grasses and weeds die and lay where they fell.  There is plenty to be done out there that doesn't require warm weather.

Looking ahead to Spring, we were starting to contemplate where we wanted to build our vegetable garden.  At first the hillside above the pond seemed like the best place, so I started clearing it of weeds.  It soon became quite apparent that we would probably need to enlist the help of a professional landscaping company to properly terrace that hillside.  That was when I tore open my knee, right through my pants, on that damned rusty fence post.  Looking out across the yard, covered in mud and bleeding, I noticed the area of fallow ground between the paddock that holds our perennial beds and the greenhouse.  It was covered in dead grasses and sumac saplings, and went largely unnoticed all year.  Here is a picture of it in the early Spring.... imagine it a full season later and having never been mowed:

So here I was, looking at all this nasty dead yellow grass and thinking, "well, maybe we can build our composting bin system along side the greenhouse there.  I'm going to clear away some of that dead stuff and see what the ground looks like".  As I was raking away the dead grass (which, by the way, comes out with its root system and all at this time of year when the ground is wet and the plants are dead), I was thinking to myself, "Huh, this looks like fairly decent soil, not like the red clay we have everywhere else..."  Then my rake hit something that felt like stone a few inches below the soil.  A bit of excavation revealed that there were brick and stone paths about 3 inches down.   Someone had a garden here sometime in years past... one with well-tended soil, if I'm not mistaken. 

As I cleared off the bricks and stones, I started setting some pavers and stones we had lying around to act as walls for my newly discovered raised beds!

 Sorry about the thumb.

There is still a significant amount that I haven't unearthed but have felt with my shovel.  In the lower right corner of the above photo there are two that I've found but haven't effectively cleared yet, one going off to the right and one coming straight at me.

I'm so excited to have found this hidden treasure.  We will expand upon the work done by whoever gardened here before us.  This spot gets full sun, is a fair distance away from any of the bloody black walnut trees, and has rich, loamy soil that has been resting and waiting for tomatoes for who knows how many years. 

This discovery, in combination with the fact that I've placed a couple of seed orders (I know, I said I was going to go minimalist this year but I can't help myself!), has me daydreaming about when the world looked like this:

Gosh, I miss the color green.....