The Organic Mechanic Moves!

Well, we're always making moves...but this time I actually moved. Why would I decide to move in the middle of spring you might ask? For a family of horticulturists...it seemed better on paper than practice, but we had to move into a bigger place since we are adding to the family! We stayed local, only moved about 5 miles from our previous place, but we are a world apart from the hustle and bustle of downtown West Chester, PA.
We moved into a 200+ year old farmhouse! Between the natural area across the street, the wood stove on the first floor, the plant shelves built into every window, the perfect piedmont outside landscape, and the four floors of space...we had to say yes! So, this spring has all the usual busy times, plus housecleaning and gardening on top of all that, and you can probably guess why I havent been blogging like I thought I would!

We counted after moving all the plants...apparently we have over 200 square feet of plants in containers! I do love plants in containers, especially if moving frequently is your thing, since you can always take a container with you. We had a fair number of highly prized plants we had to dig and move, plants from such events as the Rare Plant Auction, www.thedch.org/activities-events/rare-plant-auction. Thankfully we had a small army of friends over to help dig! In return we offered divisions of anything people wanted, and of course, food and tasty beverages at the end of the day! We are now committed to getting most of them in the ground ASAP. The nice thing is we can move the containers around in the garden space for a while before finally deciding on a final landscape plan. We plan to use Burnout herbicide from St. Gabriel Organics, http://www.stgl.us/ to knock back the areas we want to plant. Burnout uses food grade ingredients like clove oil and citric acid to combate unwanted plant guests in the garden. I'll post more on that project after it happens to show the results of using an herbicide without glyphosate as the active ingredient!
I am really looking forward to developing this property into a paradise. It has all the makings of an outdoor retreat for visiting friends (and ourselves). Now we just have to make it happen!

Its time for me to get out there and get my hands dirty! Until next time....