It’s that time of year when growing a garden seems wonderful and romantic and appealing. Visions of beautiful canned goods, plants heavy with produce, and good food, friends and family and laughter, float through my mind.

Where are my seeds?

Do I have enough starter trays?

Hurry, it’s time to plant seeds!!!

But I haven’t planted anything…not yet.

This year I won’t be pulled in so easily to all the romantic visions of a perfect, weed free garden, because I know my summer is going to be very busy packing, sorting, and getting ready to move.

Yep, we’re moving, closer to the school, but that is another post, for another day.

I do still want to have some kind of garden. We will have raspberries and strawberries even if we didn’t want them. They grow like weeds around here. I plan to pick and freeze as many as I can.

We will probably plant some potatoes and I always get sucked into planting tomatoes even though they don’t do all that great around here. I always dream of having jars and jars full of canned tomatoes, but our tomato patch has not blessed us just yet.

In thinking about gardening, there is the ever present reality that there will be weeds in the garden, and so I am constantly thinking about what could be done to prevent them from growing in the first place.

A few weeks ago I found myself in the magazine section of the grocery store. I snapped these photos of photos from the magazine I was paging through.

I love the hay in the pathways. I’m nervous about this idea for my own garden though because it would take a LOT of hay, and I think the weeds would grow through it anyway. I might try it between the raspberry rows though.

I love garden boxes with defined sides, and pathways, and edges. But again my garden is too big to have boxes everywhere.

And I love these stacking blocks. I love them in a circle around trees, I love them as retaining walls, I love them as planter boxes. I never thought of using them to create a space for planting vegetables, but I love the way it looks.

I don’t know what kind of garden I will have this summer, but I have caught garden fever, and my mind is churning, and thinking, and plotting, and planning!!