jaunthie | Mistress Mary, quite contrary

The weather has changed to a mild, mostly-dry trend that's supposed to last for a week or so (according to the weather people's predictions). It's not Spring, but it's much more springlike than the previous weeks. Judging from what I've seen around in people, news articles, and blogs, I think we're looking at a bit of early spring fever over the next few days. Certainly Jake's garden enthusiasms has me thinking of the upcoming Flower and Garden show, as well as further musing on my garden plans for this year. I have ambitions this year. Not that I don't every year, but some years my ambitions are bigger than others. This year I want to finally deal with the-old-bed-that-used-to-be-the-rose-garden, which is going to be quite the task.

When I first moved in, this bed was a 1950's-era rose garden, which had unfortunately suffered several years of serious neglect. The knee-high weeds were deeply entrenched in the rose roots, the bushes themselves were largely sucker-stock instead of the grafted varieties, *and* there were two different kinds of rose virus present among the plants. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the bed really couldn't be saved, so

fisherbear and I ripped out all the roses and weeds, removed everything down to ground level. I assuaged my rose-guilt and rose-longing by planting a number of heirloom own-root roses along the fence in the front yard, but I didn't do anything with the old rose bed except keep it flat. I wanted to give the ground time to rest, hopefully get rid of any lingering virus stock that might come back up (with cause; we had to fight rose suckers re-emerging for a couple of years running), and really plan for how to replace the bed with something useful (and with fresh earth). For several years the old bed acted as a second parking place, which was handy if not in fact what I wanted to do with the space. But we no longer have two cars, and it's too good a growing spot to just sit empty. It's on a slope, so I'm thinking stair-stepped raised beds are a good way to go. It's going to be a lot of work to put them in, but once it's done I'll have lots more vegetable garden space. Or maybe I'll put flowers in. Or both. And hey, I have rose seeds that I collected from my favorite-rose-that-didn't-survive-the-fence-rebuild...maybe I'll plant a few of those and see if I get lucky.

*blinks and smacks self*

And herein lies the problem. My brain is perfectly happy to go on and on about garden plans and other such fun musings, but a) it's too early to really be thinking about this yet (well, maybe not, but it doesn't *have* to be thought about now) and b) it's far too much of a distraction from what I really must be concentrating on in the next few weeks, such as all the work I have to get done, the personal projects that need to be started and/or completed soon, the various events I need to prepare for (and what exactly is in the air right now that everyone is having events/parties this month? I've got events every weekend this month, which is just unheard-of!)... Tons of stuff to do, and my brain wants to burble on about poppies and vegetables and roses and compost and berry bushes and pruning. Gah.

I'm doing my best to refocus my thoughts, but I suspect it's going to be an uphill fight. It's just that kind of contrarian day. I should have seen it coming when I turned on my music player on random play during the walk to the bus this morning, and the first song it queued up was Alice in Chains' "Queen of the Rodeo."

The imps of the perverse, they do mock at me and blow raspberries in my general direction...