End of 2022 - What I learned this year

2022 marked the 2nd year of my gardening "journey". When we moved into this house I hadn't a clue what a perennial was, an annual, what plants wanted full-sun, how to amend the soil, and just about everything else. Thanks to youtube I learned a lot.

This year my tulips came alive. I planted 200 bulbs and just about all of them came up. We had an exceptionally dry winter so I was nervous my hard work was going to be wasted. We went on a family vacation and when we came home, the tulips were finally blooming and it made me feel so happy.

The biggest thing I learned from planting tulips is to space them closer together. I loved that I had a plethora of pale yellow and white tulips in my yard but I had shoots of one (maybe two) stems just about everywhere. This made it painfully hard come late May into June when I wanted to get annuals in the ground. I still had green tulip/daffodil leaves everywhere. I ended up cutting most of them down before they browned because it would have been late July by the time my annuals were planted. We shall see what happens this coming spring because it's a big "no no" to cut back the green leaves before they are brown.

The biggest win for me this year was installing the drip system. O.m.g. You haven't lived yet until you have your garden on drip. The overall health of my plants were so much better. I would turn the hose bib on, come inside and tell Alexa to set a timer for 30-45 minutes depending on the heat that day. I had gorgeous roses and my mum plants that survived the pervious winter were larger than I expected.

Now that I have been working in my garden for 2 years I am noticing my weaknesses. Watering and remembering to water is definitely one of them. Especially when it comes to containers. I loathe carrying the watering can or a bucket outside to water containers. My next goal is to make sure I have my containers set up on drip too. I would also like to install the drip systems that have the timers that I can control it from my phone. Work smarter not harder.