However, it stands to reason that if you want to be a successful gardener in the Pacific Northwest, one thing you must not do is insist on gardening only when the sun is out. So I zipped myself into my fuzzy jacket and stepped outside.
There's an area of that curvy bed back by the fence which desperately needs spading up and amending. I would have gotten to this yesterday but for 2 problems:
1. There's a bunch of what Rosemary Verey (a very impressive English master gardener) calls "volunteer seedlings" in that area. They're foxgloves, though they're pink, not yellow. I had some foxgloves elsewhere in the yard, and the seeds blew elsewhere into my yard, where they grew into these. I had been considering buying some foxgloves, but the price of buying plants had put me off. They're biennials, so if I planted them from seed now, it would be more than a year before they'd flower. So I was really pleased to see these.
2. The place I want to put them needs a lot more work in the form of spading up and raking out and amending before it will be ready for them.
So, I dug them up and potted them in old six-pack market flats. (These are the black or green plastic flats that you buy plants in at the nursery. These particular ones have 2-inch cells, six to a container.) I've set them on my back porch, hopefully they'll continue to thrive until I can re-plant them! There's about 15 of them.
The other thing I did today was to rake out a lot of the debris from my digging fit yesterday. Not only does this get the roots and stuff out of my garden (and into my compost heap), it also lets me see which areas I still have to dig up. There's a lot of ground that I had thought was dug, but which was merely buried under piles of dirt from other diggings. Oh well.