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In March of '98, my boyfriend Erik and I purchased this house. It's not our dream house, but it's quite nice.

We live in Bothell, WA, just north of Seattle. According to the USDA, we're in zone 7, but I can spit to zone 8; the dividing line is about a quarter-mile south of here. Our winters are mild, our summers are cool, our springs are wet; we get more than 30 inches of rain a year. The native soil is a fairly acid rocky glacial morrain (sandy, high pH, with many rocks about the size of your fist. Many, many rocks.) The house faces the west, with a big front yard (and a much smaller back yard) with some decent southern exposure. The lot is registered with the county as being 7700 square feet, but if you subtract the house and the unusable space (driveway etc) I probably have about 5000 square feet to grow things in.

The previous owners did not place the garden at as high a priority as I do. Notable garden features when we bought the place were:

1. a mature dogwood tree in the back yard
2. some half-hearted landscaping in the back fence, consisting of
   • a curvy bed, edged with cement blocks, along the back fence
   • some multiple levels in the aforementioned bed, defined by more of the aforementioned cement blocks
   • a very sad rosebush (hard to tell which kind, it only made one bloom)
   • a birdbath
   • a quarter-circle bed which used to be a rock garden, with all the plants turned under to give the illusion of bare soil
   • a hideous white plastic swan planter
   • a mysterious single oar
3. a great deal of weeds, including what appeared to be a stand of small trees
4. rocky, poor soil
5. two great cedar trees and a mature silver birch in the front yard
6. three rhododendrons on the verge of death
7. a baby blue spruce
8. six rhubarb plants on the south side of the house
9. three completely uninspired lumps of juniper in the front yard
10. some front-yard landscaping which looked pretty good; however, investigation later showed a 6" layer of bark mulch on top of a layer of plastic.

That first year, I went bonkers and made a few rash decisions. I stuck plants madly into the soil without amending it. I bought six hybrid tea roses and planted them too close together. I bought dozens of herbs and stuck them willy-nilly into the old rock garden. I went absolutely nuts at the seed catalogs that were magically mailed to me, and I now have a shoebox full of seeds.

Only the rose mistake is at all permanent, though. I can always amend the soil. The herbs are doing well right where they are, particularly the oregano. Seeds are cheap, and you can never have too many -- in fact, I may need to order more.

More importantly, however, I need to keep track of what I'm doing this time. Too many of last year's gardening experiments were due to a random visit to a nursery, a particularly lovely picture in a gardening magazine, or some half-baked idea of a plan. As a result, the garden had a few nice days, but mostly looked like the garden of someone with good intentions but no clue. That's pretty accurate, of course, but it needs to change.

I had planned to keep a gardening journal this year; a notebook where I could write down what I was doing and when, which seeds I was planting and how, which varieties of carrots or Sweet William thrived vs. which varieties didn't do well at all. However, my track record on actually writing anything down is pretty poor. And NWLink gives me 5 meg of web space for free, and I felt bad about just letting all that disk space go to waste.

So here it is, my Garden Journal. Maybe you can learn from my mistakes.

January 5, 1999
January 6, 1999
May 23, 1999