It’s another rainy day but the call of soil and planting is calling. If your spring has been a cool and wet as mine you have the urge to be digging in the dirt. But for me the soil is too wet for any gardening so its time for rainy day gardening activities.
Rainy day gardening ideas
- I cleaned my containers for the patio and made sure they were ready for the new small space garden area. One planter is cracked but I want to make several Hypertufa planters and this will be the perfect garden pot to use and a base for making new creative pots. Hypertufa planters look great in a mossy setting or with a mini moss garden and a garden gnome.
- I sorted my gardening tools. I keep my old ruined tools for garden art projects or to use the good handles to replace on other tools with broken handles. I have one garden rake, and old push mower and a spade that need a new purpose other than garden chores.
- I cut the boards I needed for a mini raised bed. The area is 2-½ foot deep by 8 foot long. I used two boards to get a height of 12 inches. One side has hinges on it so that I can drop the side and use a hoe to rake the soil out. I’ll plant onions, lettuce varieties, cold crops and flowers in this area. The raised bed frame will be placed near a lattice fence so I will also use the back of the garden area for planting cucumbers that will trellis up the fence.
- At the end of the season I will drop the front board and remove the soil and add to the compost pile to renew its nutrients. During the winter I will add layers of composted sawdust, manure, straw shaft and leaves. By spring this will have broken down and I will add fresh compost and my garden will be ready to plant. I may even throw old windows on top of this raised bad and use it for a cold frame next spring.
- Even though the soil is soggy and too wet to plant it’s a great time to dig up and separate perennials. The plants pop up of the ground easily and I just trench or lay them in a prepared soil bad until I can repot them or put them in a new perennials garden bed. Today I dug up the deep-rooted peonies from the flowerbed I am redoing.
- The peonies should have been moved last fall so that they would have flowered this spring but this garden was not an area I had intended to redo. This garden bed suffered from the cold this winter and I decided it was time to redo the area – so the peonies will have to be moved. I’ll just mix them in with annual flowers this year and they will add green texture and form to a flower garden while developing better roots for flower production next year.
And next year the area I planted the peonies will be a perennial garden area with a bench for reading.
Even on a rainy day there is always a garden project that can be planned or started. It may be planning, repotting or creating garden art. But often these small tasks are overlooked on sunny days so a rainy day makes the perfect time to do mini garden tasks