The Library’s Garden – Spring Planning and Planting

Winter finally loosened its hold on the DMV area and that means we have begun planning for this year’s Library’s Garden. A few things we learned from tending last year’s garden:

• a naturalistic, haphazard planting layout creates a lot of work (who knew planting in rows is actually a good idea?!)
• you can have too many tomatoes and cucumbers
• if you plant it “they” will come (They being birds, butterflies, and bees!)

This year we’re planting some rather unusual things, including Japanese Black Futsu squash, patchouli, cicoria (Italian dandelion greens), par-cel (a variety of celery that looks like parsley), and cinnamon basil. We will be putting in a full herb garden this year and, of course, there will be tomatoes (our staffs’ favorite), as well as cucumbers, peppers of all types, and zucchini. To entice butterflies and bees we will grow Mexican Torch flowers, zinnias, and sunflowers.

A flat of herbs, ready to be planted!