Lavender Help Needed

These are my two lavender plants. One English (left) and one French-Provence (right). I purchased them last year and then brought them both from my community plot when I moved. I immediately planted them upon setting up my beds in November. They are looking pretty sad. I have read a little bit about lavender plants, but am still having a hard time figuring out if they are going to bounce back, or if I need to trim them back at all. One article said to trim them back to the woody part in the spring. However, most of the stems appear to be very woody. The English lavender definitely has evidence of new growth, as seen below:

Does anyone have any experience with lavender - especially keeping the plants as perennials in Zone 6? I would love to hear your advice.

All in a day's work

On a beautiful, but chilly Sunday morning I set out to attend to my garden for the first time since my move in November. Here is where I started:

Taken from my 2nd floor

Everything looked pretty dreary but, I set off to buy some compost and start on my tasks.

I decided to try a new method of sectioning off each square foot. Instead of the lath boards (which I used for my first two seasons, and is suggested in the SFG book) I wanted to try string for the following reasons:

1. The condition of my two-season boards was pretty poor, so I didn't think they were worth moving (I gave them to a fellow gardener to use).
2. Each lath boards was an inch wide, so they made the planting area within each square foot smaller (every inch counts!)
3. When moving/adding soil it was sometimes challenging to spread it out between the squares.
   

There honestly are probably many easier ways of going about laying out the grid. However, I decided to use 1/2" screw eyes & polypropylene string.

It was pretty time consuming and I had a minor setback when I broke my itsy-bitsy drill bit that I was using to start the 12 holes for the screw eyes, but...

Ta da! My backyard garden set up is complete and ready to go.

warm weather...I am waiting!

Clean Garlic

I am back...and I finally got around to cleaning my cured garlic!! I harvested it back in mid-July, so it had been curing for a good month! Since I used some of the garlic heads/cloves immediately, I now have 11 nice looking heads for storage, which I hope will keep into the winter.

Organic German White Garlic, hardneck

A while back I saw this article on thekitchn.com about onion storage and vegetable keepers. I thought these three bags were great, as I was trying to think about what I would do with all the garlic and potatoes I was going to get from my garden! However, time passed and they stayed on my "wish list." Fast forward a few weeks when I had to go to Crate & Barrel to get a wedding shower gift for a friend. I was just going to get her the kitchen composter that she registered for but next to the composter on display were...the storage bags! I had forgotten that Crate & Barrel carried the garlic & potato bags! So, I decided to get one of each for the bride-to-be...and one of each for me!!

my new storage bags!

cute images on the bags

Cabbage & Celery Harvest

On Saturday I harvested the last of my red cabbages along with two heads of celery! I was so anxious to try the celery and I have to say that I am very pleased!

Quick celery tip: Did you know that putting celery in tinfoil keeps it fresh and crisp?